step out of your time and culture and your age and your race and your gender and imagine what life is like in some other era in some other culture. there's a whole theory of criticism around that. is that kind of rationale ever been used to select literature? that's not racist, it's just an active imagination. has that argument ever been used to select literature and if not, why not? >> has the argument ever been put forward to select books based on the imaginative distance from the here and now, speaking of fantasy literature is maybe the biggest embodiment of that. >> i think that question is related to my near versus far

question earlier but i think i will turn to david on that first because he is a much stronger fan of the fantastic and i'm much more rooted in the realist. >> i would say in effect, i think that's what they think they're doing now. there are two troubles, one is their sense of what is different is based upon very narrow categories of modern multiculturalism which in effect means somebody from somewhere else in the year 2010 is presumed to be remarkably different from us and there's no sense of how greatly much more different people were four or five years ago from wherever. it's a very narrow sort of

diversity that is being chosen. the other thing first science fiction, it's actually one of the most common fiction things done, but that's not because it's not because it's new and different. it's because it's not as useful genre that people read. i love science fiction and fantasy, but when it's chosen, it usually because it stretches the students less, not because, not because it stretches them more. >> fiction is very rare. nonfiction is more than 70% of the the books chosen and most of those are memoirs. a lot of the titles are my journey, my struggle, my year and blank in blank. it's very me focused. >> of fairmont seem to get exposed after a year or two. it turned out to be a work of fiction masquerading into a

memoir. >> so we've discussed that student engagement is a problem, my question is how do we know the problem is engagement. i think the issue is,. [inaudible] faculty are forced to research and go to areas where none have gone before and they're trying to find something new and different than. [inaudible] resulting in scholarship where

students and faculty are engaged in their education. >> how much of a factor does faculty members in their effort to avoid publishing perish and have allowed the students have allowed students to be null and know of these books? >> i can speak for the humanities and the softer areas of the campus. we have a bargain in place between faculty and students. the bargain is on the faculty side i'm in a show up to class and give you a syllabus, i'm going to give you a decent

lecture and presentation and then i'm in a go away. you are going to do what you're supposed to do on the syllabus and you'll submit those materials and take those tests and you get a decent grade let's not spend too much time talking in my office, let's not do to much extracurricular contacts, i don't want to sit around and talk with you for 45 minutes about why she's getting up in the middle of the night and washing her hands and washington the halls, let's not get into that. you got the the syllabus? you got the assignment. you know what to do. i'll see you later at the st. exam. that's the bargain. i won't bother you too much and you will not bother me too much

and that's how the system keeps going. >> is reading books just to slow for students that's why colleges have dumbed down their reading list thus far? >> some times it's something they haven't even tried to know. it's just not their priority. it's not that difficult to read. i don't think the slowness of it is the problem. it's just the sheer lack of interest. but i can see how in much of the high achiever world spending all summer long to read all the games, i'm very productive.

doesn't go along with building a resume. i can see how what you are saying does sound inefficient in terms of the high achiever performance on so much of their lives. if there high achievement isn't directly oriented around books, 200 years years ago it would be expected of leaders in civilized nations to have all done their reading in plutarch. these are lessons in leadership, good lessons and bad lessons. george washington, he stages kato for his troops to watch for

it he thinks this is an important thing. this is what people should know. those things don't seem to go with success so much in the contemporary world. then other activities of building up your social media time or networking in certain ways or getting those things and doing things that can go on a resume. >> it seems like we need to change what we value as a society. >> we can take two more questions. >> maybe i'm being too cynical. if the faculty, if it's to resist this, culture and they're trying to create a community by assigning a book. >> a paradoxical question here

are books programmed in an attempt to create a community by resisting larger principles of community. >> avoiding the classics of her trying to create a community of people. >> this is a reference to the oppositional character and resistance on campus. perhaps students just dislike it for the inheritance of western civilization and they wanted in favor of what's new and breaking on our sure. >> i want to add one more goodwill thought. i'm sorry. the people who serve on these committee are the ones who are dedicated to the college. they may not have made choices that i like, but they put in the time. yes, they have more community

than the one who slacked off doing any community service at all. >> i don't mean slackers. >> among the professors and the faculty. so you've got at least some bias among the people who are selecting the book and actually care about the college. >> i would ask a question, are they on that committee, they volunteered for it because they want to control what every student has to read and they don't want the wrong book in student hands? >> like plutarch. >> yes. >> i was just going to say, you bring up a good point that contemporary book that are no longer popular, in a few years limit your community to just those readers at that time. if you do read a classic, connects you to the whole of

generations who have gone before and will go after you. ns>> those generations are dead sweetheart. >> and the future generations. >> the faculty itself is contradicting themselves. >> well. >> last question here. [inaudible] could the university redefine. [inaudible]

[inaudible] >> so there is the possibility that we are being too gentle about all of this because it's not a mere accident that there is a political subject to these books and it's the political agenda that is driving the selection of books. the national association of scholars is friendly to that point of view in that we would rather talk less of it in our previous years of presentation and some of the opposites that we been writing about. i tried to bring it in a little bit that there's clearly some elements of goodwill in the selection of books. it's not just all about politics. it is not just an agenda reading 24 hours a day. something else is is going on. one of the popular books this year is outcast united. it's another children's book

basically about a soccer team in south carolina, a do-gooder and volunteers who organize a bunch of immigrant kids from all over the world's who prospects are bleak and suddenly their lives are transformed because they can all play soccer together. >> adapted for young people by warren st. john. >> this is the shorter version. >> the title rather nicely catches the spirit of this whole enterprise. the act outcast united, the students are taught to think of themselves as outcasts and their united and coming together where they can generate a new more wholesome culture and that's one

main reason why lots of classics in the classical sense of books are so cute. 91% of the books assigned in programs around the country were written after these children were born. 91%. so it's as though the written word hardly existed before they did. there are a few sort of hints that there might've been something written down in english earlier, but you have to go to some pretty far away colleges in southern utah and places like that to find them. i would say there's a major exception right here in new york city. columbia university is implement in common reading this year. it's not a story of uniform disgrace everywhere. it's a story in which, what are

we up to, 350 colleges this year, the great majority of them have taken the easy path into a world in which the books they assign are unchallenging, the content of them is overtly political, there is a quality of intellectual squalor that has overtaken this enterprise. as an organization, the national association of scholars have a duty to be optimistic to try to find something in this that can reading this enterprise. if colleges are not going to go back and re-create some kind of core curriculum, common reading may only be a band-aid, but at least it's a band-aid. therefore let's go out and find the best band-aids we can. certainly henrique's journey or just mercy don't make the cut. we need something a something a little bit better than that and

some persuasion on the part of those who do like to read can go a long way. i imagine every single person in this room, that's here, feel books have change your life. something that you read turned on your light and made you somebody who wanted to read for the rest of that life. we want you to take that that caring into this public discussion. we've published us 200 page report about this and we need to talk about it not just hang our heads and say what a sad situation. there's family members that care about this too. we encourage you to go out and talk about this. let's get a conversation started in this country about better books for the beach and maybe beyond the beach. were looking for something more substantial. i think you for coming and i think you for having us. [applause].

i'm giving away copies of two of my books. mark has put some of his books up here. i'm not sure if he's giving them away or selling them. he can make that choice. [laughter] >> there half-price actually. [laughter] >> thanks again for coming. tod

to booktv on.org for the full schedule. the up next, a panel on public education, this is booktv live coverage. >> hello, everyone. welcome to the eighth annual dues on festival of books. i am david garcia, your moderator for this panel today. thank you for joining us. our discussion today of

politics, education and inequality will last an hour and i promise you are going to get an opportunity to ask your questions of the authors at the end and also immediately following the session, natalia will sign her book about jonathan will not be signing immediately, i want everyone to know. he will be signing later run today starting at 5:00 in the children's and teen signing area, that is the best time to catch him, has nothing to do afterwards, stick around and sign for a long period of time and tomorrow from 12:30 to 1:00 he will be in the central mall. before we get started by indeed to thank the sponsors of the jews on festival of books and remind all of you i know you have a great time today, it will be an engage in conversation and encourage you to be a friend of the festival. you and do that in the student

union or on line, great opportunities continue to be made available to the public for free so take a moment to become a friend so we can have great programming like this. next thing, right to on time, take a moment to put these on stun, silence, whatever you need to do so we do not interrupt authors today. i am honored to be sitting up here with two great authors with amazingly strong voices in education and politesse, one newer voice and one long time voice in education for many of us for a long time. pleased to be here with natalia mehlman-petrzela and jonathan kozol who needs no introduction. to get us started today, given

that this is the panel i get a chance to work with we are going to start with one of my favorite questions just to get to know them better and ask both jonathan kozol and natalia mehlman-petrzela to tell your education story. let's start with jonathan kozol. your education story. >> i began by going to harvard college majoring in english which people said would be useless in the real world. i love literature, could have spent my whole life writing about metaphysical poetry, john donne and elizabethans. by some fluke i won a rhodes scholarship, went to oxford, got bored they're actually and so i moved to paris, fortunate that

some older riders took me under their wing. one was probably only a few of you will remember, a wonderful writer named james jones who wrote to the world war ii classic from here to eternity. james baldwin was there and other writers. i came back to the united states in 64, and suddenly i heard the voice of dr. king on radio and tv. it changed my whole life. the from cambridge into the black community of boston and started teaching. i actually -- the end of that year since all my students were black, almost all of mm-hmm, there was no black literature at all in the curriculum, i brought in a single poem by langston

hughes, the kids loved it. but i was fired the next day. it is called curriculum deviation. our country worked those days, he immediately got fired by the federal government. i have gone on ever since then working with black and latino children, 20 years in the south bronx, new york, two thirds of the kids i have been writing about, latino, 1-third black, spent some time in this part of the country long ago, cesar chavez asked me to come to arizona to meet with children and their parents which i did. to bring it up to date, we still do the same old thing, i am still very angry our nation has

reverted to the deepest racial segregation in schools since we have seen since 1968, we turned back the clock and our schools are savagely and equal in funding. we are back tos versus ferguson accept they are not separate but equal. they are separate and unequal. anyway, i promise i won't the press use of the rest of the time. [applause] >> i am so happy you asked for my education story, not just my school story, education does not only happen in the classroom. i am fortunate that much of my education has happened beyond the former classroom. who i was very young growing up in not bilingual household, spanish and english and this to

me, growing up as the upper middle-class kid, seemed to me there was a huge badge of pride to be cultural ambassador between my grandmother who spoke no english and might english-speaking community, was my first education and this was a great source of self-esteem and fried from the spanish speaking background. that had a lot to do with being an upper middle-class kid and i went on, i grew up in boston and went to a very progressive school system and learned about social justice but it didn't seem like something so pressing in the world. a lot of these problems are getting solved, the buzzing problems, the first day straight alliance in the country, beazer intellectual problems but not really problems that demand immediate action. i started learning the world is not the world i was seeing in massachusetts when i got an after-school job working as a

waitress in a place called friendly's in this city. no one else was on a college track except for me. a lot of people have different colored skin than i do. i went on to columbia, studied history, i was interested in social justice. and then i went on to the school teacher and one of the things that was self reflection was when i was looking to attend school myself and apply to schools i wanted the most kristy distract possible but when i wanted to teach at a school i wanted the most troubled school possible. i have seen that repeated many times so as i was working at this school in hell's kitchen, new york city, almost all black, latino and arican arab populations during the day and that night tutoring very well the kids as a college consultant to pay off my loans and that

experience of teaching in these environments was one of my most education ever. i was teaching in middle school, very forthright conversations with our principal where it was clear she was building the school from the bottom up and older kids were already a lost hope. i saw very diverse latino population was grouped into one category. kids shared basically nothing with one another. kids had come from catholic schools who were grouped with puerto rican kids who would migrate back and forth with mexican children, whose manager was one of citizenship. what we are doing is not right in grouping these kids together and i also thought what they did share, linguistic art and spanish speakers was assumed to be a deficiency. it was not even on the table. this was an issue to be fixed, not something we could all learn from.

there is no universal. one issue from that year, also learned that teachers where seen as disposable as the children we britt teaching and the idea that teachers are a valued profession, valued as human beings was not a given their. i wrote an op-ed about this, typical 1922-year-old, i came to change the world through public schools and look what happened. there was a lot of blow back, what happened is my colleagues saw that op-ed, parents were mobilized, delighted somebody was on their side and are realize i could make an impact through working in education but not necessarily -- went on to get -- went on to get my ph.d. in history at stanford and shifted my perspective,

realizing that the west is where it is, the contemporary social landscape and i think i will stop there. i am learning as a professor. >> excellent. you gave me a lot to go on. given that i teach, i will star with the word deviation. as jonathan mention, statistics, i appreciate that. we are going to take a second and have you comment about the broad perspective on this. the idea you called an obsession with standardized testing in the united states which by the way is now being exported outside the united states, a former scholar, in standardization and

accountability, testing, global education is one moment that many other countries are also engaging in as well. let me talk a little bit about this obsession with standardized testing. >> i might just save a scholar you just referred to. he is at harvard this year from cambridge. he is from finland. the reason i mention this, far right wing critics in public schools for years have been saying why can't we do as well as the kids in finland? our kids are not competitive with them. those tough guys, no excuses people, people who brought us this entire misery agenda of castings i eddie, what they

never tell you is finland has no standardized exams, it doesn't have any of this rat race, kids actually have a precious commodity called happiness while they are students which is hard to find in urban schools today because of this misery agenda. anyway, so much for finland. sounds like a wonderful place to go to school. a universal prekindergarten, is but disaster we still deny three full years of rich developmental to low income children in this nation. i will connect that with testing maniac in the nation. it has become obsessive, far too much. it is not having such a dreadful

effect on after when suburban schools. there kids will do okay. in wealthy suburban schools, i grew up in the same standard in that school district, they don't worry about standardized exams, they just worry if their kids are going to get into harvard or dartmouth or a second-rate place like yale. it is in the inner-city schools and for rural schools that kind of siege mentality has taken over because these are the places where the principals are running scared and even the best principles say jonathan, i can't do any of the stuff i love to do because i will be in trouble if

i can't come the test scores by 2% or whatever the majority number comes up with. as a result, good principles are saying don't waste any time on anything that is not on the exam. the exams i usually limited to literacy, math, no social studies, and literacy, no idea at, they live in new york and have no idea what massachusetts is where i live. don't know if it is the city or another country. so they have no longer to and latitude of their existence. it is not just crowding out the arts. anything to do with cultural cut

spaciousness, they are dying in these kind of schools. bad enough they are excluding latino literature and classics. they are excluding almost all good literature, there is no time for is that. the principal looking at a teacher and saying is piglet on the state exam. if they do occasionally let the kids read classics and beautiful but like that they will excavate it immediately for a testable proficiency, you know what i mean by that? improved, provide us with a long

0 or short a. spit out a consonant so they are destroying literature. kids are reading books to the extent they read them at all out of fear of failure instead of love of learning. it is the disastrous agenda, it is the worst piece of education legislation in my lifetime. also a disaster, testing these kids remorseless lee. it is unthinkable. here is the government in -- testing these kids. even though they don't call it a high-stakes test they start in first grade, second grade, third grade to prep them for the fourth grade test and some of these schools take a two thirds, not just the test but the pretest, post tests, and

meanwhile low-income kids, black and latino have had no preschool usually. the children and children of my harvard classmates typically get free.5 years of the best, beautiful, developmental free school in new york starting in their 2-1/2, they are taught preschools in new york, $40,000 a year and meanwhile we are giving almost nothing to low income children. detests in first, second, third grade prove nothing. all they measure is the accident of birth, are your parents wealthy enough to send you to school? why did you spend those years at home looking at tv? until we deal with these gross inequalities, the testing is a

monstrosity, it is a substitute for genuine equality. the worst thing is the testing debate has taken us all so much time, preoccupied us ball so much that no one is talking anymore about the elephant in the middle of the room which is the we still run and apartheid system in america. that is the heart of the issue. [applause] >> i am afraid to do this given i am sitting so close to jonathan kozol's left hand. but by will channel one of our policymakers that have the react to what i hear at the policy level is the reason for standardized testing, accountability. we need testing in order to hold our schools accountable.

i will be ready to duck at any time. how would you respond to that argument which i hear? >> the testing issue in general one of the crew ironies' intensifying the apartheid you talk about is if you look at the discourse among higher social class college-bound kids the entire movement of curriculum and the polls zeitgeist is let's move away from tests. there was a report from harvard grad school a couple weeks ago called turning the tide, which says we should move college admissions from test scores and account for other things like character and social engagement. that is great. those are the same kids for college bound who are also getting in their schools a greater emphasis on all listed child and holistic learning and expressive parts. these are dueled conversations.

we need more tests for poor kids. there is a sense they need to be held accountable and i hate to say it but the kind of losers the end up in these schools, kids with parents who are supposed to not care and teachers who are so poorly trained they couldn't be left to their own devices to come up with their own curriculum, we need to enforce accountability but in the higher echelons there is no presumption that something so basic like accountability which you would hope kids, parents, teachers would intrinsically have by being part of this project needs to be enforced. i want to point to one historical irony about this testing issue which is much of the impetus for the early testing movement in schools and for a profession was actually a movement to open access to these institutions to people who had been excluded and a lot of that revolved around some of the best

evidence of this is around jews. when they were talking tests to be led into the ivy league for the teaching profession and a lot of jews said we want tests because those are objective measures. you can -- of we have a test you can't keep us out because we are not a good fit for we didn't have the right kind of after-school activity or accent doesn't sound like what you want to hear. it is such a perversion of one of the original intents. there were pretty nefarious ones as well. one of the original tenths of testing to expand opportunity that now is collapsing. the accountability thing on the one hand i want to cry that the right has taken accountability which is generally a good thing, as their own principles and we all recoil at the idea of accountability but the accountability language is just one symptom of this. >> may i add one thing? the of this thing about accountability that is intolerable is -- i am speaking

of the accountability of teachers, the use of test scores to judge how well teachers are doing, i understand in arizona that counts for 50% of teachers's rating, what scores kids got on the exams. that is to me absolutely useless. as one function, not a good one, that function is to demoralizes teachers in public schools as part of a larger agenda to demoralize public school teachers as part of a larger agenda which is to discredit the public school as american legacy altogether and this has been -- this has been cleverly, ingeniously pursued. this goal has been pursued for decades now by the same folks.

i am sorry i am including one wealthy family whose name begins with w, the john birch society, years ago, and that became the voucher for the idea of vouchers as a way to replace public education by private market. that idea was discredited. a reintroduced it in a soft way. it is called charter schools. it is us off voucher. part of the business of holding teachers accountable according to the numbers is an effort to pay the way for the private sector to move in and make a profit on the lives of low-income children by setting

up commercially profitmaking charter schools in poor communities or else in affluent communities which are the most segway -- segregated schools in america, charter schools are notorious for that. that is at stake in this business of measuring teachers. if you judge teachers, hold them accountable for the right things. holding them accountable for this year's tests for means nothing. thousands of teachers, hundreds of thousands of teachers do not teach in the subject areas that are tested. what do you do if the teacher is teaching social studies or art or music? i tell you what. in some states, they are letting those teachers decide do you want to be judged by many

teachers's scores or english teachers scores? i will add one other thing. the other point is when an entire school is judge it introduces another and certainty because so many schools from one year to the next receive a lot of new territories to bring examples, don't speak english, not just talking about latinos but kids from all over the world in big city schools and also receiving kids from other schools that have been shut because they were failing. so suddenly two percentage points and lo and behold we have now put that on watch lists. what do you do to principals when that happens? decapitate them? i am not sure.

i like teachers. there are hundreds of thousands of wonderful teachers in schools in the united states. i do not like to see them lead to, beaten up by ignorant politicians just catering to -- [applause] >> many in arizona know about school choice. no other state in the united states has embraced school choice like arizona. over two decades of school choice policies and in your work, you call the idea of choice the society centrality of markets. i would add competition and choice. really in arizona, put forward as if it is a little innocuous. ..

a better alternative than a bloated bureaucracy which is an efficient and which cannot be controlled and their unions involved in that. what i see in the charter movement and what i think we have all seen is that not only movement toward programs like vouchers which rely on individual choice, a rational act, but also jonathan alluded to literally the running of part charter schools and that

is like, how is there not a bigger conversation that is not just by the outraged left about the problem with that? i think think that is a real issue. i hope we can all assume that a for-profit charter management organization operating exclusively in low income neighborhood that they probably have some intention beyond social mobility and created citizens. i would like to point that all of that is very macro unless you lose live close to a community like this. we see this and lots of schools and lots of ways. one area i am passionate about is the unromantic area of school lunch. if you look at the history of cafeterias and school lunch where i believe education is happening, whatever that school is serving they are

marking their authority that this is healthy food. it's like teaching algebra. we give you these tater tots, right. if you look the way school lunch has been provided over the 60 years it has changed enormously. these has changed enormously. these are federally funded programs with nutritional guidelines. it was often universal school lunch, now it has moved to be a program only for poor kids with all of the stigma that is attached to it. and new york we measure the poverty of a school with a number of free and reduced lunch kids that are there. that also, school lunches offered to the highest private better. you'll see one example there it was a school in the south where coca-cola was allowed to provide the school lunches, in order to have the reduced cost for school lunches they had to have bending machines and schools. the

teachers were encouraged to get the kids to buy as much soda as they could in order to meet the quotas to get the reduce cost school lunch. these are perverse motives here in schools. i in schools. i use that as a concrete example. there's one very concrete way that markets are invading what i would hope would be a different kind of civic space. >> i will add to that if i may. i agree with everything you just that. charter schools usually pretend they're not selective. in many ways they are. even charter schools that claim they accept children, the same economic level as the rest of the public school system, typically they may observe that in economic terms but in terms of social capitalism and parents

they are highly selective. it depends which appearance here about the school first, which parents have the navigation skills, not homeless, not about to be evicted, not fully educated, in other words it is appealing to the savviest parents even in the the savviest parents even in the poor communities. that is one thing. and then once they admit the kids that they finally made a mistake and one of their children, one of the students is causing problems, a difficult child, as all of us teachers in the public school have, at least a few kids like that in every class, those are the ones i remember the longest. the longest. i always like those kids the most. but if they run into kids like that who may be interrupting the scripted proto, military lesson, what do they do? they counsel him out. they said mrs. jones, your little boy, he is a lovely little boy, he drives us crazy but he is a lovely little boy. we think he he will do better in his old public school. so then you compare the test scores.

which school is going to look best? the public of the charter? it is a rigged game. the only other the only other thing i would add to that is that nine tenths of the charter movement is not so much of teaching, it is promotion. they are geniuses at pr, public relations. i'm speaking particularly of the profit-making change, so-called emo's, is that the term? education management something. one of those terms years ago when this movement was just starting, private firms trying to make money off of poor children. i saw a stock perspective for one of these companies, i will not say which one, but a friend of mine on wall street, yes, i actually do, i actually do have a few friends on wall street, a friend of mine showed this to me, she dug it up and in looking for support, financial backing

the firm's founder said, if we can open up the market competition in the public system, the k-12 market is the big enchilada. well, whoever thought that poor children would prove to be so helpful to the appetites of of wall street billionaires, anyway they are good at promotion. typically they renamed their schools so they sound like new england prep schools. they are picking for people. they will change it to an academy instead of a school, it it is now latino leadership academy. there is a chang called nobel schools. poor people think may be tony mars is teaching that