[APPLAUSE]
NOLIWE ROOKS: Hey, hey.
There are some seats up here.
Oh, come on, come on,
come on, come on, come on.
You're holding up
the whole thing now.
Might as well come on, sit down.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
NOLIWE ROOKS: All right.
So actually, what I'm going
to do is start with a film.
And I'm going to
start with a film.
It's a short film.
It's like seven, eight minutes.
It's a mini-documentary.
I'm going to start with this
because the work that I do
on this topic really is meant to
be in the service of folks who
are experiencing this
in ways that I don't.
And so what I want to
start with, instead
of me interpreting
or explaining what's
at stake with
these schools, is I
want to start with a resident
of Chicago, a grandmother, who
in a short documentary
can sketch out for you the
why and how that it matters.
And then I'm going
to talk to you
a little bit about where
the project came from
and just one of the chapters.
We're going to be hit it and
quit it and out in an hour.
So while that may
sound like a lot,
it's really not going to be.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- The critical conversation
meeting about Betsy DeVos.
My name is Irene Robertson.
I'm a grandma of
18 grandchildren
and a mother of six.
I have been in
Chicago all my life.
I lived here all my life.
This was my first apartment
when I moved by myself
with my children.
And school was not
just a learning center
for the children.
It had resources
for the parents.
We cooked there.
We had holiday meals there with
the children and the parents.
We had GED classes in our
schools for the parents.
I used to walk my grandbabies
to school every day
as I walk my children
to the same school
until everyone of
them graduated.
But I still didn't
the leave the school.
I was still here because
that's where my heart was.
I was a young parent
when I moved here.
And the teachers here helped me.
They educated me more than
what I was educated on.
They nurtured me
when I needed it
because I was a single
mom with five children.
Anthony Overton
was a good school.
And it had always been supported
for the community and children
and parents until the sabotage
that started coming here.
By the time my children
started having children
and my grandchildren
started coming here,
it was already in plan to
sabotage it, to starve it,
and to close it.
So when you starve the
school by taking resources,
by taking the maintenance work,
by taking teachers and taking
programs out of
the school, you're
starving that school to
the point where there's
nothing there for the
children to receive,
because this school
is underutilized now.
And this school is
in poor condition--
that means the upkeep.
It's in poor condition.
And the tents go over it.
It's failing.
So they used all three
reasons to close up a school.
We protest.
We went to the alderman.
We went to board meetings.
We did everything that
a parent and her power--
any power can do.
The resistance was so--
no one wanted to
hear about keeping
Anthony Overton open or none
of the rest of the schools.
Who called grandma?
Hey, grandbaby.
Just [? cooked this ?]
up, my grandbaby.
We're fighting.
We're trying to fight
for the schools.
This is one of the Overton
babies, [INAUDIBLE]..
- I see you open Dyett up.
- Yeah, we open Dyett.
All the funding was taken
from our neighborhood school
and sucked right into
charter schools, which
half of our children
can't go to,
which is not
parent-friendly, which
is not what the parents wanted.
- Know what they
did to Overton now?
- What?
- Made a workout--
- They made it to a workout.
These people own it.
They own a gym where
they own the whole thing.
But they made the gym to
a workout [? location. ?]
- Really?
And it's not for the public.
I don't think I
can walk over here.
Though, you know why, they're
going to pay for that.
They closed it down
and they sold it.
- Oh, they sold it?
- They sold it.
When they called
Anthony Overton and put
half of the children in
Mollison and half in Bert.
They sold it.
- Damn.
- So that don't
mean that we lost.
That mean we're going to get
a bigger and better school,
right?
- Right.
- And we're going to
design it even better.
I know right now looking
like we ain't going to win,
but we're going to win.
We're going to get
those schools back.
- Get our school back.
- That's right, my king.
You know it too, right.
As long as grandmama's
got breath in her,
I'm going to continue to fight.
And people going to come, and
more people are going to come.
And the more that come,
guess what's going to happen?
We're going to get what
was stolen from us, OK?
I love y'all.
I have to go.
Give me a hug.
I love y'all.
There's a silent-- well,
I won't say silent--
invisible way that
they use hate crimes.
When they say privatizing,
when they say closing schools,
they use it as we're
going to close to improve.
But no, you're not.
Privatizing was the death
of our neighborhood school.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The pain is here.
But I know can't stop
because I have to fight.
I guess I hurt in more than way
because I hurt for my people.
The history of my
people, I hurt for.
And I hurt for my
grandchildren and children,
who don't have a chance
of getting an opportunity.
As a parent, we're supposed
to protect our children.
My grandbaby, Mikey.
After all those, oh, he
looked at me one day.
And he told me he
had got so upset.
He told me, you lied
to me, grandmama.
You told me that we were
going to get our school back.
And I hate going to Mollison.
Do you know how
that made me feel?
Because I couldn't protect him.
When the school closed, our
children faulted themselves.
They felt like
they was too dumb.
Near him in time I have two
children you're not dumb,
you're smart.
It wasn't your fault.
That's why I call
everybody kings and queens.
My young kids, I call them that.
When you take away their
self-esteem and degrade them,
and it's just over and over and
over, when is it going to stop?
When they're closing the school,
what they're really saying is,
we don't want your child
to have an education.
We don't want you
in the community.
And we can take these schools.
And nothing you can do about it.
That's what they're
really saying.
Do we care if your child
is going to be in danger?
No.
Only thing we care
about is making money.
Even if it's off the
back of your children.
And this country is
responsible for it.
- (SINGING)
Education is a right.
This is why we have to fight.
If we don't stand
for something, we're
going to fall for anything.
We need to raise our voice.
Lift up, lift up,
lift your voice.
Education is a right.
This is why we have to fight.
Education is a right.
This is why we have to fight.
Education is a right.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
NOLIWE ROOKS: All
right, so as I told you,
part of the reason that I
wanted to start with it is it
matters what voices
we bring in the room.
And this work, more than
other work that I've done,
really is about a
pressing social issue
that people need help with.
But I also start
with that because one
of the narratives that I
ended up speaking back to
in writing this
book was about how
people would say that
Black communities don't
care about education.
When I was working
on this, there
was a scholar named
Jeff Ogbar who
was saying that
Black kids thought
that getting a good
education was acting White.
And this supposed
lack of interest
on the part of Black
communities-- supposed.
This is a lovely film,
but you can multiply her
in every community
by exponentially.
The book that I
did, although I'm
going to talk about
the present today,
I went back to the 1890s.
And I can tell you
there has never
been a period in
American history
when poor folks
and people of color
weren't willing to do whatever
it would take to make sure
that their babies got educated.
Never.
And so it is almost a hate
crime, as the woman in here
says, that you can
take what we know
to be true and turn it
inside-out as a way to demolish
communities and make a profit.
And so a lot of what I talk
about in the book in that eight
minutes-- really, she
did it all for me.
All of the issues,
many of the issues,
she's just in the present.
And again, I started
a little early.
I started a lot earlier.
But what it looks like, what it
feels like, and why it matters,
I think, is there.
But I also wanted
to start with that
because the beginning
of this project
started in a college classroom.
I was at Princeton working
on a multi-year project
partnership with the
Trenton Public Schools.
For a lot of the kids who
were in this freshman seminar,
all students are
required to take one.
And they're supposed
to be basically engaged
research and learning.
You have to do something
with the students.
And everybody's taking one.
And so this one was about
school and urban education.
Bunch of freshmen, most
of whom had never been
in an urban school district.
If they went to public
schools, their schools
were high-performing.
They had not been in
the kinds of schools
like that exist in this
Chicago neighborhood.
And they certainly
hadn't been in schools
like Trenton, New Jersey.
And one of the things that
made the class popular was--
you all can come up front.
Come on, come on, come on.
One of the things that
made the class popular
is in the culture at the time.
In 2009, all of
this stuff started
happening that led
people to believe
that they had some real
understanding of what's going
on in urban school districts.
So I just listed
a couple of them.
There's this film Waiting for
Superman that came out in 2009.
It is a story about how horrible
it is in urban communities
that public schools
are doing so poorly.
And as a result, we
need to privatize them.
We need charter schools.
Basically, just a strip-down
what the story is about.
It's really melodramatic.
Any folks who do film, if
you pull that film apart,
imitation of life
got nothing on it.
It is melodrama of
the highest order.
But it led people to
believe I'm seeing
into a community, a way
of life, a set of issues,
that I knew nothing about.
At the same time, Barack Obama
announced a new federal program
called Race to the Top, which
basically incentivized states
to take on a lot of
these privatized actions.
It made what had been something
that folks were talking
about into federal policy.
So all of a sudden, closing
underperforming schools,
opening charter schools,
hiring alternatively
certified teaching corps, like
Teach for America teachers,
firing long-term teachers
that were in these districts,
this became a part
of federal policy.
But it was also, much
like Waiting for Superman,
presented as a help.
So people in these
communities are watching
schools be dismantled,
are watching
their realities be narrated.
It's becoming this big,
huge cultural moment.
And yet their voices
were not the ones that
were leading the conversation.
They're coming from the outside
politicians and the arts.
Then Mark Zuckerberg in 2009--
really this was the year--
gave $100 million to the
Newark Public Schools.
He announced it on the
Oprah Winfrey Show.
Cory Booker-- he's a
senator now, at the time
he's the mayor of
Newark-- was there.
And there was like
this big thing.
We're going to fix it.
We have five years,
$100 million,
everything we need to
fix the problems that
are in struggling urban areas.
And all of the
fixes were exactly
like what you saw in Waiting for
Superman and Race to the Top.
We needed newer, different
kinds of teachers.
We needed more charter schools.
We needed more
virtual education.
We needed less regulation
for privatized schools--
all of it.
And then on the
campus of Princeton,
a group called Students
for Ed Reform was founded.
It was two freshmen.
They'd never been in any
of these kinds of community
schools.
Their fathers were hedge
funders, literally.
I'm saying it with a
little sneer in my voice,
but this is a literal
recitation of what happened.
Their hedge funder
fathers were like, well,
we hear that there's this big
business going on in ed reform.
There's charter schools.
You should do
something with that.
You should get it on
the front page of that.
They took a year off from school
after having raised $40 million
as freshmen with
zero experience.
The year before,
they didn't even
know that troubled
schools existed.
And yet, it becomes
this real opportunity.
And so everybody on campus is
kind of like, what about me.
Maybe, I can get a hedge funder.
And the last thing
is, in this class,
we talked about all of these
things as the backdrop.
But we talked about what
are called 90/90/90 schools.
90/90/90 schools
are the sweet spot
for charter school
organizations,
for charter management
organizations.
They're 90% below federally set
poverty levels, 90% of color.
And 90% are not
meeting benchmarks,
educational benchmarks.
That people were
talking about openly,
writing to each other about
that's the sweet spot.
That's what we need to open.
And between these
bright-eyed children,
who were wonderful--
they were wonderful,
it was a great class, it
was wonderful-- it went on
for three years.
They didn't stick with
it for three years,
but the project
and the partnership
lasted for three years.
And they got it started.
But one of the things
that stuck in my mind
from teaching the
class was the extent
to which I had never
noticed that all of this
really depended on
really high levels
of racial and economic
segregation in order to work.
This is a business model
that can't function
in the absence of
really high levels
of racial and
economic segregation.
And I started to wonder if
perhaps one of the reason we
have such a hard time addressing
segregation in the country
is that there's money
to be made from it.
And I recognized that I
didn't know the answer,
that I didn't know enough.
And so this book
really is my attempt
to answer that question
that came out of this class.
So I'm going to just actually
read to you because otherwise
I'll talk too long.
But this is from one portion,
one half of one chapter,
to give you a sense.
In 2011, a Cuban immigrant
named Hamlet Garcia and his wife
Olesia enrolled their
five-year-old daughter,
Fiorella, in a largely
White and affluent school
in the suburbs of Montgomery
County, Pennsylvania.
Before the move, the child
attended a lower performing
school in Philadelphia.
The couple were having
marital problems
that became severe enough
for Alicia to move out
of their Philadelphia home and
take their daughter with her
to her father's house.
In March of 2012, the couple
reconciled and moved back
to Philadelphia, though the
kindergartner finished the year
at the suburban school.
A month later, the
school district
contacted the couple to
dispute their residency.
And that August, they were
told they were facing arrest.
The criminal complaints
sworn out against them
said that the Garcias
stole $10,000, which
was the per pupil cost of one
year at the Montgomery County
public school their
daughter had attended.
The dollar amount made
the charge a felony,
with a potential prison
sentence of seven years.
Rather than face the
ordeal of a trial
and the possibility
of conviction,
the couple accepted
a plea bargain
and agreed to pay the
district close to $11,000,
as well as $70,000
in legal fees.
This is just one example of
the extent to which education
is not only seen as
a valuable commodity
because it promises social
mobility and lucrative
employment--
it's also a possession
with a specific dollar
figure attached,
owned by the wealthy
and all too often denied
to those who are not.
For that reason, cases of
so-called educational theft,
like that of the Garcia family,
exemplify the economic impact
of segregation on
communities seeking
to escape apartheid education.
Just as underperforming, highly
racially, and economically
segregated urban
schools constitute
a lucrative opportunity
for some in business
to educate students
impacted by poverty,
high-performing schools
in wealthy areas
are a valuable asset
they feel is worth
protecting with incarceration,
if it comes to that.
This is how it came to
be that between 2012
and 2016 parents in Connecticut,
Kentucky, Pennsylvania,
and Missouri were all
arrested and stood trial
for stealing education.
This particular phenomena is now
so common that on either coast,
and in many places in
between, school districts
have begun to hire special
investigators to follow,
photograph, and film children
as they go from home to school
and back again.
This surveillance
helps school officials
determine if all the students
who show up day after day
are legally permitted to attend.
The desire to keep poor
and often non-White
children out of
wealthy schoolhouses
has even spawned a new business.
Districts in Florida,
Pennsylvania, California,
and New Jersey that don't
want to spend the money
to hire full-time
investigators have
contracted with companies
promising lower cost ways
of verifying student addresses.
With names like
verifyresidence.com,
such companies, according
to one's website,
provide the latest in
covert video technology
and digital
photographic equipment
to photograph, videotape,
and document children
going from their
house to school.
For school districts
willing to invest even more,
other companies offer
a rewards program,
giving anonymous tipsters
$250 checks for reporting
out-of-district students.
The consequences for parents
and students caught in this web
are devastating, and can
include tens of thousands
of dollars in fees, jail time,
and felony convictions that
preclude them from voting and
gaining future employment.
This is what happened
in the spring of 2012
when a judge in Connecticut
sentenced a Black mother, Tanya
McDowell, to 12 years in
prison for stealing education
for her kindergarten-age son.
Education officials
in Connecticut
said that her son
should have enrolled
in the City of Bridgeport, not
the wealthy town of Norwalk.
McDowell and her son at
the time were homeless
when she was arrested
for educational theft.
They split their time
between a homeless shelter
in Norwalk, the home of her
babysitter, Ana Marques,
in Norwalk.
And sometimes, if there
was no room elsewhere,
in the backseat of her minivan.
In order to even enroll
her son in school,
she used her
babysitter's address,
which was in a public
housing complex in Norwalk.
When school officials discovered
that the kindergartner was
not what they considered a
legal resident of Norwalk,
they could have
simply asked McDowell
to remove him from school.
That's what they
had done with the 20
or so other students found
to have been illegally
enrolled that year.
In this case, however,
officials decided
to prosecute this Black, single,
homeless parent on first degree
larceny charges that
carried a maximum sentence
of up to 20 years in prison.
School district officials
admitted that they treated her
far more harshly than they ever
had anyone else because they
wanted to make an
example of her.
They said they didn't
want their community
to be seen as welcoming to
other parents who might want
to provide their children with
an education to which they were
not entitled.
In that regard, Bridgeport
is a microcosm of many cities
where the migration
of wealthy Whites
and their tax dollars
to the suburbs
has had devastating consequences
for the people left behind.
As such, this case, makes clear
the lengths to which some will
go to make sure the
drawbridge allowing access
to their schools is
quickly and securely
pulled up behind them
after they are safely
ensconced on the other side.
In relation to urban
education, school reform,
and the difficulties
involved in navigating
the caste-defining realities of
apartheid education, this case
and the situation of
Bridgeport school, in general,
are a distillation of
history made present.
The educational
impact of poverty
and racial and economic
segregation on Bridgeport,
Connecticut's largest
city, has been evident
since at least 1961.
At that time, they were just
beginning their transformation
into an abysmal
state, the trickle
of Whites moving out of
other towns and cities
with their tax
dollars was not yet
the rushing river it would
become a few years later.
By the 1990s, 20% of residents
and a quarter of the children
in Bridgeport lived in poverty.
As is so often the case,
poverty breeds other ills.
According to Pastor Kenneth
Moales, a former school board
member, quote, "in
the City of Bridgeport
we have 18 schools
that are failing.
Of those, 13 have been failing
for the last 10 years."
The children in
Bridgeport are educated
in a system with few students
who are White or wealthy.
What that history
is context it's
easy to see how a homeless Black
mother might risk everything
to ensure a quality
education for her child,
as well as easy to understand
the reasons why authorities
would struggle mightily
to keep her out.
If she were allowed to
stay, others might follow.
The fears on both sides
are as much about education
as they are about economics.
However, economics
is a driving force.
In 2011, the Bridgeport
School spent about $10,000
per pupil each year.
That number is far less than
was spent in wealthy districts
in Connecticut and elsewhere.
In 2016, nine states
had large disparities
between what they spent in
wealthy districts and those
that are poor--
Arizona, Illinois,
Missouri, Nevada, New York,
Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
Vermont, and Virginia.
When asked about
his views regarding
how these choices impacted the
education of poor children,
former Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan
said, quote, "Children who need
the most seem to be getting
less and less.
Children who need the least seem
to be getting more and more.
There's something unfair
and educationally unsound
and frankly un-American
about what's happening."
End quote.
The truth of his assertion
about how American
or not it is for the wealthy
to hoard educational funds
for their own
children and deny them
to poorer students of
color is at the very least
up for debate.
However, what we
know for sure is
that Tanya McDowell was
charged with stealing
$15,686 in educational
services for her son.
Despite the fact that
there have previously
been no penalty for
so-called educational theft,
the Norwalk school
board president,
in answering the
question of why they
seem so intent on
prosecuting this one woman,
replied, there has to be a
penalty for stealing services.
Right now, there is none.
Their thinking persisted,
despite the fact
that her homelessness should
have protected her and her son.
Under federal law,
children can continue
to attend classes in
the school district
where they began their
education if the family becomes
homeless at a later point.
That made no
difference whatsoever.
Norwalk's mayor,
Richard Moccia, when
asked to explain why the
family's homelessness didn't
lead his administration
to follow the law,
did not so much
answer the question
as restate the facts before
offering his opinion when
he said, quote,
"This woman was using
an illegal address in a
public housing complex,
has a checkered past.
And despite all the
protestation that she's
concerned about her son, if
she had done things right,
this would never have happened."
He did not specify
what exactly he wishes
McDowell had done more right.
And she and her son were not
the only casualties in the case.
When McDowell enrolled her
child in Norwalk's Brookside
Elementary School, Ana
Marques, McDowell's babysitter,
signed a notarized statement
saying the child lived
in her public housing unit.
In their quest to establish
the inviolate boundaries
of their school,
school officials
passed that statement on to
Norwalk housing authority
officials, who then began
eviction proceedings
against Marques for fraud.
It would not just be
McDowell and her son who
would pay a high
price for trying
to obtain a rigorous
education, one that
would have been
almost impossible
within the Bridgeport
city limits.
On average, a Black
student in Bridgeport
attends a school with
five times the poverty
rate attended by the average
White student in Connecticut.
2/3 of the city's
children are born
into families on some
form of public assistance.
More than half of the
neighborhoods in the city
have unemployment rates
greater than three times
the national average.
These are the conditions
that led to McDowell's
impossible choice.
As a result, the
vigor with which
prosecutors pursued McDowell
attracted national attention.
The Connecticut chapter of the
NAACP hired a lawyer for her
and issued a supportive
statement that, quote,
"The criminalization
of parents trying
to enroll their child in
a better-quality school
simply to give them a
chance for a better life
is wrong and should be
resolved through civil
and not criminal means."
The online petition
site, change.org,
collected over
27,000 signatures,
urging an end to
her prosecution.
Public sentiment seemed to
have moved in her favor.
But then McDowell was
arrested on drug charges
as a result of an
undercover police sting.
To the extent that a national
outcry over her treatment
might have had an ameliorating
effect on a harsh sentence
following the drug conviction,
prosecutors, believing they
now had the moral
high ground, pressed
for a speedy conclusion.
They joined the drug
and school theft cases
and won the right to
have them tried together.
Given mandatory
sentencing minimums,
she'd now face a
potential of serving over
20 years in prison.
Instead, she opted
for a plea that
resulted in a 12-year sentence
with parole eligibility
after five years.
While she served her time, her
son lived with his grandmother
in Bridgeport and attended
school in that district.
He was said to suffer
from frequent nightmares.
Though the sentencing
in this case is extreme,
McDowell and her
family are not alone
in attracting national
attention for attempting
to navigate structural
barriers impeding
Black children from receiving
a quality education.
The so-called crime
of educational theft
is growing and expanding.
The same year McDowell
began serving her sentence,
a federal judge sentenced
another single Black mother,
Kelly Williams-Bolar
of Cleveland,
Ohio to 10 days in
jail, three years
probation, and 80 hours
of community service.
Though the governor would
subsequently pardon her,
she was too was
convicted of stealing
an education for her children.
Sadly, her father was also
swept up in the frenzy,
was arrested on fraud charges
for letting his daughter use
his address.
And in trying to fight the
prosecution, lost his house
and ultimately died of
a heart attack in jail.
The whole case is yet
another example of the ways
that education and access to
a quality, non-segregated,
non-apartheid [? conduit ?] has
become a marker of a socially
limiting caste system.
Her crime was using
her father's address
to enroll her children in a
predominantly White and wealthy
school district in which
she did not reside.
His crime was helping
his grandchildren.
Williams-Bolar made
the choice to find
a more stable educational
situation in 2006
after there was a break
in her home in Akron.
Though no one was there
when the robbery took place,
she was nonetheless deeply
concerned about her daughters,
then 13 and 9.
She says this was
the first time it
occurred to her that she might
be able to use her father's
address.
Not only were the
schools where he
lived better, but,
because he was retired,
she said, she knew that he would
be home to look after the girls
while she worked.
Though Williams-Bolar says
the educational quality
of the schools were
not the primary reason
for her decision, the difference
between the educational record
of Akron schools and that of the
Copley-Fairlawn School District
where her father's house
was located is stark.
In 2010/'11, Akron Public
Schools met state-prescribed
performance schools on
just five of 26 categories
of performance, such as
high school graduation
and standardized tests.
While Copley-Fairlawn District
met all 26 of its benchmarks.
The only way for
students to attend
a school in the
Copley-Fairlawn District
is to reside within city limit
or pay a $9,000 annual tuition.
Williams-Bolar at the time
earned roughly $28,000 a year
and couldn't afford
that kind of fee.
And so she listed
her father's address
on her daughters
enrollment form.
They attended the
district for two years.
Though she couldn't
have known it,
the decision to enroll her
children came at a time
when the district was in the
midst of an aggressive war
against parents who tried to
steal their kids' education.
To administrators and
many of its parents,
people like Williams-Bolar
simply look like thieves,
literally stealing their
school without having
to contribute
anything to the tax
base for the provided services.
The residents of
those districts say
it's not right for
them to be expected
to subsidize the education of
a child whose parents don't
pay taxes in the district.
They worry about the impact
of outside enrollment
on class sizes, test scores,
and special education programs.
They believe these
feared changes
justified increased
vigilance about keeping out
families who did not pay taxes.
In order to fight back,
the school district
deployed a range
of taxes to protect
what it viewed as
an increasingly
valuable commodity.
Among other things, officials
hired private investigators
to track parents.
And in 2008, they
announced a $100 bounty
to anyone who turned in an
illegally registered parent.
So after her conviction, she
served nine days in jail.
And the terms of her parole
forbade her from drinking
and required her to
submit to drug tests
and to report monthly
to a probation officer.
She also had to perform 80
hours of community service
and pay $800 in
restitution, as well
as the cost of the Summit
County's prosecution
against her.
Upon her arrest, groups
and organizations
set up online petitions.
And together with one organized
by a woman in Massachusetts
named Caitlin Lord, they
guarded 180,000 signatures
asking for Governor John
Kasich to partner her.
He did so-- but the
felony conviction
remains on her record.
The account of Williams-Bolar's
youngest daughter, Jada,
comparing the school
district to which
she had been assigned with
the one to which her mother
and grandfather father were able
to send her for a few years,
hearkens back to a pre-Brown
v. Board of Education
era of sanctioned segregation.
She remembers,
quote, "We had things
I would have never have thought
an elementary school would
have.
We had a computer lab.
We had a garden outside.
We had our own greenhouse."
End quote.
As Jada recalled, the move
back to the Akron School,
she says, quote, "It
was a huge difference.
It was huge.
We didn't learn that much.
It was disruptive in class.
There were no resources.
It was completely different.
And I felt like I wasn't
learning anything at all."
Tellingly, wealthy Whites do not
end up with felony convictions
when they're accused
of educational theft.
This was the case with a man
named Mark Ebner, a Columbus,
Ohio parent who
illegally enrolled
his children in a neighboring
suburban school district.
The Ebner family's primary
residence was a $1 million
property just outside the
suburban district's borders.
When Ebner found out that
private investigators were
tailing him, he reportedly
arranged for a house swap
with relatives
inside the district.
He then sued the district
for spying on him.
The same year that
Williams-Bolar and family
were engulfed in
their court case,
the Ebners were able to use
their wealth and privilege
to evade the grasp of the
criminal justice system.
And their children continued to
benefit from attending a higher
quality school.
OK, I jumped before it.
So there's all these
other cases in Rochester.
I'll just read one more,
and then I'll dismount here.
In 2015, the school district
in Orinda, California
made national headlines when
officials hired an investigator
to spy on the seven-year-old
daughter of a nanny.
Both lived together
near the school
in the home of her
mother's employers.
School officials
allowed the little girl
to stay in the district
only after her mother agreed
to make the couple she
worked for her daughter's
official caregivers.
This allowed her employers
to enroll her daughter
in the school.
In Atlanta, a mother of
three faced up to 80 years
in prison after being charged
with 16 counts of falsifying
school documents so that her
kids, all honor students,
could attend better
schools in the city
rather than in her home
district of Cobb County.
And there's more.
So as a result, the cycle
of hoarding and plundering
educational funds earmarked
for poor and working class
children of color
continues uninterrupted,
as it has since
the 19th century.
Again and again, these families
learn that race, segregation,
and educational policy in this
country work against, not for,
low-income Black and
Latino communities.
At the same time, the
wealthy and political elite
learn that race, segregation,
and educational policy works
for them.
It shores up their caste
status, speaks moral authority,
and ensures financial
gain for some,
all while whole communities
fall further and further behind.
We have failed to collectively
notice this social arrangement
where increasingly
thick walls are
erected around certain
districts, both allowing
and keeping out students
based on race, ethnicity,
and socioeconomic status.
So this is the context
within which I came up
with this term segrenomics.
That refers to both the
ways that businesses
profit from underperforming
school districts
by providing edu--
the edu business sector
in the United States
is second only to the health
care sector in terms of growth
right now.
This is a $500 billion to $600
billion a year enterprise.
And every time these businesses
shift these funds from taxpayer
dollars to private
hands, not only
are the districts
undermined, but they're
making too much money.
You have to ask,
what will it take
to make the potential
profit not worth it to them.
Just by way of
comparison, there's
been a lot of talk about
the criminal justice system
incarceration and
the amount of money
that's bound up with the
ways that we police and jail.
If you take everything
from bail bondsmen
to ankle monitoring
to prison guards
to prisons to the
janitors, like all in,
if you take everything involved
with the criminal justice
system, you're talking
about $80 billion a year.
Here, you're talking $500
billion to $600 billion.
And right now, the
public education system
is majority of color and
majority poor right now.
And so what that means is
the social capital that
allows folks to push
back, to fight back,
to keep some of these
policies from happening
in their communities,
when you're
talking about poor folks who
are of color without those kinds
of connections, they're
just simply vulnerable.
And so one of the things that
I always say with this work--
we can talk about if
anybody's interested--
the kind of stuff I've been
doing since it was published.
But again, it is
useful for people
who are in communities on the
front lines fighting battles.
And that makes me feel good.
So much my partner made
this little video for me
as a teaser.
He taught himself
animation to do it.
That explains segrenomics.
So it's just 30 seconds.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[BELL RINGING]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So I stopped in time
for at least 10,
15 minutes worth of questions.
If there's anything anybody's
interested in hearing
more about?
Yep, in the back.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
It was really shocking.
Never heard that before.
Are there places like, for
instance, North Carolina
which bases education--
NOLIWE ROOKS: Oh, he's
trying to hand you the--
AUDIENCE: Oh, thank you.
Just speak into it like this?
NOLIWE ROOKS: Mm-hmm.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much
for that shocking information.
Do you notice differences
around the country,
for instance, in
North Carolina where
they base the school
funding on general sales
tax for the state?
Do you see these horrible
cases of education theft
not happening in those states?
NOLIWE ROOKS: I have not found
any cases of educational theft
in those states.
But what has happened
in North Carolina
is they had fabulous
integration plans
that communities came up with.
And White parents said, we think
there is a value for our kids
and the state and everybody
in having integrated schools.
So we are going to
voluntarily come up
with plans that will lead to
racial and economic integration
in North Carolina.
The majority of the parents
in the Charlottesville area
were on board with this.
There was a handful who
felt like their rights were
being stepped on.
Just because 80% of the parents
in North Carolina held these
values of integration and
privileging different kinds
of groups being together, this
20% was, like, yeah, we don't.
And why is it exactly
that we have to go along
with the majority here?
What about our rights?
And after a series
of court cases,
the Supreme Court
actually agreed with them.
That whatever the idea
of integration, the good
that it was supposed
to bring the country,
it was trampling on
the individual rights
of this community
of White folks.
And so this hugely
successful-- people
were doing case
studies about this.
This is how you can
make integration work.
And the thing that we know--
the only thing that has
actually moved the needle
substantively is integration.
But that's because it
gives poor folks access
to the money that's being
hoarded by wealthy folks.
It's not some magical
sit by White people
and, all of a sudden,
you too will be smart.
It's just you have
access to stuff
that people are
keeping from you.
But once the Supreme
Court said no,
the same thing happened
down in Seattle, Washington.
Group of parents who were
saying, yep, we want this.
Supreme Court-- yeah,
no, because there's
a little group that do not.
And so somehow, when you
talk about majority rules,
and when you talk
about democracy,
when you talk about race
and poverty and education,
really what we're looking at
in a legal sense is it doesn't.
It just doesn't.
The majority of folks who in
the cases that I know about
have all been White
middle class parents.
Their rights are the
ones that predominate.
And so, North Carolina schools
have re-segregated aggressively
following that ruling.
Schools all across the South
have re-segregated aggressively
because the Supreme
Court says you can.
Eric?
I'm going to do Eric.
And then I'll come.
AUDIENCE: Great job, by the way.
NOLIWE ROOKS: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: During your
presentation, it just hit me--
the whole aspect echoes of
slavery because in terms
of it being against the
law to educate Blacks.
I mean, what those single
parents went through.
And also, the woman in
the project that was there
was basically forced
to be evicted.
I don't know if she really was.
NOLIWE ROOKS: Yes,
she was, she was.
AUDIENCE: It reminded
me of slavery
in the sense of the
laws that were passed
and what went on with
Black folks then.
So, really good job.
And thanks for sharing.
NOLIWE ROOKS: Thank you.
The thing I'll tell
you is-- so when
I left this class that I started
telling you about at Princeton,
it was like, so you got
philanthropies, Zuckerberg,
and you've got business
entities, there's growth.
You've got all these things
that are prescribing education
to poor communities.
And so when I started,
I was like, I'm
going to just keep backing up.
I kept backing up,
decade by decade,
trying to find a period
where that wasn't the case
so I could say I'm
going to start here.
And then look at what
happened when I don't
see all of this happening.
And so what I always say is then
I backed into Reconstruction.
I kept backing up.
And during the Reconstruction
period is when in the South
you get taxpayer-supported
state-funded education.
That's where it comes from,
with the federal dollars
to educate the
formerly enslaved.
But they couldn't do it and
not educate White folks too.
So poor Whites were
for the first time--
I mean, education had
always been something
that the wealthy enjoyed.
It just didn't occur
to anybody to educate
the children of White farmers.
Nobody was trying to
educate Black people.
But even White folks, they were
like, why would we do that.
And with these
Reconstruction dollars,
everybody in the region
got to be educated.
But what happens is
post-Reconstruction,
that all worked when you
have federal troops with guns
and stuff, making sure you
are going to let people vote.
You're going to let
them go to school.
But literally it
took federal troops
to ensure that that happened.
When after the Haye's
[? telegram, ?] I'm
not going to turn
into a historian,
but stuff happened and then
they pulled out the troops.
It was a compromise.
And immediately,
Southern governments
went after voting and education.
And they went after it hard.
Governments in the 13
former slave-holding states
came up with all kinds of stuff,
like you can't use White tax
dollars, even though now we
have state-supported taxpayer
education.
But the White tax dollars cannot
be used to educate any Black
people.
Cannot.
Matter of fact, we going to need
the Black people to pay taxes
into the system
to educate Whites.
And then we're
going to need them
to pay other taxes to educate
their own to make sure
that we don't mess up
and start sharing money.
Just really quickly-- so the
way that rural Black folks--
most Black people were rural
post-Reconstruction-- the way
that they ended up
getting educated
is you had these philanthropists
with names like George Eastman,
Rockefeller, Dodd, names
you would recognize today,
captains of industry
with companies.
Well, Eastman Kodak doesn't
really exist anymore,
but they used to make film.
But it was like a big--
and Peabody.
And they all came
and they said, you
know what, we have a problem.
The whole economic
growth of the country
was based on all
this free labor.
The whole country is
benefiting from the fact
that the South can be
the economic engine.
Because they're not
paying anybody to work.
Now, that we're
trying to pay, we
have to figure out something.
And if we have to give them
education in order for them
to stay here and work,
we can figure out
how to pay them as
little as possible.
We can have them work
on subsistence levels.
But how are you going
to them in the region?
Education became
a tool for that.
That all of these
philanthropists
said, because what
we're looking at
is with immigration busting out
in the West and in the North,
if we have an educated Black
citizenry, when it comes time,
they're trying to
unionize and stuff.
They're trying to
better themselves.
We can take these
Black folks, if we
educate them a little bit,
and make them compliant.
Educate them into
a social status.
I'm not making it up.
They were writing this to each
other and to everyone else.
This is their purpose
for education.
It was labor concerns.
So when they had
to have strikes,
they needed some workers.
And they needed them educated.
And that's why at least
initially in the South,
education was all vocational.
Because they were like, we
need to teach them skills
because we're going to need them
in other parts of the country
to take over.
Yes, so I was looking
for this period
where money and
philanthropists and education,
that there was just
some sort of free thing,
and I backed up to
Reconstruction and I'm
looking at the same thing--
the under-education of
poor folks, specifically
Black folks, for business gains.
One more question.
AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.
Thank you for being here.
This has put together a
ton of dots for things
that I think a lot
of people have mildly
understood for a while.
But your book is awesome.
I wanted to ask a
question whether you
think that ending
corporate PAC donations
and cleaning up that
system in Congress
will solve some of these
issues or lead to solutions.
But obviously, the
Supreme Court--
that's not the answer fully.
But I was going to ask you,
what solutions do you think or--
NOLIWE ROOKS: Yes, so let me
say because I've got two seconds
and I'm long-winded.
So let me say, one, I think that
literally I'm not hysterical.
I'm not trying to
be hysterical when
I say I believe that
democracy is in trouble.
And we've seen it in
trouble around education
around the country in the United
States for quite some time.
Actually, I mean, I could go
into a whole global thing.
The World Bank
has all this stuff
about financing these
privatized forms of education
in very poor countries.
And they will forgive
your debt if you
will let video teachers come
in and replace your teachers.
Or you will have 100 students.
And they'll be like, they
will forgive your debt.
So it's not just in
the United States.
But in the United States,
I do believe that democracy
is in trouble and that democracy
is the only thing that's going
to push back against this.
The fact that educational
access and voting rights,
when you look at
it, go hand in hand.
They have since the 1890s,
and they continue to.
When there is free
access to voting,
it tends to be
access to education.
You can find it.
It may not always be
great, but you can find it.
When you see voting under direct
attack, education shrinks.
And so the school boards,
we have suspended democracy
in some of our nation's
largest educational districts
and put business
people in charge of it.
And those business
people are Democrats,
Republicans, Libertarians.
It is bipartisan.
The ways that people will tell
you these government schools
need to be dismantled
and replaced.
The last time they authorized
it was in 2016, the Charter
School We Love You Act.
It's not really its
name, but it's basically
something like that, like
the Charter Schools Support
Them and Love Them Act.
It passed 365 to 40.
Wealthy people, elite
people, rich people,
people with access, think that
dismantling public education
makes sense.
And at this point, none of the
poor people and people of color
are in it.
So we're a profit
center once again.
So again, this is why I began
with this mother/grandmother
in Chicago because it's not that
people are not pushing back,
it's not that they don't know.
Really, everything that's
in my book she said.
She knows from her
lived experience.
And she's been
organizing against it
and she's been fighting
it for a long time.
There is just simply
too much money.
We're being out-organized
and outspent.
And so one of the things that
I'm happy about with the book
is that it's at
least giving people
some ammunition as they organize
themselves to fight back.
All right, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
