>> well, now on booktv we want to introduce you to university of wisconsin professor john diamond. professor die monday, what do you do up here at the university? >> guest: i'm a professor in educational leadership at the school of education. >> host: and what exactly do you teach? >> guest: well, i teach courses on race and inequality, i teach courses on research methods, how people can study schools more effectively, and i also train leaders who are going to go out and work in wisconsin and elsewhere sort of how to lead schools, how to think about organizations, how to change them, those kinds of things. >> host: how did you get interested in education in the first place? >> guest: actually, my mother is an education professor. she started out as a first grade teacher and later became a professor, and i really just became interested in trying to understand sort of inequalities in education, because i was a sociologist by training. my dock tarl work -- doctoral work i studied sociology and wanted to explore inequalities in schools, it's also a place

where inequality gets reproduced, so i wanted to understand the die page ins of that process. -- dynamics of that process. >> host: "despite the best intentions: how racial inequality thrives in good schools." you and amanda lewis, who is whom? >> guest: a colleague i started working with 15 years ago -- >> host: here at the university? >> guest: she's actually at the university of chicago. >> host: they are the co-authors of this book. and professor diamond, you say it all started with a phone call. >> guest: yeah. it all started with a phone call. i had been engaged in working with schools that were trying to address racial achievement inequality, particularly black and latino students compared the their white counterparts. and the principal from the school called up and said, you know, i'm having this truck ising. i'm -- this struggle. i'm trying to understand why these inequalities persist, and can you come talk to some of the black students in the school to try to understand what's going on with this achievement gap that we see in our school?

be why is it that, you know, black kids and latino kids are achieving at lower levels than their white counterparts. >> host: all right. you talk about this school as riverview high school, the principal is maurice weber and metro midwest is what they're saying. how much of that is made up? can you tell us -- is this a real school? >> guest: it's a real school, it's a real location, it's a real suburban context that's racially diverse and a place that's known for its progressive, liberal ethos and context. >> host: so maurice weber made up, riverview, made up. metro midwest -- is it in the midwest? >> guest: it is in the midwest. those are all pseudonyms for real people, rell places. >> host: okay. what is it about this school that attracted you to write about it? >> guest: you know, it's a really fascinating place because it's been stably integrated for, you know, probably 30 years, 40 years. and what you find there is not the sort of standard disparity between income. most folks there are middle

class including the black, latino families as well as the white families. most folks, again, they espouse this egalitarian ethos. they believe in diversity. many of them move to this community because it's a diverse place. and so the idea that this is a really progressive community, this is a community that believes in racial equality that's been stably integrated for some time and where the teachers are high quality, where the resources are abundant, we really wanted to understand, well, what's going on here that there are racial inequalities that still persist in a place like this? >> host: what are some of the inequalities? when you talk about inequalities, you're talking about statistical inequalities when you look at the stats. >> guest: right. >> host: what were you finding? >> guest: what we were finding was that, for example, we looked at grades. black students, latino students had lower grades on average. they weren't doing as well on tests, so the profresh city levels on the test -- proficiency levels, they were not doing as well as their white counterparts. we looked at graduation rates where most students were graduating and going on to

college, actually, which was a positive thing, but more of the black and latino students were going to two-year colleges as opposed to four-year colleges, right? so there were these differences that manifest themselves in the school, and they sort of made us wonder what was actually going on inside the school context. and so we wanted to understand race, we wanted to understand what the racial dynamics were as well as the social class dynamics that might be leading to these inequalities. so we thought mr. weber's invitation to come in was a great opportunity to look at what was going on more generally. so we started with the black students, and we actually wound up interviewing about 171 people in the community including students, parents, community members, teachers, administrators, staff members to really get a complete picture of what was happening in the context. >> host: walk us through some of your findings. >> guest: well, one of the things that really struck us coming into this was we really wanted to understand what was racial about these inequalities. there's all this research out there that talks about race and what it means and trying to you

said it, and one of -- understand it, and one of the first things we wanted to understand was this idea of oppositional culture. there's this idea that black and latino students are somehow uninvested in education and that their peers criticize them for behaving in ways that would lead to academic success, the sort of acting white hypothesis that you may have heard from anthropologists to president obama talking about education. and what we found is that that really wasn't an explanation that carried much weight. what we found, for example, is that there was no more negative peer pressure for black students than for white students, that black students were actually more pro-school than their white counterparts. and we found this out through interviewing, but also through a survey that we conducted in riverview and 14 other school districts. and what we found was that black students were more pro-school than their white counterparts. so what we really wanted to do in that piece of the work was really debunk that idea. we found the evidence really to support the idea that this isn't

really what's going on in the context of our school in riverview and that there were other things that were manifesting itself. >> host: such as? >> guest: well, i mean, one of the things that, you know, we have a lot of discourse and discussion about the racial achievement gap, but what winds occupy happening is people don't really engage with the idea of race itself, right? what does race actually mean, right? so people often, you know, will throw it into a regression equation, they'll talk about race as a variable, but they don't really unpack the meaning and the social meaning of race. so if you think about race, you really have to look historically at what race has been used for. race emerges at a time when you have commonnization happening around the world, you have slavery happening, all these inequalities, genocide of native americans, and what race wound up being is a construct that allowed people to justify those kinds of exploitations. and one of the things that continues to exist is this idea that black and latino students are essentially not as intelligent as white students

and that they're likely to be violent or misbehave. and so one of the things that manifests itself in the contemporary context based on this historic context is this idea of the criminalization of black bodies and latino bodies and the lack of intelligence that people perceive in black and latino bodies. and these things were readily apparent when we talked to people in the school context. like i said, we interviewed blacks, whites and latinos to try to understand what was happening, and there was a pretty consistent story that people perceived that black students and latino students were not as intelligent, were not going to achieve as well and were not going to behave as well as their white counterparts. >> host: so there was that perception? was there a reality? >> guest: there was definitely a perception and, you know, what we think about with regard to the reality is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophesy. once you've decided that someone is going to misbehave, you're going to scrutinize them more. so what we found was that, for example, in the hallways in the schools, students are supposed

to have a pass when they're not in a class, when they're moving through the hallways during class periods. what we found was white students would say i never need a hall pass. i walk through the halls freely. and white students would say but i know my black friends can never do that, right? so there's this process of hyper-surveillance, and the likelihood of being in violation of the pass code is much higher if you're stopped than if you're not. it's almost like racial profiling in policing, right? so that was one of the examples of how this sort of played itself out. and the white students were trying to make sense of it, and they were saying it's not fair, it's something that happens all the time. the administrators were trying to make sense of it. one talked about having black and white students in their office, and whenever they would ask white student ifs they needed a pass to get back to class, the white students would say, oh, no, i never get stopped. black students would always ask for the pass. so not only were black students talking about this, white students, administrators and others in the community were talking about how discipline was

not meted out fairly. and we saw similar patterns in classrooms with regard to how students were disciplined, how they were referred to discipline and how they were expected to achieve -- >> host: but, professor diamond, what does that have to do with test scores or academic achievement? >> guest: yeah. so, you know, when students come to school, they're looking for a number of things, right? particularly adolescents, because we are talking about a high school here. they want to belong. they want their peers to accept them, but they also want to be able to navigate the school context and feel like they belong this that context. when they're being hypersurveiled, when they're being scrutinized and punished for things that their peers are not, that sends a strong message about who's valued and who's not valued in the school context. when you layer on top of that that there was a perception that students who wore clothes that were societied with african-american culture -- associated with african-american culture were more likely to be scrutinized than people, than students who didn't wear those kind of clothing, if they wore, for example a button-up shirt

and a pair of khakis, they were often assumed to be good kids, and if they wore clothes associated with african-american be culture, with hip-hop culture, they felt like they were often more scrutinized. and, again, this was something that was echoed among many people in the school context. so when you have to deny a part of yourself to navigate your school context, that naturally may lead you to feel like you're not necessarily part of the environment. >> host: thus, your test scores are lower? your academic achievement is lowersome. >> guest: i think what winds occupy happening is if you -- up happening is if you feel scrutinized and feel less likely to be embraced as a part of the environment, that can happen. the other part of performance expectations is what teachers expect from you in the classroom, right? so what we found is that black students talked about the fact that the teachers didn't expect much of them. administrators talked about low expectations that they experienced for black and latino students as they navigated the school. parents talked about those low expectations, and those things also become a self-fulfilling

prophesy. they provide more or less access to the teach everybodies' time -- teachers' time and attention, rigorous curriculum, and they provide another set of messages about who's capable in the school context and who's not. one example of that is, it sort of became embedded in the school environment, is that the school was about 45% white and about 41% african-american, about 8.5% latino. but the honors-level track and the ap-level tracks, the sort of privileged context in the school, were 80 and 90% white, right? so less than 50% white students, but these classes that are the high status classes in the school were predominantly white, right? and so people in the community talk about the fact that when you come into the school, the students mingle in the hallways, and you see them talking to each other, they go to classes, and they go separate ways. you can walk down the hall and see the difference between a regular class, which is predominantly black and latino,

and honors and advanced placement classes where mostly white students find themselves. >> host: what was one other finding that you -- at riverview? >> guest: i think the other big finding is that we often think about parent involvement as a positive thing, and in some ways it certainly is. but one of the things we found is that the administrators and teachers and members of the community felt a lot of pressure from white parents who were powerful in the community. and those tended to be the parents of the students who were in these honors and advanced placement classes. so as they tried to create more equity in the context of the school, there was a process that we refer to as opportunity hoarding. it's the monopolizing of the most privileged, valued educational context and exclusion of other people from those contexts. so as school and administration tried to address these disparities in class placement, what they ran into was roadblocks at every step. so as they tried to limit the number of distinctions between

class levels, they got pushback from the parents of the, quote-unquote, high-flying students who said things like, well, my kid needs to get into harvard or wisconsin or one of these elite schools, and if you provide resources to the kids who aren't doing as well, you're going to take resources away from my kid. they did things like as they tried to limit the number of distinctions across course levels and sort of level that out, create mixed-level classes with honors, advanced placement and regular students, there was what we called internal white flight where white parents would encourage their students to migrate to classes that were predominantly white even though they may have been interested in studying another class. so, for example be, some students wanted to study african-american be history or african history, and their parents would steer them into russian history or middle eastern history because they knew these were white spaces, essentially. and so that was, you know, some of those dynamics of opportunity hoarding were really sort of critical.

another piece of this is that when we look at the discipline disparities, there were disparities in terms of how people were selected into discipline, but there were disparities also on how they were treated in the discipline process. and many times the parents with more resources, what we call sort of the cultural capital and social capital to exert their power on administrators would do things like negotiate away something like their child having drugs in the school. they would say things like, well, my child had the marijuana, but it really wasn't possession because possession means you mean to distribute it, and they didn't really mean to distribute it, they just had it, and it was in their hands, but it wasn't really theirs. so let's not call it possession, because they really have a bright future, and we expect them to go to a great college, and if you, you know, put it down as possession, it's not going to happen. and so these were some of the dynamics that occurred across sort of the academic context, but also in the disciplinary domain that led to advantage and disadvantage at the