6:00 p.m. from their books. thanks so much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] ..

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> so good to see you. >> yeah, yeah. did you get my note? >> i thought i'd come and surprise you. [laughter] >> i missed the talk because i was at lunch until 3:30, but i made it over for your q&a. you looked very, very pundit-like. >> [inaudible] >> no worries. [laughter] >> you brought your son along to do a performance? >> no, no. he actually attends school here. >> he's in collegesome. >> he's in college. >> that's insane. >> he's a junior. >> you're old. [laughter] >> thanks, man. i am, man. no, so my kid's here, he's on

the first -- [inaudible] scholarship, so he's a poet, and he's performing tonight as part of the first wave performance. >> i would be so proud. i my kid just got on a pony for the first time. [laughter] >> your kids, i know, are going be to be awesome. >> [inaudible] >> that's not bad. measure. [laughter] >> that's all right. >> you staying in? >> leaving tomorrow. aye been here since, like, dawn yesterday. this is my last event tonight. >> are they just working you -- [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] >> sounded great up on stage. looked good too. [laughter] >> we try. you look great yourself. >> thanks. >> yeah, yeah, yeah. >> stick around longer than this? >> i'm going to do this, and then we're going to go to, i think, meet up for dinner and then do the thing. >> all right.

>> mom, mom. come. can you take a picture of this? this is me and my classmate from cal. [inaudible conversations] >> nice to meet you. [inaudible conversations] >> oh, oh, okay. well, take it with that one, and then we can wait for that to warm up. yeah, this is yours. >> mine -- >> yours? cool. >> this is mine. [inaudible conversations] >> you got it, mom? >> yes, of course. okay, one more. okay. >> we're both on c-span. >> that's crazy. here, one more. one more. [inaudible conversations]

>> mom, your finger's in the way. there you go. >> one more. >> okay. >> one more just to make sure. [laughter] will you go. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> that was a good panel, you and scott and -- [inaudible] >> it was fun. oh, you got to see that too? >> i saw the picture. he came down to -- [inaudible] >> you had to go and do a pulitzer thing, right? >> well, i had to cover "the new york times" -- >> oh, yeah, yeah. next time, man. we have to do some cool, like, berkeley, you know -- >> oh, yeah -- >> some berkeley, like, american -- >> anytime. >> -- folks who are from the '90s. >> we're that generation. nostalgia event. [laughter]

how long is the tour? >> i've got three more weeks. >> [inaudible] >> my kid's been kind of annoyed with me. >> oh, yeah? [laughter] [inaudible conversations] >> thanks, jess. keep on representing. talk care. >> you too. >> yes. hi. >> i'm -- [inaudible] >> hi -- [inaudible] >> okay. can i tell you what i want? >> can i put it over here?

>> yeah. to -- from -- what's your name? >> jeff. >> [inaudible] >> thank you. have a good day. >> take care. >> hi. >> hi, how are you? >> good, how are you? >> i'm fine, thanks. [inaudible conversations] >> thank you so much for -- [inaudible] >> it's where we're at. [laughter] keep on doing it. take care. >> hi. >> hey, how you doing? >> good. [inaudible] run a korean restaurant on the other side of the capitol. thanks for your work. >> thank you, thank you. awesome. where?

>> right on the other side, it's called -- [inaudible] >> yeah? okay. >> right off the strip. >> [inaudible] >> i get a photo? >> yeah, for sure. >> and booktv on c-span2 is live from madison for the annual wisconsin book festival. we'll be back with more in just a few minutes. for a complete schedule of author events, visit booktv.org, follow us on twitter @booktv and on facebook, facebook.com/booktv. >> southeast asian-americans -- [inaudible] within the asian -- >> well, now on booktv we want to introduce you to university of wisconsin professor john diamond. professor diamond, what do you do up here at the university? >> guest: i'm a professor in educational leadership. 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: well, actually, my mother is an egg professor. she started -- an education professor. i really just became interested in trying to understand inequalities in education because i was a sociologist by training. in my doctoral work, i studied sociology and really wanted to understand inequality in schools, places where inequalities manifest itself, but it's also a place where inequality sort of gets reproduced, so i wanted to understand the dynamics of those processes. >> host: well, that leads us into your book. despite the best intentions, how racial inequalities thrive in good schools. you and amanda lewis who is whom? >> guest: a colleague i started working with probably 15 years ago. she's at the university of

illinois-chicago. >> host: and they are the co-authors of this book. professor diamond, you say it all started with a phone call. >> guest: yeah. it all started with a phone call. i had been engaged with working with schools that were trying to address racial achievement inequalities, particularly the achievement of black and latino students compared to their white counterparts, and the principal from the school called up and said i'm having this struggle. i've been working in this school for a long time, i'm trying to understand why these inequalities persist, and can you come talk to try to understand what's going on with this achievement gap that we see in our school. why is it that, you know, black and latino kids are achieving at lower levels than their white counterparts. >> host: you talk about this school, the principal is maurice weber and metro midwest is what you're saying. >> guest: right. >> host: how much of that is made up, can you tell us -- is this a real school? >> guest: it's a real school, a

real sub you suburban context ts predominantly middle class and a praise that's -- place that's known for its progressive-liberal ethos. >> host: so riverview, made up, metro midwest, is it in the midwest? >> guest: it is in the midwest. those are all pseudonyms for real names, people, places. >> host: okay. what is it about this school that attracted you to write about it? >> guest: you know, the it's a really fascinating place because it's been 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 and latino families as well as the white families. most folks, again, they espouse this eagle atarian e not -- egalitarian ethos. and so the idea that this is a really progressive community, this is a community that beliefs in racial equality a, that's been stably integrated for some time and where the teachers are

high quality, the resources abun adapt, we really wanted to understand what's going on here that there are racial inequalities in a place like this. >> host: what are some of the inequalities -- and when you talk about inequality, you're talking about statistical inequalities when you look at the stats. >> guest: right. >> host: what were you finding? >> guest: we were finding, for example, when we looked at grades, black and latino students had lower grades on average. they weren't doing as well on tests, so the proficiency level on the tests they were taking, 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 as opposed to four-year colleges. all 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, planters -- 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 that talks about race and what it means and trying to understand it, and one of the first things that we wanted to understand is this idea of oppositional culture. there's this idea that black and latino students are somehow uninvested in school, uninvested in education and that their peers criticize them for behaving in i ways that will lead to academic success, this acting white hypothesis you may have heard from everyone from an no wolingses -- anthropologists

to president obama talking about education. and we found that really wasn't an explanation that carried much weight. what we found, for example, was that there was no more negative peer pressure for black students than for white students, that black students were more pro-school than their white counterparts, and we found this out through interviewing and also through the survey we conducted in 14 other school districts. what we found was black students were more pro-cool than their white counter-- pro-school than their white counterparts. we wanted to debunk that idea, and we found the evidence really to support the idea this isn't what's going on in the context of our school in riverview and that there were other things that were manifesting themselves. >> host: such as? >> guest: we have a lot of discussion about the racial achievement gap, but what winds up happening is people don't really engage with the idea of race itself, right? what does race actually mean? people will often throw it into

a regression equation, but they don't unpack the meaning and the social meaning of race. so if you think about race, you really have to look historically as what race has been used for. race emerges at a time when you have colonization happening, slavery happening, all these inequalities, you have 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 intelligence as white students and that they're likely to be violet or misbehave. and so -- violent or misbehave. so one of the things that manifests itself in the contemporary context based on the historic context is this idea of the criminalization of black and latino bodies and the lack of intelligence people perceive. and these were readily apparent in the school context. again, line i said -- like i

said before, we interviewed blacks, whites and latinos, 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, for example, in the hallways in the school 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 pass. i walk through the halls freely. and white students would say but i know my black friends can never do that, right? there's this process of hypersurveillance, 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 profile anything 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 the9 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 students if they needed a pass, they'd say, oh, no, i never get stopped. black students would always ask for the pass. not only were black students talking about this, white students, white administrators and others in the community were talking about how discipline was not meted out fairly or equally among students. and we had similar pattern simir patterns that we saw in class rooms with regard to how students were disciplined and how they were expected to achieve -- >> host: professor diamond, what does that have to do with test scores or academic achievement? >> guest: so, you know, when students come to school, they're looking for a number of things, right? particularly adolescents.

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 in that context. when they're being hyper-surveilled, when they're being questioned about if they belong, 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 wore clothes 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 have the best intentions, and if they wore clothes associated 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 a to deny a part of yourself, that actually may lead you to feel like you're

not necessarily a part of the environment. >> host: thus, your test scores are lower? your academic achievement is lower? >> guest: i think what winds up happening is if you feel scrutinized and you feel less likely to be embraced as a part of the environment, that can happen. but 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 teachers' time and attention, they provide more or less access to rigorous instructional, rigorous curriculum, and they provide another set of messages about who's capable in the school context and who's not. one example is it sort of became embedded in the school environment is that the stool was about 45% white and about

41% african-american, about 8.5% latino. but the honors level track and the ap level tracks, the privileged context of the school, were 80 and 90% white, right? so less than 50% white students, but these classes that are the highest us in the school were -- status in the school were predominantly white. when you come into the school, the students mingle in the hallways, you see them talking to each other, they go to classes, and they go separate ways. and be you can walk down the hall and see the difference between a regular class and an honors and advanced placement class where mostly white students find themselves. >> host: what was one other finding that you, at riverview? >> guest: ing 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 that 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, the monopolizing of the most privileged, valued educational context and exclusion of other people from those contexts. so as the school and administration tried to address these disparities in class placement, they ran into roadblocks at every step. 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 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 and regular students, there was what we call internal white flight where white parents would encourage their students to migrate to classes that were predominantly white. some students wanted to study african-american history, and their parents would tier them into russian or middle eastern history because they knew these were white spaces, essentially. so some of those dynamics of opportunity hoarding were 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 also in how they were treated in the discipline process. and be many times the parents with more resources, what we call sort of the cultural capital and the 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 x it was in their hands, but it wasn't really there, 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 put it down as possession, it's not going to happen. these were some of the dynamics that occurred across the academic context but also in the disciplinary domain that led to advantage and disadvantage in the school. >> host: so despite the best intentions, what improvements did you suggest to retiring principal maurice webersome. >> guest: well, one of the things that we wanted to get across is that it's not so much that people intend to do bad things. teachers don't go into education because they want to create an achievement gap, because they want some students to do well and others not to. but they do live in a society

where race permeates everything about the society, right? where the inea qualities -- unequalities persist across a number of domains, and schools are no different. this is not necessarily by the old-fashioned racism where you have people organizing in the streets in ways that reproduce racial inequality, but the sort of day-to-day dynamics that people engage in when they're talking to someone, what they expect of them and how that sort of manifests itself almost at a subconscious level where people act on their racial beliefs even when they don't intend to. and those are some of the mechanisms that led to performance expectations for black and latino students being lore, led to discipline referrals for black and latino students being higher and the cumulative impact over time shaped the context of the school. >> host: so teachers are really on the front line again here. >> guest: i think they are. i think teachers are, in part, on the front line.

and particularly given the fact that we're focused on what's happening inside the school, and, you know, for the society as a whole, there are a lot of things we could do outside of schools to make a difference. we could create family policies and social safety nets that would mean families weren't struggling as much. but in the context of riverview where we have mostly middle income families, this racial dynamic seems to be a powerful and important one. and teachers are on the front lines to some extent as are administrators in the fact that they have to be able to deal with these processes of opportunity hoarding. they have to be able to figure out politically how to respond to the powerful parents in the community who are pushing for, essentially, the monopolization of resources for their own kids and be able to push against that in a way that suggests that, you know, this school is for all the students who attend, not just for your kids and, you know, sort of move away from the sort of zero sum game sort of idea that some parents bring to the educational process. >> in your book despite the best

intentions, did you find recommendations for students as well? >> guest: ing well, i think the recommendations were more likely to be focused on the adults in the context of the school. for students i think the big thing that they need to do is to recognize that some of these dynamics play out, right? when you're in an environment that doesn't value your presence or when you're in an environment that sort of expects less of you, you have to be sort of socialized to understand that discrimination will exist and to build on historical patterns of how african-americans and latinos have struggled to make those environments work for them despite the discrimination. right? and so there's a rich history of people fighting for educational access, of the civil rights movement, of the creation of schools in the south for african-americans, of struggles for latinos to access education and particularly in the southwest and in california. and that history is very helpful for young people to be able to recognize that while

discrimination exists, i can overcome it. it's called race-related socialization, the kind of socialization that families can engage in and the kind of education that schools can engage in that teaches people even though they may face discrimination and low expectations, those things can be overcome and have been. >> host: professor diamond, are there lessons that you learned in your view that you can take to other schools, all-white schools, all-black schools, private schools, etc. >> guest: yeah. i mean, so that's really the next step in this work. i'm working with a number of schools in madison now and using the the book itself as, actually, a common read more teachers. so i've met with the first and is second-year teachers in madison quite this year. last year -- twice this year. last year i met with all of the principals from the school district four times to talk about race and inequality. i'm working at a particular k-5 school in this madison -- in madison now where we're doing a set of professional development opportunities around race and ine -- inequality where we try

to impact what does race mean and how can we engage in practices that can make a difference about the disparities that we see in the context of our schools. so right now we're move prosecution the book itself to use the book for helping schools address the inequalities that they see. and i'm excited about that work. there's been a lot of investment from people in k-12 environments to really see the book as an opportunity to engage around those kinds of efforts. >> host: where did you grow up, and what was your k-12 environment like? >> guest: i grew up in lansing, michigan, near michigan state university, and my k-12 experience was one that was, you know, partly about being on the front lines or just behind the front lines of integrating schools in this town. so i dealt with some racial discrimination, i dealt with situations where i wasn't allowed to go to certain places. i faced discrimination in my schooling context, and there

were racial dynamics that were happening in the context of my schools. but i also hit the sweet spot in some sense in terms of the integration of my high school where we had a nice mix of students from many different backgrounds, and it was a rich environment for understanding how we can get along with each other. we had folks who were conservative and liberal, we fad fad -- we had folks who were black, white, latino, christian, jewish, muslim, and we were all in the same environment. and i think that was a rich experience. so one of the goals of "despite the best intentions" is to really think about, you know, in these environments what's working well but also what's not working and what can we do to make those environments stable and productive places for young people to sort of learn how to participate in a democratic society with people who don't always look like them. >> host: "despite the best intentions: how racial inequality thrives in good schools." amanda lewis of the university of illinois-chicago and john diamonof