weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story. on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including cox. >> hi. >> a friend doesn't have to be rare. when you're connected you are not alone. >> cox along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> i got introduced to erica turner a few years ago through a mutual friend and began asking why are you interested in writing?

what are you studying? what is it like to be you? that is usually how i start conversations and some of that conversation, got introduced to her scholarly work. i was interested in bringing professor turner to a talk to the state of wisconsin so i invited her to her leadership series in wisconsin and the conversation was very engaging, very relevant to the time a couple years ago and today. and also folks really resonated to the content, the scholarly questions and to your findings so i want to invite you to the space to talk a little about who you are and to share the context of your book. [applause]

>> thanks so much, everyone, for being here. colleagues and former students, neighbors and friends and children, really fun to have all of you here in one room. i am currently an associate professor in wisconsin where i teach education policy and politics and my research over the last 15 years i looked at how school district leaders have responded to increasing diversity and inequality in our schools and that, nate in the book we are talking about today. the root of this project which was my dissertation at uc berkeley lies in my concern for racial equity in education a question about why people who profess to believe in equity act in ways that undermine that conviction. perhaps this was inevitable. i come from a black and chinese-american family were education, civil rights under

been developed were regular topics in dinnertime conversation. thinking about equity in schooling when i was 10 years old, like the middle child over there, placed into middle school in the late 1980s i was assigned to attend a very sought after school my own mother had attended 30 years earlier but when she visited she found that it was highly tracked with the black students in the lower track classes in the school basement. the other, the district was under a court order to desegregate schools and part of it was that they would reconstitute low performing schools, in particular one of the mission districts, predominantly mexican and central american neighborhood that has previously been underserved and with a new more highly skilled staff, what we would call culturally relevant curriculum.

the school was wonderful but raised a new question, why had it taken a lawsuit to achieve this in this purportedly liberal place, why were the inequalities allowed to persist? these early questions resurfaced for me years later after i attended college, became a middle school teacher, traveled with my husband and returned to the bay area. i started working with a professor who was studying decision-making in central district offices and been following discussions about bilingual education with a multiethnic student population. i was interested in the motivations around how the schools tried to serve these bodies but in wisconsin i started looking for a new project. like the multiracial multiethnic san francisco that i grew up in, districts across the country were becoming more diverse, gentrifying central cities, diversifying suburbs

and in wisconsin's smaller cities including two cities in fairview. local newspapers said more kids of color and greater poverty. this was not new. in 2008, in either of these cities. in wisconsin indigenous people have been here since time immemorial. but too many leadership positions in these predominantly white communities it felt suddenly diverse. i wanted to know more about how school district leaders were responding to these new conditions. to find out i started studying fairview and milltown, a working-class manufacturing based wisconsin city with a conservative political orientation and anti-immigrant politics. when i went to milltown, they had been kind of transitioning

out of well-placed manufacturing jobs, our product by global conglomerates, some people were getting higher paid manufacturing jobs and others filtered into new lead deunionized food processing groups, very dangerous and what brought critics for that. that was also what generated anti-immigrant politics. they had anti-laboring laws, ordinances for local players. this was a district of 20,000 students in fairview and are similarly sized but well resourced community with more middle-class reputation, the reputation for liberal politics, equity and inclusion. for example the city ordinance since the 1960s that was to guarantee nondiscrimination along lines of race, class, gender.

starting in 2008 i began interviewing 37 school districts, superintendents, central office administrators, school board members and the like. i also interviewed people from across communities including civic leaders. i attended 107 hours, a little more, of meetings, school board meetings, public meetings and meetings in central offices. took a lot of notes. i also mentally collected over 270 documents and analyze those as well, things like newspaper reports, local community reports, blog posts that were being generated at the time. what i learned surprised me. you would expect these two places would do different things in response to a similar demographic change, yet they basically both come to a

similar response. leaders of both districts were adopting businesslike practices as a means to respond to to ethnic diversity and inequality in the system. as a way to illustrate this idea i would like to share with you a scene that i observed in milltown, a working-class traditional manufacturing base. i will read from the book a little bit. it was 8 p.m. in milltown a few days before thanksgiving 2009. rich haynes was about to give the last report of the evening. a school board member introduced him. a veteran of one trimester of edgar elementary. he had been principal at the school for a few months, had only been a principal for a few months. the school board members seemed eager to hear how things were going. rich said i'm proud to be a new member of edgar elementary. i'm not alone. we have 18 new staff at edgar.

high socioeconomic status, disadvantaged and a transient population. the board president asked about the transient, probably average two to three students a week. at the end of the year probably 20 or 30% turnover, champions, the terms people in his district used to talk about those who transferred in and out of the school until the housing instability, racism, poverty at its roots. it wasn't just haynes's challenge, all three principles presented to the school board about similar challenges so rich at least said that his school for the year was getting better. we have to have clear learning targets. as we analyze our goals we are getting better at that. he noted data showing high numbers of students in special education. but he saw some hope in that data. rich noted reading test scores

for latino students and students identified as english learners had been improving each year. they already started in a whole but each year closing the gap, now we need to figure out what we are doing and how to bring this to the rest of the population. rich explained he applied for submental grant to do this work. the board state another hour, a budget strategy to address a $2 million deficit. report for the 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 happy thanksgiving and pleased with what had just transpired they headed out. so what just happened? my mind is exploding at this moment but it is really mundane, another school board meeting. the principal then had just recounted enormous turnover in

the transient sea of predominantly low income children 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 of the night spoke to ongoing budget deficits, state governments taking greater control over the school systems making it harder. here in this situation as i said for rich made me disturbed but they had left feeling, it seems, pretty good about things. i saw them, they saw the meeting of making progress against educational equity, they, like many people, saw what was happening as illuminating the achievement gap. all over milltown, school board members were doing something similar to what i just described, they were adopting performance monitoring

approaches, select and monitor and report academic performance data as a way to address challenges in the circumstances they were facing, examining a new professional development that rated teachers or had goals based on standardized data and looking at school-based data. this is really common. a teacher that hasn't done something like this at this time so they were adopting these strategies as well as ones like marketing, diversity, developing schools like international baccalaureate to meet customer demand but it wasn't just milltown. fairview was a relatively well resourced community with a middle class population and liberal values, they were doing something similar including valuations of strategic goals district programs report, the state of the district and all sorts of assessments. and planning to market their diversity.

what was happening in fairview and milltown represents a broader phenomenon in school districts across the country inspiring business inspired means of operating school in dealing with these efforts as i think oddly, new, more effective means of addressing racial diversity and inequality in their school. i call this broader phenomenon managerialism. a way of leading public institutions that takes its cue from business specifically corporate and operant from an aerial business models. you might think about previous iterations of schools being modeled on a factory model. you see how business is attractive to people in schooling but in this case or this iteration it is corporate and entrepreneurial model, things like generic management skills, quantitative measurement of outcomes for

decision-making and competition and marketing as means for guiding organizations. these approaches are common across different districts, not just these two but i argue, and others have pointed out that these kinds of approaches, when they do not address the fact that they exist within an already unequal society or not explicitly designed to address that, those approaches can allow existing inequities to persist and may even amplify them. this is consistent with common ways people think about racism today, what some people call colorblind racism. when most people think about racism today they define it as the aberrant views of a few extreme individuals rather than a widely embedded social or economic or political system. they think of racism is mostly something that happened in the

past and instead racial inequality is posited as a result of individuals or groups of deficiency. enduring systemic racism is often minimized, people become invested in seeming like they are not racist in the best example of this is donald trump. donald trump is 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. they latch on what others call official antiracism, notions like inclusion of diverse groups or eliminating achievement gaps framed as antiracism but do little to nothing to challenge or deconstruct existing systems of

oppression. they don't, they do not get at the root of the problem in other words. it is a little like what we call happy talk. given these two different places, different resources, political environments you might expect they would have adopted fundamentally different approaches to racism and inequality. they generally did not. why was this? to find out, i traced policies in each of these two districts and found these kinds of approaches, performance monitoring or marketing, trying to attract new customers emerged as district leaders try to navigate increasingly untenable situations especially a large population of students of color or low income students, they usually try to

do this without confronting existing inequalities in the system and the educational equality we call achievement gap so they face a lot of challenges that include the changing demographics and growing inequality and this was 2008, not only were many people out of jobs or financially precarious but big governments were ailing and part of their response to that was cut budgets within schools as well. in addition they were facing pressures from accountability systems, no child left behind and to open and roll month school choice policies. accountability systems, if you are not raising test scores for each group in the school system and more diversity, each one has to be going up and every year the bar is raising.

and three years your schools are not achieving those targets, they get increasingly serious sanctions including eventually being turned over or reconstituted. so this is one pressure. another one was open enrollment, a form of school choice we have in wisconsin the gets less attention than vouchers or charters but operate similarly. it makes a market out of schools and essentially in wisconsin if you can transport your child to a different district you can stay in your home but send them out of state or out of district and when you do that money gets transferred over to the receiving district. in wisconsin we had a safeguard on that, raised every few years. at the time of this, the safeguards come off. many students want to go into in lakeview, in fairview they tried to address this through a desegregation plan but the supreme court decision, parents

involved in community schools, they began to feel that they could no longer rely upon that. they wanted to deal with all these challenges but they wanted to do it without making people mad. particularly they are being asked to do more. under these conditions they originally kind of early 2000s, they tried to make somewhat deeper changes to the school. they put in to place new training programs for teachers and that kind of thing but they soon found resistance from predominately white privileged families or their predominately white teachers who were concerned about the changes. over time the district leaders emerged, embraced instead these managerial approaches,

solutions that appear to help them achieve their equity gains in these difficult conditions but without upsetting teachers in these families. they didn't want to upset them not because they thought they were right but they were very critical of them and they were basically racist but felt there schools had to respond because of the fiscal and political support the schools relied upon from the constituencies. and adopting these managerial approaches, this is how they tried to navigate through the muddy waters. . district leaders viewed these approaches as a way to address inequity while garnering support for public schools but i want to alternately suggest they didn't either.

this undermined equity and also public schools so to the racism first, you can think of these kinds of approaches using the language of diversity or reducing achievement gaps and the ways to justify policies that perpetuate inequities. they leave existing systems in place. they also distract from other things that they could have been doing with their time and resources, things that might have made a bigger difference in student lives and perhaps most importantly, under this approach, racial equity comes to mean raising test scores. it comes to be understood as promoting, marketing comes to be seen as promoting diversity. or keeping public schools afloat rather than another approach. in other words inequity is reframed as equity, racism reframed as antiracism but they are also undermining public schools. i would argue they are doing

this in a couple ways. first, managerial policies follow a logic of efficiency and customer service rather than public service or equity but in moving to these concerns they reflect their own centering of the concerns in educational visions of their predominately white and wealthier constituents, teachers and families and moreover 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 organized in ways that perpetuate inequality they are also very much legitimized as places that should do just the opposite, how we think of addressing inequity in the system. to undermine that is to undermine public school. a final story will help make this clear, the way these kinds of approaches can undermine equity and democracy in schools.

so a respected public lecture in fairview julio garcia was known as an advocate for latino communities. i often saw him rushing into political and community meetings at work still wearing a sport coat and tie or sweater vest. for years julio, it will he worked with an advocacy group along with many other parents and local advocates in getting area school districts to pay attention to the growing student population in their midst many of whom but not all of whom were underground. in particular he was involved with efforts to move promote bilingual education for spanish-speaking youth, he was -- recall the year it took to get the first bilingual program approved in the district. now the situation was different. with increased demand for foreign language instruction for english white families in the district desire to halt white flight school board

decision to expandable anger generation, bilingual programs to fairview schools came pretty easily and julio set unfortunately you have heard it before, reflecting back on this earlier decision to expand the program, down my gosh, 50% of students in the district are students of color, we have to stop the white flight. he chuckled at his constant school district focus on white middle-class families but continued seriously. there's always been a tension there. we don't want to really scare the majority community but the other fight is we need to recognize this new demographic of kids is entitled to a good education as anybody else and we've got to help them. julio recognized fairview district leaders hope to use dueling which immersion programs to attract and retain predominate a white middle-class families to fairview. it was part of their efforts to market the schools as a positively diverse place.

it wasn't his motivation, but he saw there were some strategic benefits. we actually have leveraged 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 scored vision, not because we asked them but because they asked him emphasizing the influence of white families wanted more dual language immersion programs and which had influence over school board members who didn't want to scare the majority community but julio accepted pragmatically unequal responsiveness was part of the spell to involved in securing these programs and hope that expected they would develop filing will is him, reinforcing cultures and offering english language learners greater access to academic content which the research suggested happened. this example could be seen as a

win, to see something good, bringing together these different strands of desires. it was also an example how school district leaders valued and responded, only expanding those programs when viewed as a model that was of interest to them. better educational programs for latino students, in other words, mostly interested when it was on the terms of what was acceptable and desirable for white families. in other words, it showed how this decision, beneficial though it may be was also an example of unequal voice and educational opportunity in fairview and upbeat and happy with the outcome as he was, julio garcia anyway. critical race analyses of school district policymaking, i

hope this book suddenly diverse helps us recognize and understand race and inequality as very central to how we make decisions in school districts and to think critically about the directions forward from here. [applause] >> i thought that was a phenomenal introduction about you and the navigation of learning the data. often times we think about data as numbers, you made a point to highlight the stories and draw conclusions and analysis and you got deep into the analysis part. i wanted to start this

conversation with you lifting up the provocative title of "suddenly diverse: how school districts manage race and inequality". for people of color, that is not what we would describe happening, yet the phenomenon of where all those people came from, where do they live, we don't know who they are is a phenomenon that i have definite experience, i see that throughout the state. talk to us a little bit about the title, i will lift up the term in congruency which you bring a lot in the book, in congruency's of experiences of people of color and families of color as to the title of the book.

>> thank you for that question. tidying in with what you've seen as a school board member, i kind of told you this. my editor want to the book to be called suddenly diverse. i did not want that. i said it is not suddenly diverse. that's one of the points i'm making in the book, and she said you can explain that. let me explain. basically, i think if you look at both of these cities, their histories are different and distinct, there are interesting things that are different in the two places but both of them had histories of having students of color. it just wasn't paid attention to until it got to 40% or 50% of the student population in this place and also until accountability policy pressures made them pay attention. there have been communities of color in both places for a long

time, district leaders who were not from these communities want the attention. i say this like before this we didn't realize or pay attention to it, didn't know. communities of color new that their students are not being served well and there's a lot of data in the documents i looked at where they talk about this within their media or their communities the way students are being underserved and fairview, african-american students, and part of it speaks to who is in charge of the school, part of it is how demographic changes happening in the us. they've been predominantly white country in these places they were predominantly white cities and because of birthrights, they were the first places to see these so if you weren't associated with the school you might not know about it, because the schools were more diverse than the general

population. it is important because who votes and who agrees to pay more money for the schools is different than who's being served in the schools, right, and that is what districts need, they need those two votes, who pay property taxes to continue to do so. but these inequities were not new and it is telling. the second part to your question. >> i have other questions than what you just shared because you in your sharing of parts of the book and just now you mention this word majority, i associate to a mathematical analysis, we are talking about 51%. that's really not what we are talking about because we are talking, we are not talking about numbers necessarily, we

are talking influx which is what you speak to bodies of work, the influence of white families that tend to be largely predominantly connected to the political aspect of education which all of it is political but they would be the loudest voice, the majority of votes, people driving the money because they will say to you i will leave the district, okay. >> that happens all the time. they know this. you can tell a know it because they are threatening to do it. superintendents say that they are threatening to leave and that is why it was a concern for them. and i think a good question about whether this is a real

concern they should have or not for a number of reasons but that was kind of a power being wielded and to your point, i like to think not so much about i don't agree with the notion of white flight so much and i don't think the record shows it to be the case but would it signals is who has power in the system and that is where we should be paying attention because it could be privileged families that are people of color too and there's a history of that as well. if we think about how the school districts are set up and this is the case for those places you often have a city district surrounded by other districts. they have government structure but it is funding structure and that funding is based on where people live so therefore how much money is available to your schools is reflecting how much property wealth there is in a place and when people who have

money move to a different place not only do they take the enrollment money but they may also be affecting property wealth. sometimes more important than housing prices is corporate taxation so that's important to distinguish and that is why i say this, white flight is not necessarily the thing i want to -- the idea of white families just being racist which was convenient for district leaders to argue against but what is the system that enabled them to wield their power to get what they want and that's not a power that was available for low income families and also not available to them because that was usually not -- members talk about when i see so-and-so at the grocery store, my neighbors getting on my case about this, who are they living next to and who do they know and see in the grocery stores

not distributed. >> okay. we are going to be here all day because this is a lot. i really appreciate the sketch from your last comment and that will take us to doing the right thing which you mention here and you mention in the book and the leaders you interview were also talking about that. one of the things when i was in the school board and my colleagues would say the community wants that, i would always raise my hand, which community are we talking about. who are we talking about. if we are talking about your community of white middle-class upper-middle-class working in corporate wisconsin, talking about your community, than i can understand your concerns of your community because that is not what people are having

concerns in my community. i've recently, this is the real story, i recently heard state leaders sharing their concern about getting sued. when i hear about that which is connected to the wi-fi, i hear about white people suing the state, white people suing the district, white people suing the schools. what i don't hear is the fear of brown, black and indigenous families, suing and putting the pressure on accountability. so much so that when we see brown and black families leaving, we criminalize that. we say how dare you are black family go take your kid to a private school. how dare you brown, black family take your child to create your own school. how dare you do that? to this conversation about

doing the right thing because i do believe the majority of educators have that in their minds and hearts lose they want to build the right thing. and they are doing the right thing, their pursuit of doing the right thing is in the racialized context of their school district whatnot. you mentioned the tension of racial equity within the structures. the ability to change those structures or the influence of those structures and how little we see the change when the organization is still the same and all we are doing is we are going to look at the data and ask for more data and ask folks to do another survey and whatnot. talk to us about how you navigated that specifically as a parent of brown and black

children. easy question. >> maybe if you haven't seen schools, the idea of looking at data is really on. i'm not against that. them is my job. to look at evidence and research. but it doesn't tell you what you want to know. you might be able to learn. mostly the data is standardized test data. learning about particular test data what you don't know. as a parent, that is limited. it doesn't tell you what you should do instead. that's the point about managerial, there's no professional educational knowledge that comes from the data. you could add that but it is not required and that is very attractive to administrators.

that is why sometimes it is attached to administrators. it can give you a role even if you don't know anything about education. so this, just in madison we see this, more and more testing and that kind of thing and i feel a little bit conflicted about it because on the one hand kind of a waste of time and that's my take away on this performance monitoring. a certain amount is useful but when people get that information they don't do anything different. even if they did something different, on what basis? because the data doesn't tell you what to do. and so kids taking these tests, they could be learning other things, they could be learning something rather than how to take a test. but it is not that particular teacher's fall, the teachers may also object to it, these are the pressures that are coming down so in some ways

that, what district leaders are also facing. when i try to think about is what is the bigger picture here beyond this particular testing day or this kind of thing, what is i want? in these districts, in milltown, what they would do is the suburban districts were also losing population, student population so what they were doing a started advertising to students to get students to come from milltown into the suburban district. it was a market, that's what the policy allowed for and facilitated that even more so than already existed and then they would offer that your kids can take the classes. everybody in prairie town could do that. that was their way to get families there and it was a calculation but is that what we

really care about and want for what our kids learn? for me that guides it, not just my own children but thinking more broadly about public education, why i believe in it, why i study it. it's more about our society and the kind of place we want to be so i am not thinking as much and my children do wonderfully, you will do very well in school and i am proud of you and you read a lot but also, the test scores are not how i measure it, not only my own children are doing well on those kinds of things but more broadly are they good people and citizens, do they know about history so they can understand what's happening in the world today as well? >> do they know about history? that is important and controversial conversation. >> you wouldn't think that yes in 2023. >> i want us to move to the

race events terminology that you introduced in the book. i have heard different folks, different scholars talk about that. i don't think we talk enough about that term. i don't think people understand deeply in particular historical and institutional context of that terminology. what i really appreciate was your analysis to parallel to a managerial business corporate framework. the competition, the marketing, the outcomes, what i find interesting particularly to your last comment around we know the data but are not changing anything because the corporate world they know the data. they won't do a thing or they become irrelevant. when one of the most common questions that i got the two

times i ran for office was what are you going to do about voucher schools, i'm not going to do anything about voucher schools. i'm not a state legislator. or what i want to do to assure that our brown, black families don't leave and no other child leaves the school district is to make the school district better for everyone, right? so that is not what is happening. we have the data. even in the majority brown/black school district like madison is a the decisions are not there. can you talk to us a little bit about the business model, what was in your findings, how you are navigating that and how are leaders navigating that? part of the business model is the demonization of people including educators. >> there's a chapter that's not written or kind of written but not in the book and that was because the book had to be published about their

workplaces in each of the districts where there were people who really in central offices but also in different places, teachers, wasn't policy but they were trying to make connections to families, make families have a voice. managerial approach is antithetical to that. it puts the decision-making power in the hands of the manager. it was not a professional educator. doesn't have to be one and with a stake in it. giving the talk yesterday in michigan to educational researchers, that makes educational researchers or people in the department of public instruction a federal government complicit so we benefit from the focus. that is their job, we can get grants from it or study it but

it is not in that area so i think that you have to understand part of what's driving it is there are people whose job it is to do these things to be part of that. giving that including teachers and families is one of the challenges and there was that in places but if you are trying to do what is most efficient, how to raise test scores or attract the most customers you will always reinforce the existing inequality because the way to raise test scores is to attract kids who have higher test scores. you see that in new orleans with the market-based school system and what they do is try to get test scores, that's the theory of how it works.

so that approach will never get you going. so it is with the marketing that is tightly intertwined. >> okay. we don't have time to get too deep into that because i wanted to hear from you all and this is how we are going to do that. i will ask one more question and invite all to think about what question you want to ask erica turner. i ask you not to pontificate. i know you have opinions about what we are talking about but we want to stick to the question. i was given permission to kindly interrupt you and i will use that. erica turner. what is your vision for educational equity in the state of wisconsin? >> thank you so much for asking me that question. >> we have two minutes. >> i collected the data for the book a long time ago.

on the job and so forth but a lot of things were changing during that time in the way i thought of it then, among the things that were happening as the book was coming out, trump had been elected, we no longer had no child left behind but what was supposed to be a more flexible system, turned out not to change what people do in schools at all. so things like that were happening. there was also a lot more attention especially after covid, didn't start then, with organizing, people organizing against prison abolition, the movement for black lives and what those people have to do because they want a different system. they have to think differently about what that looks like. and think about what are you

actually going for. there are some great ideas and some of those movements how things could look otherwise. for example, community care is a great idea which we are trying to achieve. some other work with colleagues at the university of connecticut we've been thinking about from the idea of integration which is prominent in fairview, before the managerial approach but that often was about moving kids around in practice and achieving resources but there's other things as you are mentioning before. beyond the numbers or the resources, what do schools offer, whose knowledge is valued, what kind of learning do we want to have, that has to be part of how we think about what educational equity is. whose cultures are valued, not what is valued over others but there's equal status according

to them. if there were you would see parents are all different, groups would be welcomed into schools as positively contribute into kids education and into the curriculum itself would reflect that. right now it doesn't still. the other thing you would see is participation piece, everyone would have an equal say over what their kids education looks like. everyone who had a stake in that way which is all of us, would have equal power to affect what that looks like. so now when i do more of my research, none of these people are still in their offices which is another interesting thing. within 5 years almost everybody was gone. will never let me in again? me and again? no. but i think the things that holds more promise for me is thinking about how parents, families and communities organize and push against, they have the most stake in having

things change. others have a lot of stake in keeping it the same. >> that's an amazing way to wrap up the conversation we are having in transition to questions from folks around who makes changed. change. and the energy especially when we think about folks leaving the buildings, leaving the district and leaving the profession altogether. i will say this one thing. is a woman of color working for the state of wisconsin. i've been working for the state for six years and i'm one of the veteran women of color. and that is scary. six years is like one administration. who is ready to ask their question. i will ask you to use your educator voice and i will repeat the question. go ahead. a microphone. we are ready here.

thank you. >> public policy. >> we will turn the microphone on but the question was around voucher schools, is that a bad policy? >> depends what your goals are for schools. if your goals are to siphon money from public schooling into private hands then yes, great mechanism to redistribute, that is what they are doing, you want to know more about it, re-segregating factor. i will be introducing at 4:00 pm cara fitzpatrick who will talk about the death of public schools trying to trace the voucher movement. she would be a great place if you're interested in that to look at more of that. one of my points is vouchers, that thing, the evidence is really abysmal about the educational attainment of students in those schools as

well so just on that basis i don't think it's a good use of money and voucher schools but you are taking money, most of the people in wisconsin taking advantage of school vouchers, ari had their children in private school, essentially subsidizing private school attendance. >> the idea early on was that it would be used to help low income kids. that's not how it works right now. but i think there's other mechanisms that don't work that differently. and the one i'm pointing to in the book is around interdistrict open enrollment especially with virtual schools now you can send your child to any other school districts so some of the district especially those who need funds started virtual schools. on the whole the evidence for

student learning anything is abysmal. part of that might be who chooses to send their child to a virtual school because it is already not working for that kid but in general, really bad response rate so it is kind of like a little better perceived as a way to make money for certain districts, so kids don't get an education and this then can take away from the district to might need it. >> do we have time for one more question? one more question. i could be here all day. yes? we wanted to do that. sorry. i was trying to help you out. >> you mentioned your title for the book which i would like to hear more about your title and the editor's title and why you chose that one. why did you go with that title

for the book? >> i'm horrible at titles and didn't have a good alternative which is partly why i had to go with it. this is a person who is good at their job and know what they are doing and i can explain it so i didn't have a good alternative but i was uncomfortable. so much of while writing about it is it important how we talk about things and many people will never read this book. most people will never read it and i didn't want to put out this idea that these places were suddenly diverse which is not what i think but i do tend -- a good part of a chapter explaining how we get this diversity, not just people coming from chicago which is often how the story is told in these two places but about global movements of people to the united states more broadly because this is happening. changing age cohorts like giving birth etc. . it is about other things,

economic changes, people thought of it as poor people coming here but it was the great recession and also wisconsin has been a stronghold for middle-class manufacturing jobs and at that moment those are largely being bought up by international global conglomerates so those good paying jobs were no longer sustained. it used to be like 6 out of the top 10 middle-class communities were in wisconsin. and that's not true anymore. not just a wisconsin story but it is particularly evident here, the things people were thinking, as opposed to these broader kind of trends and processes that were underneath them that weren't about individual families of kids who were coming. so i worried.

the other thing is critiquing the notion of diversity as a way to think about what is happening as a focus of what we need versus equity or justice. there is much more critique out there about there can be a certain vacuum to these notions like diversity that don't get to it so it did make sense to people now to question that but i didn't -- the argument is somewhat different. i didn't wanted to be misunderstood and my hope is that people who see those things kind of think differently about it. i'm trying to help us think about, how policy contributes to how we think about what are the problems of equity and what we are trying to suggest. if we get those wrong then we don't know how to move forward in the right way. >> i want to wrap our time

challenging the folks here and the folks who are listening to this reporting to say when we talk about people of influence and power is us. please do purchase 5 to 10 copies of this book and share with your college, share with parents, share with the school district, wherever you grow up, or districts across the state are hurting financially and could benefit from this incredible donation. lastly i want to thank the public library for the organizers, volunteers, leadership here, the wisconsin book festival, the amazing recording crew, the media crew the tier, and to all of you that came to join this amazing conversation, thank you to you, professor erica turner, for writing this book, your courage with this book and being here

with us. >> thank you, everyone. [applause] >> this yearbook tv marks 25 years of shining the spotlight on leading nonfiction authors and their books, with talks from more than 22,000 authors, nearly 900 cities and festivals, and 16,000 events. booktv has provided viewers with 92,000 hours of programming on the latest literary discussions on history, politics, and biographies. you can watch booktv every sunday on c-span2 or online, booktv.org. booktv, 25 years of television for serious readers. >> c-span now is a free mobile apps featuring your view of

what's happening in washington live and on demand. keep up with the day's biggest events with live streams of floor proceedings, hearings from the u.s. congress, white house events, the board, campaigns, and more from the world of politics all at your fingertips. you can also stay current with the latest episodes of washington journal and scheduling information portably -- for c-span radio. talk about compelling podcast. c-span now is available at the apple store and google play and the qr code to download for free today or visit our website, c-span.org/c-span now. c-span now, your front row seat to washington, anytime, anywhere. the thing. it's good to be with you in this setting as opposed to the federal courthouse where we usually spend our days and we've a lot to cover about this really remarkable book that congratulations and glad it's finally out. just to start with a basic question, who who are the sedition hunters and why did you just to start with the basic