>> stay up-to-date on breaking is about authors, books and publishing my liking us on facebook at facebook.com/booktv or follow was on twitter at booktv. you can also visit our website and click on news about books. >> from new york city, shelby, former chancellor of the washington, d.c. public school system, recounts her career and present her thoughts on education reform. this event is about 45 minutes. thank you very much for joining us. i know you have a couple of busy days from last evening. jon stewart to this evening, cnn, piers morgan and would like to have our old friends here from c-span filming this event that many people across the united states can really benefit

from a lot of what michelle has to say. just to kickstart it deceiving, how did you come up with a fascinating and interesting book, "radical," and where did this interesting income from? >> so i think the genesis of the name is an interesting one in that when it first got to d.c. it was the lowest performing and most dysfunctional school district and the entire nation. that was a pretty widely known truth. so i started doing things that were obvious for school district in that kind of state. i started closing low performing schools, moving out ineffective employees, cutting the central office bloated bureaucracy and have. as i was taking all these steps and measures, people started saying she's a firebrand, she's a radical, she so controversial. and i thought, really? after thinking about it for a

while finally i just said you know what, it's bringing some common sense to dysfunctional system makes me a radical, then i'm okay with that. so that sort of the embracing the concept was the idea for the name of the book. >> some people call you anti-teacher. however, there's many teachers out there who really like you. which is it do you think? is there any in between? >> i think it depends on the teacher that you're talking to. you know, i think the whole sort of notion that i am anti-teacher is an incredibly odd one to me, and i write about this in the book. i come from teachers. my grandfather was an educated. my grandmother was a kindergarten teacher. my sister-in-law, my best friend. i grew up around teachers, and having an incredible respect for the difficult job they have every day. and i'm still surrounded by

teachers to this day. and i think it is because i have such respect for teachers and hold them in such regard i have a tremendous belief for what they can do. and the power that hath. and i refuse to believe what many folks say, which is well, kids are coming from difficult situations and the poverty. there's nothing that schools can do. and i just roundly rejected that notion. i believe that when children are in the classrooms of truly effective teachers, even despite the fact they may face a lot of obstacles, those kids can achieve at the highest levels. so we should aspire to nothing short as a nation of making sure that every single kid is in the classroom of a highly effective teacher every single day. it's no less than what we want d want for our own children. so it's nothing different so we would want for our nation's kids. >> so if the united states spends the most per capita per student, why is america's children ranked number 25 out of

30 of in developed nations? and 14th in reading? >> no, when i showed those statistics with people, they cringe a little bit. when i share the fact that we are 25th in math and some the country that are ahead of us are hungary and slovenia. and i think of as americans we don't expect to be behind slovenia and hungary on any measure. when i started a few years ago someone showed me a scatter plot of all of the developed nations in the country, and on one axis it was academic achievement levels of the student, and on the other axis was the amount of money that the country spent per child on the public education system. and we were in the quadrant that you don't want to be in, which is spend a lot of money, have poor results. the only other country that was in the quadrant with this was luxembourger i have no idea what they're doing and luxembourg but

apparently not so good. i think the problem with this notion is that for decades now, people have been sort of pushing this idea that what we need in order to fix the system is more money, more money, more money. but when i got to d.c., i never stand that was not the case. we're spending more money per kid in d.c. analyst any other jurisdiction in the entire nation, and yet our results were at the absolute bottom. school districts right across the river in new jersey spending $22,000 a kid and yet kids operate on grade level proficiency are in the single digits. so the idea that we can throw more money into the broken system and expect a different result is just a faulty one. i think what we've got to do is have a great deal of transparency around where our dollars are going so that we can stop spending money on things that have absolutely no impact on kids. when i was in d.c., we have a

budget for the schools of $1 billion a year. and of that $1 billion, 403 million of it went into the schools, which means that the majority of the money was going into the bureaucracy, the bloated bureaucracy. and that's not where you're going to have an impact. a money loving impact when it's in the schools and in the classrooms, and not when it is being sucked up by the school district itself. until we bring some light to that and fully shine a light of a cut of return on investment are we getting for different programs in different expenditures, i think we're going to continue to live in this world where we're spending more money but we're just like getting the results. >> in your book you talk about student vouchers. could you tell us how you came to the change in your thinking on this interesting topic? >> so this topic of vouchers gets people really, really riled

up. i mean, you want to have a debate commuters bring up the word voucher and people of very strong opinions. you know, ma i'm a democrat that i have been my entire life since i was in second grade and i asked my dad what the templates between the republican and democrat, and he said democrats care more about the people that have less and republicans want to make more money. and i said well, i'm a democrat than. and have that ever since. so when i got to d.c., i had very clear views about what education reform should look like and what it shouldn't look like. and were i to a line was around vouchers because the democratic party we think vouchers are bad because you're taking money away from schools that need the most in your own helping a few kids. i bought into that. but when i arrived in washington, we have a publicly funded voucher program, and people, it was about

reauthorizing and people wanted me to wait in a. they said here's a top education official, what do you think? i pretty much knew what i thought that i did want to jump to any conclusion so started to meet with people, families throughout the city. the discussion that i had absolutely changed my mind. i was meeting with parents from throughout the city, mostly low income single moms. and these moms have been everything that you would want a mother to do. so the first research to their neighborhood schools, figured out the content of some of the kids at the school were on grade level, said my kid has a 90% chance of failure of i go there. not good enough. so then they would do the next best thing which is they would apply to the out of boundary slaughter process to try to win on the spot that one of the good schools on the other side of town. then indefinitely they would lose because there were thousands applying and only handful of spots available. denise moms would say now what am i supposed to do? when i was looking i to eye with

these mothers, and i knew that i could not offer them a spot at high-performance school that i thought was good enough for my own two kids, i said well, who am i to stop this lady to take a certain $500 voucher, which by the way it was a lot less than we were spending on the district, and maybe going to catholic school where a kid could get a great education? i was not willing to say now, so i came out in favor of the voucher program. people went crazy, nuts. what are you doing? you're going against the party. i would always say to people, look, my job is not to protect and preserve a district that has been doing a disservice to children of my job is to make sure that every kid in this city gets a great education. it can be a private school, a charter school, a traditional public school. as long as kids are getting a great education, i don't care. so i tried to bring a lot of my democratic friends along with me

on this issue, and a stalking friend of mine who's a public school teacher the other day. i said, i laid the whole argument out how she looked at me and she said yeah, you know. i'm not buying it. i said okay, let me try one last thing. i city to watch the movie -- she suggests, one of best friends was and i said okay, but do you remember the scene with a little beyond the wishes looking out the window and it's this tragic and she's crying because she can go to school because her mom is falling behind on the tuition payment? i said what did you think? it was heart wrenching. it was an injustice. i wanted to write a check myself. i said right, that would be a voucher. [laughter] and this is the problem that i think people have is they see things like vouchers, that's a republican thing, this is a democratic thing. and if we stop looking at things in terms of politics and started

making public policy based on the decisions that would make for our own kids, and i think would have neither republican agenda our democratic agenda that he students first of june and i think that would put our country on a wildly different trajectory. >> you put a lot of emphasis on the importance of teachers improving student performance. how do you answer critics that say there's a lot of other factors which teachers in the control over, such as kids home life, poverty level, et cetera? >> no, they're absolutely right. we have kids who come to school every day facing enormous challenges. nobody put them to bed the night before at a decent hour. nobody fed them breakfast before they came to school. maybe electricity got turned off in the house and they couldn't do their homework. when you are facing these challenges, does it make it harder to learn and, therefore, doesn't make it harder to teach those kids? absolutely, 100%. but can it be an excuse for why kids are not achieving? no way.

this is what i think is the thing that we have to understand in this country right now, the u.s. ranks towards the bottom internationally on social mobility. which means if you're a child who was born into poverty in this country, the likelihood that you will ever escape poverty is not good. doubt in my mind goes against every single ideal that we hold in america. that is not the winner country is supposed to work. this is the greatest country in the world, because if you work hard and you do the right thing you can live the american dream. but if you're poor kid growing up in america today, the likelihood you go to a school is about 50% which means you will not get the skills and knowledge you need to go want to get a college degree and, therefore, a high-paying job. that's criminal in my mind. so we can't allow poverty in my mind to be the determining factor of a kids, chances in

life outcomes. we absolutely cannot do it. >> what about the problem with teaching to test? >> so, this is a very good question. and i see both sides of it because as a mom, last year when my daughter was in the fourth grade, about the middle of april she was coming home and i was saying where's your homework? and she said we'll have work anymore because the test is over. and i thought oh, my gosh. what kind of message is this sending to the kids, to the parents who are sitting there asking the kids these question indicated thing the test is over so we do have homework anymore? there's this over emphasis on the tests. i think it's maddening for parents. but on the other side of that, i talked to a parent not too long ago it was extraordinarily frustrated because she had a little girl, daughter, who also element to school had gotten

straight a's. and she was excited because she applied for daughter to go to the middle school and was told later on that her daughter didn't qualify and a lot of because she didn't have academic skills that she. her mom said what you talk about, she got all a's are in kindergarten through fifth grade? they said greater one thing but she took the test, she actually doesn't no reading comprehension. we can show you all the data. and this mom felt so betrayed. you know, she trusted the system and she thought when her kid was coming in with good grades that that meant something but she said why wasn't anyone telling me and showing me the data that actually compares to her peers that she couldn't compete? while we don't want to emphasize the test we also want to have some accountability. so the challenge i think we face as a nation, how can we strike the right balance? where we have accountability, we

know what kids are able to do and we can do that on a standardized consistently, and yet there's not such an emphasis on the test the people think that's the end all be a. >> david guggenheim brilliant film, you offer the teachers union more money for teachers that excel, substantially more money, and the union rejected it. why? >> that's what i was asking. [laughter] during the movie committee solve the incredulous look on my face, are you getting? so this is the situation but when the movie was being filmed, we have presented a plan to the union where we said we want to give highly effective teachers the opportunity to make basically double the amount of money that they were in the old system. if they are willing to give us tenure and seniority protection, et cetera. but it's a choice. at a hefty. teachers want to stay in the old system they can. if they want to go to the new

system, they give those tenured rights of but they'll make a whole lot more money. let your teachers choose. and the union said no. i sort of couldn't believe. it's interesting because the guy who was the of the teachers union at the time now has come to jesus and now he is an education reform. what he tells me now is you know what i did with the toy boat? because i didn't want that policy in place. he said i was getting all these e-mails from teachers and put it to a vote, ma we want. so i'm not going to lose the vote if i did it so i just didn't put it up. eventually we got the contract in place, and this is the interesting thing about it. people were very skeptical about what kind of impact it was going to have if you paid some teachers a lot more money based on the results, et cetera. and there was a study that just came out a few weeks ago that studied several urban districts

across the country. and what it showed was that most of these districts, they retained their highly effective teachers and their ineffective teachers at exactly the same rate. there was no differentiation whatsoever. and one outlier for the study was washington, d.c., where they kept about 88% of the highly effective teachers and only about 40% of their ineffective teachers. and i said, that means that what we were doing is starting to work because the great teachers are feeling more valued and you know that they're being recognized and rewarded for the work and makes them want to stay. >> why doesn't merit evaluation and merit pay apply to teachers? and why aren't poorly performing teachers removed, in your opinion? >> you know, it's a tough thing to understand why this goes on, because it defies all common

sense. spent everybody any odds, most people have all kinds of jobs. merit evaluation is the way of life, whichever way you cut it. [inaudible] >> i can take from having run a school district for three and a half years that much of the education community is allergic to the idea of accountability. people want to say accountable because of this reason, that reason, the other reason. and i think it's extraordinarily problematic. so i do know exactly why, but let me tell you how i think we've got to change this. i now live about have time in california, which is one of the most difficult states to get anything done in sort of an educational reform. so there was an episode that

happened in a public school in l.a. where they found this teacher who was basically a sexual predator, and they showed that he was sorted using the kids in his class, the school district had to fire him. and they couldn't because he had tenure. and it was just this absolute travesty. the school district, i meet the parents were up in arms. so a legislator from that area introduced a bill to the california legislature that would simply make it easier to fire sexual predators. not ineffective teachers, sexual predators. that's such low-hanging fruit. you think a bill like that could get past. it didn't even make it out of the education committee. didn't even make it out of committee and make it to a vote of the legislature. that is how powerful the status quo is in making sure that no

laws get passed. and when you think about it, if you went out on the street and asked people what they thought about it, i guarantee you virtually everybody would say of course we should pass a law like that. the people in the academy who wrote know or what -- nobody knew that. there was no public light shone on them. so those are not going to be held accountable for those decisions that are to the detriment of children. the only way that this is going to change is if we as everyday citizens hold our elected officials accountable for the kind of laws and policies that we put in place. we send a message to them that if you're going to vote with adult interest instead of get interest, then we are not going to vote for you the next time around. [applause] >> that means you all have to figure who is your school board never go to your state legislators and what steps they've taken on education reform. >> why do most teachers receive

the same raise every year? you touched upon previously and doesn't it show poor performing teachers that they don't have to improve their own performance, regardless and they get the same 2% raise every year regardless of what they do to the great teachers there really hard-working? >> so again, you see what i was shocked when i was trying to make commonsense changes and got such perspectives. you have some employers that are doing really well, he should be a will to compensate those employees more. and that's not just have the education system works. so in education we have something called step in length. you get paid according to a kind of degree you have and how long you been in the profession. it literally drives a highly effective teachers not -- when i see somebody down the hall who comes in when the kids come in

place when the kids lead to me while they're coming in two hours early and stayed three hours later and producing results and yet they get paid less than that person does because that person has been here longer. it's just not the kind of environment that how achievers want to go into it and stay in. it doesn't make teachers deal valued at all. -- deal valued at all. i was lamenting the fact that teachers, highly educated taste of debate in the. the thing about it, i said basketball players, now, my husband is a former nba player. so this is why i got in trouble at home. i said back about this, basketball players get paid $12 million a year for dribbling a ball around. [laughter] what value are the adding to society? meanwhile, i think we should pay $12 million to most highly effective teachers in this union because they are determining the future of our nation. but we have this huge culture

where we don't cut your respect and honor teachers for the incredible work that they do. and we surely don't pay them what they are worth. >> in australia, they have 200 days of public school. in china and india, 220 days of public school instruction. in the united states, whitey thing in the united states it's only 180 days? -- why do you think? its 40 less days a year and if you multiply that from 10 through 12th grade and stuff, it's a big disadvantage. >> it's no wonder they're kicking our butts. it really isn't. you know, people all the time taco what do we need in order to fix education? in my opinion you have to put every single resource to bear to stop this problem. people -- the resource of time. i think if you look at the

schools in this country, whether they be traditional public schools, charter schools, et cetera, they are in school more time. they have their kids working for school, afterschool or weekend, et cetera. we have 180 day calendar because we are still living off the puck where he and calendar. literally it's interesting, summit said on a talk show the other day or maybe a blog that said, though, michelle rhee is wrong. the u.s. is not doing worse than what it was doing before, she is sort of exaggerating the policy. and that person is right. when you look at the fact, the academic achievement levels of our kids in america in the 1960s and '70s is pretty much on par with where we are today. so it's true that from that vantage point we have not gotten worse. the problem is that there are country that are leapfrogging ahead of us.

countries like latvia and liechtenstein. i'm not kidding, latte and liechtenstein are both growing academically at two to three times the rate of american kids. so if worst things in because we're running the school system exact same way we were 100 years ago, based on the calendar, and other countries have figured out you know what, for want to get ahead were going to have to educate our kids and will put more time in, et cetera, then we can remain the same as similar academic achievement levels that we're going to fall behind in terms of the global position. >> if the average american receives two and a half weeks of vacation a year, why do public school teachers in general receive over three and a half months a year? anti-think that will ever change -- and do you think that will ever change how long the school

year is a more focus on students a? >> i think it's only going to change if we make the as a country addressing this issue and doing something about it. as long as the school calendar is something that is negotiated in the collective bargaining agreement, we are in trouble. because it is in my mind we should set up as a country our kids need to be in school x number of days a year. that's just the way does. but right now because it's collectively bargained with school districts not having money to put on to become oftentimeoftentimes the only thn bargain away is just the length of the school day or the school year. which is a detriment to the children. that is where we have to draw the line. i'm it, i am for collective bargaining.

i'm all in favor of unions, et cetera. and around things like benefits they should absolutely be able to bargain those things at the table. but when it comes out long kids should be in school, that in my mind should not be a bargaining chip. >> it death feels like there's more chapters being written in your incredible story, this book that is receiving incredible reviews. tell us where studentsfirst is going and what's next for the organization. what you've done in two years has been impressive according to many, many folks. >> thank you. so i started studentsfirst a few years ago when i left d.c. with the idea that if you looked at what was happening in public education over the last two to three decades, you'd see that it was largely driven by special interest groups, whether textbook manufacturers, teachers unions, testing companies. these organizations have tremendous resources and they use those resources to put a lot of influence on the political

process to get those policies and regulations in place that benefit them. and actually don't have any problem with it. that's the american way. that's democracy. we should be able to do that. the problem is not the fact is organizations exist or are doing those things. the problem at that point was we didn't have an organized national interest group with the same -- that was advocating on behalf of kids. and because the kids were not be represented at the table you had a huge landscape, an environment that was tilted towards all of these interests and away from kids. so i thought we have to start a national movement of everyday people who care about education, who know what kinds of laws and policies would've to put in place and who are willing to fight for it and hold public officials accountable. it has to be an organization that has political muscle. so i started studentsfirst. with 2 million members across the country. with over 150,000 here in new

york. almost 300,000 in california, and these are very active people. they had been searching for a venue through which they can fight for kids. they found it through us. we have over 115 laws in the 17 states that we are working with over the last two years. we have gotten involved, support over whether politicians than last year's elections and with a win rate of about 75%. so we are beginning to level the playing field on behalf of kids, and i would say we still have a long way to go. >> where does most of the funding come from? >> it comes from a variety of sources. people who are passionate about this. what i'm very proud of is the fact that a lot of our members, our members to donate to the cause. i think our average donation is about $84. so these are everyday people, parents, teachers, grandparents, business owners who know that the future of this country is

going to be based on whether we can fix the public education system for kids today. >> we will take a couple of audience questions before we move onto the book signing but i ask you to speak about it. i'm going to repeat the question because it's being filmed for television. the late here first. >> [inaudible] >> [inaudible] th

>> so, that is part of the reason why i wrote "radical." partially because i wanted to sort of tell my story and explain to people why i have come together views i do. part to sort of get teachers and educators to understand that, but partially for the average mom out there he was frustrated with what she sees and wants to do something about it and doesn't know how. what i will say is this. take the right here in newark city but it doesn't matter where you send your kid to school. it doesn't matter whether it's the highest or lowest

performing. you have to make the decision that you think is in the best interest of your kid. you can't let politics or guilt or anythin anything else make uy to one school or another. but there is something you can you doubt the situation. at stake new york city for example. most of you probably know this 80 keep up with the news, but the city recently locked $300 million in state and federal aid, because -- lost. because the union basically refused to implement a rigorous teacher evaluation system. what you were saying before. everybody has to be evaluated. everybody has to be held accountable. this is the way the world. but the fact of the union refused to do this, and mike bloomberg to i think very rightfully stood his ground and said no. because what the union wanted was for the evaluation period, model to just be a place for two years and then it would sunset after two years. two years what happened to be the market, an effective teacher

would be removed within we revert back to the old system and the mayor said no, what's the point? now, where is the public outcry? where are the people that are, you know, picking out the industry the same, you cannot deny our kids $300 million because you refuse to be held accountable and have a reasonable evaluation system in place. this is where studentsfirst is organizing everyday people like you, it doesn't matter where you send your kids to school again. you've got to get involved in that process because until people see the legislators in albany, the governor, they can solve this problem. they just have to hear from people like you that you're going to make her decisions on whether you contribute to the campaigner vote for them based on the stances they are taking the right now they're hearing a whole lot, pashtun not hearing enough from folks like you.

>> even if all these reforms were put in place, one could make the argument that we live in a culture where children go home to homes where they watch five hours of tv a day, compulsively addicted to texting, facebook, internet, hollywood and tv which is filled with, shall we say in pure things. and certainly a mass meeting in terms of television and radio and pop-culture and obsessed with sports that the very culture and danger of our country is hostile to education. and i raise the question with the best meaning teachers, what good does it do and less you hold culture -- [inaudible] and basically that's a huge part of the problem and i'd like your

reaction to the things that are beyond all these reforms spent i'm an educator sought him out to solve all the social ills out there, and i can say that the kids are not the only ones who arspend too much time on facebok and texting because i know a lot of corporate ceos spending too much time on their iphone as well. there was a study a number of months ago that was done by an economist at harvard, and what they showed was that, and they studied over 2 million kids over a 20 year period. and what they found is that if a child had a highly effective teacher, just one in the 13 your school experience, their earning potential was higher. the likelihood that the graduated from high school and went on to college was greater. and the likelihood that he would have a 40 teenage pregnancy was higher.

-- would have avoided teenage pregnancy was i. we should try to solve a lot of the problems but we also cannot forget that what happens in school matters a lot. and you know, if what we are concerned about is poverty, because a lot of people say kids in poverty, they face these challenges and these are real challenges. don't get me wrong. but if we want to fix that problem, the best way for somebody to break the cycle of generational poverty is to get a high quality education. so we have to embrace the fact that education plays a very significant role in whether whae culture is going to look like in a long-term. if we are producing kids that do not have the skills and knowledge necessary to get a well-paying job, right, nowadays employers configured as an employer say they cannot find people in the applicant pool for the skills that they need to fill mission-critical jobs. think about that. with this kind of unemployment rate in this country, half of

the employers to say they have jobs and they can't fill them, because our education system is not producing people who have those skills, we are on a very, very difficult course for the future. that education can play a very large part in fixing. >> michel, thanks so much by the way. my question has to do with structural change. [inaudible] is a possible for someone with a high school education to go to work in a factory or auto plant, make perhaps 80, $90,000 have a solid middle-class market for the film. those jobs are now gone forever. and for people in this families and the children, able to make similar salary, inflation -- [inaudible] the skill level they

need today is so much. no one is really, really talking seriously about these undocumented people, or talk about this structural problem. [inaudible] what you see is the most effective way? >> well, we have to bring and into how public schools operate. you know, it is astonishing how many conversations i am in in public forums like this when people say to me, well, you know, you seem to have sort of commune of them you want all kids to go to college but not all kids are cut out for higher education. and i say, excuse me? because the bottom line is, if you look at the date it is very

clear that the vast majority of the jobs 10, 1520 years from now are going to acquire some level of higher education. so if you're saying that some kids are not cut out for that, you are basically saying that they're not going to be able to find a decent paying job will put in solid in the class. what does that mean for their future? you know, when i was in d.c., i remember going into a school and they were doing, they had a program what we called them we just called vocational education. and now it's called career and technical education. and i walking and the kids are doing shoe repair. and i said, really, shoe repair? are we thinking that we are preparing kids for a profession? we have to be thinking about things in terms of what of the jobs that are going to be available 15, 20 years from now?

have to be looking at things like clean tech and green tech and that sort of thing. and then our career technical education should be geared towards those skills and those professions. so even what we think of as vocational and career, check, what d can we do to build the skills of kids so they could potentially go straight into a profession after high school? it's a wildly different set of skills and fields and we're looking at 20 years ago and we have not made that shift yet. >> [inaudible] >> not 50% spent well, $5500 sounds like around 50%, i'm just estimating spent all, you mean in terms of the amount of the voucher? >> correct. spent it depends on the district, but go ahead with your

question. >> this requires that schools require -- twice as efficient and more than the school they're sending their kids to. and the argument that the schools -- of the units throughout that in order to have a trump card, what about special needs kids? here's a simple answer. each special needs kid counts as two kids. so when you figure out the per capita spending you just use, and make a calculation in that manner and have to redefine who is special needs so they get a double voucher. so this calling the teachers unions block. and when the federal government wanted all states to adopt 55% speed limit, they said you're not getting any highway money unless you do. well, you know, congress can do that with federal education money as well. if you don't fully voucherize the bottom quintile districts in this manner, you're not going to

get the federal education money if you don't make those requirements all the way down the chain to the municipality. >> let me first say this. there are lots of people out there who believe that, let's have universal vouchers, et cetera. i don't agree with that. i am for choice, not for choice sakes but only one choice results in better outcomes of opportunities for kids. so the voucher programs that we support at studentsfirst are programs that are geared toward low-income kids would otherwise be trapped in failing schools. i do think to your point, it can be worked out in terms of how much money the voucher should be, et cetera, to sort of be there. what i find curious is the absolute aversion that people have to the concept of vouchers in public education. and there's two reasons why. one is because if you don't believe in public dollars going to private institution and

companies, et cetera, then you don't live in pell grants, right? that's the same thing. when kids get pell grants, federal government dollars go to harvard or you. >> or wherever they want with those grants. you do believe in food stamps that can be used and we deemed as any story go to a new neighborhood. medicare can also be used at not just public hospitals. so the idea that we just can't get in public education i think is an odd thing. the second thing i would say is that people often make the argument when it comes to vouchers they say well, we shouldn't take mone the money of the system. we should take that money and invest in failing schools to make them better. and here's what i think that made no sense because because we don't use that logic in any other part of our life. if you went to a dry cleaner down the street and of every 10

sure she took them, seven of them came back with a huge burn mark on them, what would you do? you would stop going. what if the people should wait, you can stop giving us your business and your money, because we need your money to be able to invest in new equipment and to train our employees. and if you take your business away, when not going to be able to do that. what would you say? you would say not with my shirts. so if we're willing to take that much care with our laundry, shouldn't we take at least that much care with our kids, not be willing to say okay, let's continue to invest in this thing that assailed for generations and hope that maybe someday it might get better. meanwhile, our kids are not learning how to read and write, not getting the skills that they need. it makes absolutely no sense. >> ladies and gentlemen, will have to cut it there with question to do, i'm sorry, because michelle again has to go on shore and she's kindly agreed

to science because i think you guys are bound to be nicer with the questions then pierce was. >> but before we close it out, i just want to make a couple of notes. firstly, i would really like to thank a real, real old and dear friend for making this incredible is it possible and that's leslie cohen. also, anybody who has any stake in education and if they want to get involved, it's living up to them, studentsfirst.org, according to many critics and others is doing all kinds of interesting work. also most importantly the book, just two or three books. the book has received incredible reviews. if you have any stake in education or if education means anything to you personally, your kids, your family, future of the country, according to many individuals, it's a must read and i strongly recommend. so on that note please join me in thanking michelle rhee for an

incredible talk. [applause] >> tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> this system of mass incarceration is now so deeply rooted in our social political and economic structure that is not going to just fade away or downsize out of sight without a major a people, a from the radical shift in our public consciousness. now, i know this many people today who will say oh, yeah, there's no hope of indian mass incarceration in america. no, no. , there's no. pick another issue. just as many people were re-signed to jim crow in the south and say yeah, yeah, that's a shame, it's a shame, but that's just the way this. i find it so the people today

view the million cycling in andd out of our prisons and jails today is just an unfortunate but an alterable fact of american life. well, i'm quite certain that dr. king would not have been so resigned. so i believe that if we are truly, truly to honor dr. king, if we are to ever catch up with thank you, we've got to be willing, continue his work. we've got to be willing to go back and pick up where he left off and do the hard work of movement building on behalf of poor people of all color. and night -- and agencies get dr. king said the time to transition from the civil rights movement to a human rights movement. meaningful equality he said could not be achieved through civil rights alone. without basic human rights, the

right to work, the right to shelter, the right to quality education, without basic human rights, he said, civil rights are an empty promise. so in honor of dr. king and all those who labored to end the old jim crow, i hope will commit ourselves to building a human rights movement to end mass incarceration. a movement for education not incarceration. a movement for jobs, not jails. a movement to end all these forms of legal discrimination against people. discrimination that denies basic human rights to work, to shelter and food. but mostly -- mutt -- what must we do to end this movement? first we have to tell the truth, the whole truth. we've got to be willing to admit out loud that we as a nation managed to re-create a cap like system in this country we've got to be willing to tell the truth

in our schools, in our churches and our places of worship, behind bars and in the reentry centers. we've got to be willing to tell the truth so that a great awakening to the reality of what has occurred can come to pass. because the reality is that this new system doesn't come with signs. there are no whites only signs anymore. there are no signs today of hurting us to the existence of the system of mass incarcerati incarceration. and prisons today they're out of sight and out of mind. often hundreds of miles away from communities and families that might otherwise be connected to them. and the people who cycle in and out of these prisons typically live in segregated, impoverished community. communities that middle-class folks, upper-middle-class folks barely come across.

so you can live your whole life in america today having no idea that this system of mass incarceration harm's, and even exist. so we've got to be willing to tell the truth about what has occurred, pull back the curtain and make visible what is hidden in plain sight. so that an awakening can begin, and people can begin to take the kind of creative constructive action that this moment in our history surely requires. but, of course, it's a lot of talk and conscious raising isn't going to be enough. we've got to be willing to get to work. and in my view that means we've got to be willing to build an underground railroad for people to be released from prison to an underground railroad for people who want to make a genuine break for real freedom. people who want to escape the

system and find work, find shelter, be able to support their families, find true freedom in america today. we've got to be willing to open our homes, open our schools, open our workplaces to people returning home from prison and provide safe spaces of support for the families who have loved ones behind bars today. how do we create these safe places? well, one thing we can certainly do, we can begin to admit our own criminality out loud, our own criminality. because the truth is we've all made mistakes in our lives. we'll have. all of us are sinners. all of us have done wrongs. all of us have broken the law at some point in our lives. if you're an adult, you have

broken the law at some point in your life. now, i find that some people say oh, yeah, i'm a sinner, i've made mistakes but don't call me a criminal. don't call me a criminal. i say okay, well, maybe you never drink under age. maybe never experimented with drugs. well, if the worst thing you've done in your entire life is speed in most of the speed limit on the freeway, you put yourself and others at more risk of harm and someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of their living room. but there are people in the united states serving life sentences for first time drug offenses. life sentences. the u.s. supreme court upheld life sentences for first time drug offenders against an eighth amendment challenge that such sensors were cruel and unusual in violation of a daemon. the u.s. supreme court said no, no. it's not going unusual punishment to send the young man

to life imprisonment for first time drug offense. even though virtually no other country in the world does such a thing. so we have to end this idea that the criminals are them, not us. and instead say, there but for the grace of god go i. all of us have made mistakes in our lives, taken wrong turns. but only some of us have been required to pay for those mistakes for the rest of our lives. in fact president barack obama himself has admitted to more than a little bit of drug use in his lifetime. he has admitted to using marijuana and cocaine in his youth. and if he hadn't been raised by white grandparents in hawaii, if he hadn't done much of his illegal drug use on predominately white college campuses and universities, if you've been raised in the hood, the odds are good that he would have been stopped, he would've

been first, he would've been searched, he would've been caught. and far from being president of the united states today, he might not even have the right to vote, depending on the state he lives in. >> you can watch this and other programs online at otb.org. >> we have allowed a human rights nightmare to occur on our watch it in the years since dr. king's death, a vast new system of racial control has emerged from the ashes of slavery and jim crow. a system of mass incarceration that no doubt has dr. king turning in his grave today. the mass incarceration poor people of color in united states is tantamount to a new caste like system from one that shows our young people from decrepit underfunded schools are brand-new high-tech prisons. it is a system that locks poor people overwhelmingly poor people of color into a permanent

second class status nearly as effectively as earlier systems of racial and social control once did. it is, in my view, the moral equivalent of jim crow. >> get ready, booktv's first online book club meets at the end of the month. watch a video of michelle alexander at booktv.org and read the new jim crow. and on tuesday march 26 at 9 p.m. eastern join us live online at twitter and facebook with your questions and comments on the new jim crow. >> growing up in the nuclear shadow is a book about my childhood. i grew up about seven miles from the rocky flats nuclear weapons plant, and actually our first house was about seven miles away, and then in 1969 we moved to a subdivision which was

closer to the plant, about three, three and a half miles away from rocky flats. my sisters and brother and i, we had an idyllic childhood in the sense that we have horses and dogs and i spent a lot of time outdoors riding our horses in the fields around the plant, and swimming in the lake's. and we never knew what went on at rocky flats. we had no idea what it really was. and we had no idea of environmental contamination that was happening in the area. plutonium and tritium, and a number of different things in the environment, we had no idea. later, like many kids in my neighborhood, i worked at the plant myself, and got a sense of what it was like to be on the inside of the plant. there was one evening when i came home from working at rocky flats and turn on the television and was a show on "nightline"

that it was an exposé of what was really happening at the plant, and it was the firs the e that a really have an awareness, really have an understanding of what was happening at rocky flats and how extraordinary the contamination was. it was on that day that i decided to quit my job at rocky flats, and the day i quit was the day i decided i would write a book about it. it took me about 10 years of research and writing to pull this story to get up and i wanted to write a book that reads like a novel but is very heavily footnoted and everything in the book is factual so you can check in the back and see where the information comes from. but i wanted to write this story from the perspective of all of the different kinds of people whose lives have been affected by rocky flats. not just residents like me and my family, but workers at rocky flats, some of the activists, all the different people, thousands and thousands of people in colorado and beyond who were affected by rocky flats. another reason why i felt very

passionate about this story is that there is, we continue to deal with the legacy of our nuclear weapons production in this country in so many different ways. the environmental legacy and then also the cultural legacy of how important this plant was and the way it affected people, people who were not aware how they're being affected. when i went to the plant, it was very common for workers, we call ourselves cold war warriors, those who work right on the leg of the people who grew up near rocky flats can we also were cold war warriors. no one told us we didn't know what was happening in the plan. the rumor in the neighborhood was that the plane was operated at dow chemical and the rumor was they were making household cleaning supplies. my mother thought they were making scrubbing bubbles. and it wasn't apparent for quite a long time what was actually going on. what happened at rocky flats now is that there has been a cleanup, a very controversial clean, controversial levels of contamination remaining in the

soil. and 1300 acres of that site are so profoundly contaminated that they can never ever be open for human habitation. and the rest of the site is slated to open as a national wildlife refuge for hiking and biking and possibly even hunting. so even though they're still soil contamination on the site and there's a lot of homebuilding and shopping malls and all sorts of things going on out there. so i felt that even though in colorado and country as a whole i think would like to forget the rocky flats ever happen. the story would like to put in the past and pretend it's all fixed and we don't have to do with it anymore. but the truth of the met is a very important story that will have to continue to deal with now into the future. plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years. it's not going away anytime soon. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. lef