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 american 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, it may be nobel lawyers are sponsoring the school, baloney, they have nothing to do with it. they are very good at that. there is one called up academy. there's one called success academy. that is a big chain in new york city which has had scandals recently. so i don't know, the market

apply to public education, market competition, wall street values brought into public schools, and business partners even for the regular public schools are starting to dictate the curriculum. i do not see why we should trust bankers and brokers on wall street who just brought the world into a worldwide recession, destroyed the economy of the entire western world in any case. i do not see why we should trust them to improve the quality of the education for our children [applause]. >> this is going to be our last structured question and then we will allow you an opportunity. i want to give the out audience

and opportunity, a diverse set of topics to think about. i will have you both talk about language policies were moment. particularly in arizona we have a policy where we segregate our english language learners for four hours. on much the same argument that we have been making for 100 years and that is they can learn english, we also have a circumstance where you write a lot about language policies get co-mingled with with the idea of culture and even patriotism. i think a question many have is, given today's society and the current political environment, why why can't we move toward a healthier approach where we have the ability to learn more than one language? >> i'm going to the fastest because i want to hear natalia. we had to come so far across the country when we grew up, people

were miles apart. here a couple of things i'll say i will say about it. first of all, i would have given anything when i was growing up to be able to earn english and another language at the same time. arizona and much of the southwest is missing a precious opportunity. instead of being the object of satire all over the country now because of prohibition on ethnic studies, we could be a model for the nation, you could be the one stated america that actually comes close to switzerland in developing a entire population that is fluent in two languages. it is a huge missed opportunity. the other thing is just dropping kids cold into an all english environment and blocking out for hours every day to segregate them, into this in my mind, the

most destructive way to introduce them into the english language and anglo-american culture, the mainstream culture. not only because of the language prohibition, but also because the point david just made that it comes along with a cultural prohibition. that is the part that troubles me the most. trying to lock out the tremendous cultural heritage of latino poetry and literature. i just cannot believe it when i saw isabella monday was prohibited here, i just cannot believe that, not just, some of the other just great latino authors, the irony is that all

of the authors are read in the top white suburban schools in the united states because the parents there want their kids to learn early on the world they really live in. so they will be able to navigate this inter- global market that it is today. so for the wealthy kids, yes let them have all of the treasures and for the poor kids, narrow it down to the smallest possible parameters. i will just add one other point to this, it is this, it's not just banning cultural richness, treasure, there are also banning books that have anything to do with critical thinking, that is the worst to me. there is suppression of the

independent voices of young people so they can think for themselves, crushing their morale, they will never be full-scale citizens if they do not learn critical thinking because that is the way you grow up to be an active citizen in a democratic nation, that is the way you grow up to see through the false promises of politicians, dumbo politicians who just rant and rave, otherwise you could be seduced by demagogues, that is the whole point. so it hasn't just been latino cultural treasures but lots of books that have to do with thinking hard about the country we live in. i notice, you know know how i notice?

because they been to my book. two. i swear it has been read by about 2 million white high school kids in america. they are signing and all of the wealthy high schools and ap classes, although so kids will know how privileged they are. millions of americans and adults have read it and it has not brought down the republic yet, the english language i might say is still doing very nicely in america, despite the fact that many cities do encourage latino literature, shakespeare is still selling pretty well. was he afraid of? what are they afraid of? okay do you have a comment on this. >> first of all for mentioning spanish i think that is the underlying assumption here because i'm latino and we still

have such challenges and the issue is pressing. as jonathan brought together both the conversation about structured english immersion and the studies and it really make sense to bring those two together because language and culture are intertwined. this segregation and i mean that word for all of its connotations, the segregation of english language learners away from other kids have everything to do with much more than just learning to speak english. this is about cultural exclusion. i want to point to want strange but perhaps optimistic historical example to conclude, when i started the research on the history bilingual education in california in the southwest, i operated from the assumption that spanish bilingual education this is like one of those lefty, progressive issues that goes along with other kinds of progressive education issues, as it is today, what i discovered in california with that in the

late 50s and early 19 sixties, republicans even conservative republicans were actually onboard with wanting to implement spanish language by cultural and cultural education in schools. ronald reagan got into trouble in california because he wanted to get rid of the english only statutes early on. a guy name max was a buddies with barry goldwater and he was the state superintendent of california education in the 1960s became a glenn back media figure. he ran from republican center for california. in 1964 he is running these big conferences, the education of the mexican-americans, he is sending adversaries to meet with the mexico. and he said every anglo student has as much responsibility to learn spanish as a latino kid has to earn english. that a conservative republican

would not have said that in the mid-19 60s and now we are so far from that, in some ways i like to think that it is a possibility for thinking that things do not have to be the way they are, we do not have to be rooted in these ideological poles where the presidential candidate announcement that an entire cultural link with the group's criminal and racist and should not be predictable. we should push back on that and i think the schools are good place to start. >> [applause]. okay you have given us a lot to listen. you we have two microphones to take questions. let us know know your name. we have 15 minutes left we will start the site. >> hi, my name is leah. i went to public school and i

was in the gifted and talented education for most of my education, i'm in the honors college here at u of a, i was wondering how you feel about gate because i don't think i got into the gate program because i'm gifted, i think i got in because i had parents who read to me when i was little and they have a college education. i think a lot of it is based off of the privilege that we have. i benefited a lot from that, so i don't know how you feel about that. >> first of all i'm sure you are very gifted to don't sell yourself short. you are realizing some of the structural issues that contribute to the place of privilege that you are able to

tame. i think the issue for me is not so much getting rid of programs on accelerated tracks or enrichment opportunities, but not closing the door especially so early for so many children to be blocked out of them. that is really the problem. of course we should have more enrichment and gifted and talented programs but we should not make it so hard to get him best on a test you take when you are for that means essentially nothing and is dictated largely by your parent's ability to sign you up for it or have read you when you were little. >> or send you to an expensive preschool. >> i agree with you completely on that. the only thing i would add is this, if we are to have gifted and talented programs that have got to be much broader, in a way i wish we could have the gifted and i wish every classroom was the gifted and talented classroom. all i would say to any of you who do believe in inclusiveness and think it's a good value in america, look at a school that appears to be racially mixed and integrated school, there are some in america and then look at

the gifted and talented. you will will not find too many latino, african-american kids there, it is always heavily white, same with ap courses in the high school. in those schools that look racially mixed on paper, the naacp calls this in school segregation. it is really embarrassing. i know lots lots of white kids who get into those classes i will tell me honestly, they said i i felt embarrassed. i wondered where all the black kids were. so if we are going to have that type of program i say don't do it by purely test scores, don't start testing for admissions to those programs anytime early in their school career, and also don't test them at all until you provide all low income children with the same terrific,

marvelous pre-k that rich kids are getting otherwise it is worthless. >> thank you, appreciate the question. >> i think we recognize that our public schools have big problems, the question for me would be what steps should we be taking to integrate our schools, make cheating a respective, at active profession and i think in me the most important thing, how do we also reduce class size? >> i would just are by saying i think money is one possible solution. [laughter] [applause]. i say this because i have wealthy friends in new york, some of them still like me. they invite me to dinner parties , they're always nervous because they are afraid i might

ruin the party but i'm usually polite. exhibit for desserts. at some point they will ask me what is happening to those kids in the south bronx? i will say 30 in a class, day four and a class kids who really need help most, i walked into a high school in los angeles, 40 kids in 11 grade history class. more kids than there were chairs in the room. i tell that to my friends and these are people whose kids go to either they go to the top suburban school like manhattan outside a new york work class-size is probably 18, or if the kids are old enough and they send them off to new england prep schools like andover, which is $60000 per year, average class size of andover and they

will look at me at the dinner party and say jonathan, can you you really buy your way to better education? and i say can you really solve the achievement problem for those children by throwing money at it? i always say yes, that is the best way, throw it. drop it from a helicopter, give it to me i will bring it myself. i do not know better way to do not know better way to take a class of 34 children and put it into a class of 17. they will say well a great teacher ought to be able to, a good teacher to be able to handle any size class. i will say there are a few geniuses who could probably pull it off. teacher who is pretty good with 34 is going to be spectacular with 17. >> i also want to add to that. i

come from higher education i think there's there's something to be said for teacher education and for the history and future of the schools, it is no secret that all of these statistics that lower qualified students go into education professions, i think that has to do with the money problem, they are not in ties to buy big salaries but it also has to do with the structure of higher education. schools of education have moved farther away from the more prestigious disciplines in the last decade. so what does that mean, if you're you're serious about history you go and think about you don't go to be a history teacher, we need both of those things, we do not need both of the division and a real looking down the nose from the disciplines. i've seen it from both sides for people who study education. i think that attributes a lot as well. >> thank you. great question. [applause].

>> speaking of throwing money at problems, i am from washington state and the gates family has a huge influence in terms of human money and expecting certain results. do you have any comments about things, particularly about the gates foundation and its impact on education not only in my statement across the country? >> i will make a very brief statement about it, will probably never get a great from the gates foundation because i oppose almost everything they have been doing for the past ten years. first of all, the idea that private money can solve the problem is very dangerous to begin with. ultimately that is charity. charity is a lovely thing, i never turn it down, but charity is not a substitute for systematic justice and equality. [applause]. it is unreliable, charity is

inherently promiscuous, this decade might be low-income children in predominantly black latino school the next decade it could be turtles on an island of latin america. that is one problem. the second thing is, gates has been one of the primary forces in advancing the entire test and accountability agenda. it has place much much emphasis on that instead of placing its emphasis. see what they doing their shifting, not just gates but the whole neo-, liberal conservative, liberal conservative group that has brought us where we are today instead of talking about the quality and input into our

schools, that is to say enough teachers with small classes, well-paid teachers so we are getting the top caliber college graduates. beautiful infrastructure and terrific pre-k. instead of creating equality and put their turning their back on that and just saying, we demand equality of outputs. anybody in the manufacturing industry knows that is impossible. it's amazing. so gates does not put a huge amount of emphasis on output and very little on input. i've never heard them speaking i've never heard bill and melissa gates in public saying it is a crime that after all of these years we still have an education funding system in america that guarantees that will never have an honest a meritocracy. there will