and arnie duncan is here with us from chicago, illinois.rack obama. the former, having lost her father and two uncles to gun violence. arianna, thank you for talking to us. this is personal for you. tell us the message you bring from chicago. >> the message that i bring is, you are not alone. because we have felt that we were along for so long. now finally the kids from florida have given us the leverage to be able to come out here and speak and to give our experience. and they listen. we no longer feel alone. we feel as though we have family who have felt the same way as we have. it's very -- it's very special to know that people who come from different worlds feel the same as you. >> mr. secretary, talk about what it took to get these kids here from chicago, first of all, and how it feels, you never know what it's going to take to get everyone's attention. it turns out it took parkland, florida. >> this has been a really emotional day, brian, it brought tears to my eyes. we've felt pain in chicago for a long time, honestly. we have 500 te

destroy children's learning so we always lay out the math -- the myth first if it is donald trump or arnie duncan members of both political parties remember. for bill gates but then we say reality check there is an easy hypothesis to test look at the space that don't allow teachers to unionize how are they doing on your standard test and look at the ones that are in canada every teacher is in a union and they do better on those international tests that we are skeptical of but that is the preferred metric so we set out to undo the myth and the other motivation with this new yorker article when arnie dogan was first secretary of arctic asian mom -- of education now is the superintendent of chicago public schools but the piece begins by saying the national conversation of education reform there are two camps one is revolutionaries that want charters and vouchers and an end to the teachers unions then the liberal traditionalist who love the education just as they are we are not neither camp. where are we? so we said let's set out to set the record straight it is indefensible place like chicago we don

i am arnie duncan and i'm going to do some quick context of the work we are doing and why. we are always very real. sometimes a little raw. it is so important that we are honest and authentic. context for chicago and why i do this work when i lived in chicago public schools might hardest part of the job was the number of kids that were shot and killed during the 7 and a half years we averaged one child killed every two weeks. going to funerals in their homes and going to schools where there is an empty chair and trying to make sense of this was the hardest part of my job. in hindsight i felt it was rock-bottom and could not get worse. in the seven years my family and i were in d.c. things got worse. and fact the past year chicago public schools, september through june that 59 kids killed. more than one every two weeks killed. last year in chicago there were 650 homicides. almost 3000 people shot. something i accessed called the clear rate that is the percent of crimes against solved. in chicago if you kill someone that has about 26 percent clear rate. so 74 literally get aw

dramatic disparities in suspensions that are profoundly troubling, that secretary of education arnie duncan blamed teachers for. the teachers aren't responsible. they are baked into the americans because of slavery and awful policies. when i see the department of education telling school districts across the country, you have to hold african-american students to lower standards, i see institutional racism there. but it's a hard case to articulate. i think they've been intimidated the same way teachers have been. >> great. any other thoughts from the panel on that? we've got time for one more. yes, sir. >> thanks. thank you so much for your presentations. you high lighted some of the largest urban districts. i was wondering if you think we have a handle on what's happening in the other 16,000 rural suburban small town communities in terms of school discipline, first of all? and then second of all there are a lot of states at the community level that long before the 2014 federal guidance limited exclusionary discipline in places like california and colorado. and i guess my question is, do you