Start with Equity Webinar Series
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The Children’s Equity Project and the Bipartisan Policy Center hosted a virtual event series to announce the release of our new report, Start with Equity—From the Early Years to the Early Grades: Data, Research, and an Actionable Child Equity Policy Agenda.
The report reviews the state of the equity data, research, and policy landscapes from the early years to the early grades in key areas—like discipline, inclusion of children with disabilities, and dual-language learning. The report also establishes an actionable, concrete policy road map that can begins to bridge longstanding opportunity gaps and improve the learning conditions of children from historically marginalized communities.
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2020-07-22_BPC_Start with Equity Webinar Series Part Two: Addressing Harsh Discipline and its Disproportionate Application
00;00;06;10 [Linda Smith]: In a four-part webinars series, where we are looking at the issues of equity in early childhood education. Um, my name is Linda Smith for those of you don't know me. Um, and I am the director of the early childhood initiative at the bipartisan policy center here in Washington, DC. And if you don't know the BPC, we are a Washington based, uh, think tank that tries to look at the best ideas from both sides of the aisle to promote the best policies that we can hear in Congress and in
00;00;37;07 legislation. So, uh, before we get started, actually, and I introduced my colleague, I want to take care of a few housekeeping details. Uh, we always get the question, are the slides going to be available? Yes, they will. They'll be posted along with Q and a. If we can't take all the questions at the end of this, we will be posting the answers to your questions. So feel free to include your questions in, uh, even if we don't, uh, you know, if we don't get to them, feel free to keep putting them in there.
00;01;06;40 Finally, just to note that the report is, uh, that we're going to be talking about today is posted on both the BPC website as well as the children's equity project. And that gives me time to introduce my dear friend and colleague, uh, Dr. Shantel meek, who is the founding director of the children's equity project at Arizona state university. And over the last year or so, the two of us have been sponsoring a series of round tables and discussions to examine the issue of equity in the early years.
00;01;40;41 Um, so before we get into the details of this particular one, I want to thank Barbara chow and the Heising Simons Foundation for the funding of this project.
00;01;50;02 [Linda Smith]: It was very important work at the time. We had no idea that what was of what was to come, uh, when we started the work, but I think we have some very important policy recommendations to make that might help inform things as we move forward in this country around this issue. So today's topic, and I'll be short, is going to talk about the issues of harsh, harsh discipline in early childhood programs and what that sets in motion for children's lives. And so I think most people who hear
00;02;21;37 us talk about this, find it, it is appalling to find that children are expelled from early childhood programs at two, three and four years of age. It's just in comprehensible. Some of this has to do with what for most of it is, has to do with behavior that is absolutely developmentally appropriate, but we have to deal with some of the issues around the workforce and their, their training on this, as well as understanding what discipline works and what doesn't. And I think this, this particular
00;02;52;51 webinar, we'll try to examine these issues around harsh discipline, and, and How we as a nation need to move forward to rethink some of this. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to shad. Tell me who is going to guide the conversation. She will introduce the topic with this series of slides and then a panel that will follow that, that we'll be discussing this issue in depth and a panel of various distinguished, um, uh, experts in this field.
00;03;22;05 So, Shantel, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you.
00;03;28;20 [Shantel Meek]: Thanks, Linda. We at the children's equity project are thrilled to have you and the bipartisan policy center as partners in this important work around systemic racism and equity for our youngest learners. We also want to thank the Heising Simons foundation for generous funding for this work. And I want to thank all of you for joining us here today. As many of you know, the children's equity project and bipartisan policy center released a new report, uh, start with equity from the early years to the early grades last week, the full report covers three key
00;04;00;18 inequities in our learning system, uh, that we know are having a disproportionate impact on our youngest learners, especially those from historically marginalized communities, our black children, or Brown children, our native American children, and our children with disabilities. Uh, if we can get the first slide, that'd be great. Okay, Perfect. Um, before repo report covers, uh, three key issue areas. So these
00;04;30;53 are the three issue areas that are covered in the report, harsh discipline, and it's disproportionate application and learning settings, which is going to be the focus of today's webinar. We also look at the lack of inclusion or segregated learning for young children with disabilities and inequities that exist within that. And we then look at in equitable access to high quality learning opportunities for our dual language learners and our English learners. We believe that reforming these three issue areas and eliminating racial disparities within them, by doing this, we can begin to
00;05;01;14 transform children's learning experiences and close opportunity gaps. Of course, these three issue areas do not encompass all of the inequities. Our children face across multiple different systems and even within our own systems, but we have to meaningfully address economic justice fair and affordable housing, wealth gap segregation, and equitable funding, and many other issue areas to get there. We believe that there are significant contributors to the unequal state of our systems today for each of these
00;05;29;35 issue areas, we deeply reviewed the research and the data landscape and informed by that we provide an actionable and concrete policy agenda. Next slide please.
00;05;41;20 [Shantel Meek]: So today we're going to take a deep dive into harsh discipline and it's disproportionate application, harsh discipline, and especially exclusionary. Discipline is one of the most concrete manifestations of the preschool to prison, pipeline and policy today. Kids can't learn if they're literally pushed out of school. It's also harder to learn when you're being subject to other abuses like physical abuse via corporal punishment and solitary confinement like, uh, conditions via seclusion. So as our country continues, having a dialogue on race and systemic racism in America, we must ensure that school push out and harsh
00;06;15;34 discipline more broadly is part of our reform agenda together with BPC would develop a public policy roadmap in this space that can help us address harsh discipline and close gaps. So, uh, these on the right side of the slide, you'll see, this is how we define harsh discipline more broadly. It includes corporal punishment. It includes suspension and expulsion, and it includes seclusion and restraint used in appropriately. I should note
00;06;41;21 that seclusion and restraint were never intended to be used as, as discipline measures are supposed to be used as, as emergency behavior management measures that are used very rarely and, and not at all, uh, implemented as punishment. Uh, but unfortunately we found in several reports, uh, most recently an investigative report, um, that it is abused and that it is used for punishment, uh, in ways that it was never intended.
00;07;09;37 Next slide please. So here's a summary of what we know we're going to dig into what we found in our review of the data and of the research. We know that harsh discipline starts early. We know that it happens often, and we know that it's disproportionately applied. We know that we have preliminary evidence that it occurs even in infant toddler childcare programs. So we, we send preschool to prison pipeline earlier. There is some evidence emerging evidence that it starts even sooner than that, where
00;07;43;18 the most important things we found and others who study this will not be surprised, but there is absolutely no evidence that shows that any of these forms of harsh discipline work, they don't work to improve child behavior in the short term or long term. Uh, they don't work in any sense of the word. They are not an effective intervention and they're not an intervention at all.
00;08;04;49 [Shantel Meek]: However, there is an abundant amount of evidence that shows that these harsh forms of discipline, uh, have negative effects on young children. We know that early suspension, expulsion predicts later suspension and expulsion. So it kicks off kind of a trajectory in a cycle. We know that it's associated with a decreased engagement in learning. Uh, we know that it's associated with grade retention and lower levels of high school graduation and even interaction with the criminal justice system,
00;08;35;04 uh, much later in life, when, when kids grow up to be adults, we know that rates and disparities in the rates vary between and within state lines. We know that, uh, the disparities and the rates are really driven by a complex set of factors that include bias and include inadequate training, uh, of, of teachers and principals and others who are kind of having direct
00;09;03;19 interaction with children and making these decisions. We know that it is influenced by misguided policies like the zero tolerance policy wave, um, that, that we saw take hold the last several, uh, several years ago, we know that poor working conditions also contribute, uh, to, to, uh, exclusionary discipline in particular. So when teachers, um, have really long hours when they don't have an adequate number or appropriate number of breaks, um, we know that that's associated with increased rates
00;09;37;02 of discipline. It's a partial discipline. We know that when teachers don't have supports like mental health coaches or other types of training and support, uh, to address, uh, children's social, emotional development, they are more likely to, to rely on this type of harsh and exclusionary discipline. We know that there are a handful of interventions, uh, that are out in the field right now. Some of them are very widely scaled that work
00;10;04;37 to decrease exclusionary discipline.
00;10;07;33 [Shantel Meek]: We know that very few, however, have been shown to reduce disparities within exclusionary discipline. Um, some of those that, that are having kind of some are beginning to provide some emerging evidence, positive behavior intervention support, which you'll hear about a little bit more on the panel, a is doing some investigating on, on reducing that disparity. And there are other models as well, but very, very few, we know that a harsh discipline is largely unregulated at the federal level with the exception of some data collection requirements, data reporting
00;10;40;23 requirements. We know that there was a large influx of state and local community level policy that has developed and cropped up, especially in exclusionary discipline. So suspension and expulsion since 2014, when the first round of preschool suspension, expulsion, federal data were, were released. And we, uh, at the federal level, uh, you know, uh, engaged in a
00;11;08;52 lot of, um, work and policy around, uh, trying to decrease the use of exclusionary discipline in early childhood settings and through the K-12 continuum, we do know how we also know however that although there has been a lot of state and local policy, uh, on this issue over the last several years, that the quality of the policies greatly vary, um, the extent of the coverage. So who, who gets protections and who does it, uh, varies greatly. Um, the
00;11;38;42 supports that have been paired with those policies and the funding for those supports varies greatly. Um, and there's a whole number, other quality indicators with respect to policy that we go over in the full report. Next slide please.
00;11;56;03 [Shantel Meek]: So we're going to start first with exclusionary discipline, which we count as suspension and expulsion suspension, being a temporary removal from, uh, from school or childcare program or early childhood program, um, childcare provider and expulsion being the permanent termination of a child's participation, uh, in, uh, in the school or in the childcare program or in their preschool program. Um, more broadly, next slide please. So here's what we know. Um, we know that federal data find
00;12;27;45 that 5,000 children in public pre-K, um, were suspended in one year alone. Um, we know that young children, uh, that's preschool children preschool are about three times more likely to experience to be expelled, uh, from their public pre-K then children in K-12 settings. We also know that there are some, there are some small studies, uh, state specific studies that
00;12;55;38 have kind of looked at this rate, uh, in childcare settings. And we know that it might be much higher than that number, even in childcare settings. We also know that, uh, in 2016, uh, we included the department of health and human services included a question on, um, suspensions and expulsions, um, in a national parent survey. So this was the very first time that we asked parents on a national scale, if their child had been suspended, uh, if their young child had been suspended, uh,
00;13;26;34 and that's, that's really significant because the federal data we had before, and then we still have as part of the civil rights data collection at the department of education, um, realized kind of on, on, on education administrators, uh, to, to report that information as opposed to parents and what they found in, in, in the data, what the data revealed were that the numbers were much, much higher, uh, when you ask parents and that, you know, of course also included parents of children who are not just in
00;13;56;09 public pre-K, but in childcare, um, and another types of preschool systems and settings. Next slide, please. So, um, if we, if we get back to that slide, that's okay. We, um,
00;14;20;44 [Shantel Meek]: Couple more. There we go. Um, so I, I mentioned a little bit earlier the, uh, the infants and toddlers, um, there's emerging evidence that, that even in our youngest learners, infants and toddlers and babies are also excluded at a really high rates. Um, there were a couple of studies that have been conducted recently, um, that one of them, uh, they're both state specific studies, um, 42% of infant toddler childcare programs reported expelling a
00;14;53;00 child in the past year in another study, 26% of programs have reported expelling a child in last year. And by comparison, um, Dr. Walter Gilliam, who was on our panel today, we're excited to have, uh, his 2005 study that looked at at expulsion and suspension in public pre-K settings found that just over 10% of those teachers had reported expelling a child, which has
00;15;18;35 already a much higher rate than what you find in K-12 next slide, please. Yeah. So we know that, that the rates are high, that we see disparities across ages and systems. We also know reliably that there are racial disparities in suspension and expulsion. Um, there has been this, this, this pattern of black children in particular, um, being overrepresented in suspension, expulsion has been consistent in, in every study and in every way that we
00;15;52;15 look at it since we started really recording this data, um, that has never changed. So today what we find these are your, your preschool numbers from black boys, they make up about 19% of preschool enrollment, but 45%, nearly half of male preschool suspension. Um, and for girls, uh, the disparity looks even higher. Although the numbers are less, they make up 20%, um, of, of female enrollment. Um, but over half of all female suspensions, next
00;16;24;22 slide, please.
00;16;28;38 [Shantel Meek]: We also know that there are, when we look at, um, that there are some disparities when we look at American Indian, Alaska native population, and also Latino children, um, although the disproportionality varies, uh, and it's not consistent, uh, study by study or state by state. Um, we do know in general, uh, that these kids are generally excluded at higher rates in the later grades. Um, but again, like I said, that that data and research is unreliable and, and the, the, uh, I
00;16;59;36 guess gravity of, of the disparity and the severity of the disparity really varies across studies and datasets and States. We know that children, um, within the AAPI group have significantly different rates within that group. So it's really important to look at them, kind of parse out, uh, children in that group. We know that Pacific Islander children had a risk ratio that was four times greater than Asian-American children. Yet. They're usually kind of lumped into one category when we look at this
00;17;28;31 issue, if we turn to look at kids with disabilities, uh, we know that, uh, children school age children with disabilities are at least twice as to be excluded. And we don't at least the civil rights data collection data show that, um, there isn't disproportionality noted in younger children with disabilities. So children went in preschool. Um, it is important to note though, a few caveats and you'll see some asterisks there for that reason. Um, children with a disability may be identified, um, after preschool. So
00;18;02;21 once they enter kind of formal education. And so it's really difficult to know if the children who were eventually identified, um, were kind of the same children that were, you know, potentially kicked out of preschool, uh, early childhood programs before they had that, that disability diagnosis. So it's, it's, it's difficult to tell what that looks like in the early years. Next slide please.
00;18;27;56 [Shantel Meek]: So this is really hard to see, I apologize about that, but the slides will be online. Um, but really what we're trying to show here, we did an analysis looking at the early years in the early grades, um, public pre-K through kind of fifth grade at the elementary school zone. And we looked at exclusionary discipline, uh, by state across the country. And we, we looked at rates per 1000 children to control for population. Um, and these are the rates kind of across the country. Um, we
00;18;57;41 know that, uh, Mississippi and South Carolina, I believe that Alabama, um, up there kind of make up the top three and down at the bottom are, uh, Utah, Massachusetts, Maryland, and some others with the lowest rates of suspending and expelling your children. Next slide please. Right. We also know we looked at racial disparities and the rate difference, uh, between children, um, in, in exclusionary discipline and suspension in
00;19;30;47 particular. And what we did here was we took the rate, uh, for all children. Um, and then we looked at the rate for black children since black children are really the ones that are most reliably overrepresented in the school, push out numbers. And then we can, we compare, we, we calculated a different score between those two numbers to identify, you know, what the disparities look like. And those differences look like across the country.
00;19;59;10 And as you'll see here, the, you know, the States with the maroon, uh, had the highest, uh, difference rate between black children and their peers, uh, then the, the kind of the dark orange, uh, from there on, and then with the yellow States, having the lowest amount of difference, um, the state with the highest number of difference or the highest disparity between black children and their peers was Ohio, uh, and the state with the lowest,
00;20;24;41 uh, with Hawaii. Next slide please.
00;20;31;00 [Shantel Meek]: So what does policy look like? Then we examine the policy landscape, um, across discipline. And, and as I mentioned earlier, there's been a wave of new policy moves, um, across the last, you know, seven, eight years across childcare head start and public pre-K. So we'll break those down really briefly, um, starting with childcare. So in 2014, uh, the childcare development block grant was reauthorized. And for the first time ever, it included some language on suspensions and expulsions
00;21;05;32 and in particular, it required States to report what their policies were, uh, in this issue area. And that's really significant because most, if not all States, uh, did not have a policy at all on this issue. And what we'd often see was that local programs would kind of manage this on an ad hoc case by case basis. There were also many, many, many actual early childhood programs, uh, that didn't have a policy, a written policy on this either
00;21;33;34 and kind of managed it case by case. So since then, since that requirement was kicked into that law, um, and, and that's been implemented nearly every state has taken some kind of administrative action to try to address exclusionary discipline in childcare settings. We know that here probably more than anywhere, the policies vary greatly, and most of them are weaker on the quality side than, than, you know, what, what we would like to see in terms of
00;22;01;52 protections for children. Many of them, um, you know, state prohibits the practice, uh, even with within parameters and most of the policies, uh, focus around, um, uh, uh, advising parents and telling parents when this is happening. So, you know, letting them know and keeping an open line of communication and engaging families, family notifications, some States have required some, some data collection requirements. Um, some States have
00;22;32;30 opened up auctions for professional development. So nobody's required professional development, uh, in, you know, in discipline, in social, emotional, in, in bias, or kind of the combination of how these things all come together.
00;22;45;58 [Shantel Meek]: Um, but some have, have made it a, an option. Um, and then several States or, you know, some States as you can see in the report, um, permitted, uh, as, as a last resort. So we, we know that sometimes that is, that is not meaningful. Um, in terms of the steps folks have to take to push a child out of school, um, head start and Tweed, we take a look at head start, um, head start, prohibits explosions, and limits suspensions, and it has a whole lot of caveats around when you can suspend.
00;23;18;05 And it's a limited amount of time and there, um, all whole lot of supports and interventions and, um, collaboration with parents and mental health consultants are, and others are kind of required, um, to really try to prevent this and make it a very rare occurrence and address the issue, uh, when it does happen. Um, this, this new explicit language on exclusionary discipline is new to the head start regulations with the 2016, um, redo of
00;23;45;27 the head start program performance standards that were finalized, uh, in 2016, before that it was common practice and kind of common knowledge, uh, that head start does not expel or suspend, but with, uh, the redo of those regulations in 2016, it kind of was codified into, into the rule. Next slide, please. Pre-K through the early grade and kind of the public school system. We know that, um, more than half of all States have, have addressed a exclusionary
00;24;19;49 discipline in, in some way, uh, and limited it or tried to limit it in some way, the extent of the limitation varies. So we see some places, you know, provide protections for just kids in pre K some go pre K to second grade pre K to third. So that varies the extent of, you know, what age children are covered. There's also a lot of variability around the exceptions, so nobody, nobody prohibits the practice outright. All of those who have made
00;24;48;15 steps in that direction have a whole number of exceptions for when you can, are you when you are allowed to suspend or expel a child? Um, again, a lot of this work has been done kind of in the silos of specific systems. So head start, as I mentioned, childcare, pre-K, there have been a number of States. Here's a list of some of those that have passed some reforms that address this issue across, you know, all of the systems where young
00;25;17;32 children learn, uh, so childcare, head start, or headstart cause that's federal, but childcare and their pre-K system. Um, so here's a list of, of some of those, um, next slide, please.
00;25;32;40 [Shantel Meek]: So now let's switch to corporate punishment. Um, and as you see the definition here in the civil rights data collection for corporal punishment is paddling spanking, um, or other uses of force or physical punishment imposed on a child in a school setting. Next slide please. So we know that corporal punishment is legal in schools, public schools in 19 States. We know that it's legal in private schools in every
00;26;03;28 single state in the country, except for, to New Jersey in Iowa. Um, we know that 45,000 public and private, uh, that, that kind of covers 45,000 public and private pre-K settings. Next slide please. Okay. Here's some data and some facts on corporal punishment and what we found, and this is all, um, I think this is all from the civil rights data collection at the department of education. Um, we found that there was 160,000 kids pre-K to 12th grade who were subject to corporal punishment in
00;26;35;41 a single school year, 1500 of those were three and four year olds. We know that black children make up about 16% of enrollment, but 33% of corporal punishment cases. And that translates to 40,000 black children being subject to corporate punishment in the single school year. We know that black boys are two times more likely to be corporal corporately punished than their peers, uh, than, than other white boys and black girls
00;27;02;10 are three times more likely to be corporally punished than white girls. We know turning to disabilities in the four States that really make up the highest proportion of corporal punishment cases across the country. Um, children with disabilities make up, uh, you know, more than, uh, two times the number of cases. And, uh, the last piece that I will highlight is that American Indian Alaskan children make up less than 1%. We're looking at kind of the preschool population, but 9% of corporal punishment cases. So
00;27;34;05 that disparity is really astounding. Next slide please.
00;27;42;19 [Shantel Meek]: So we ran a similar type of analysis as we did for discipline, but we looked at, uh, corporate punishment, uh, in all of the States where it is legal. And we looked at, uh, what the rates were for again, young children, pre-K through elementary school that early years through the early grades time period. And we found that that the rate of disparities. So the difference between, uh, the total percentage of enrollment, of, of young children and the total percentage of corporate punishment cases that they made up, um, varied quite a bit from, from state
00;28;14;27 to state, the States that were pointing to with these arrows kind of make up some of drive some of the largest differences. Um, so for example, if you look at South Carolina, uh, black children make up about 38% of the population, but half of all corporal punishment cases, we also find that American Indian, Alaska native children, um, are disproportionately corporately punished. As I mentioned earlier. And in particular, if we look at North Carolina where AIAN students make up just over 1% of the
00;28;45;39 population, but they make up over 11% of corporal punishment cases. And in Oklahoma, they make up just over 11% of the population and almost a quarter of all corporal punishment cases. Next slide, please. So now let's pivot to restraint and seclusion, um, and I won't read the definitions, uh, but really restraint is, uh, mobilizing or reducing the
00;29;12;15 ability of the child to move by holding them. Um, there's also a form of restraint that's called mechanical restraint, and that's the use of some kind of device or equipment. Um, and looking at seclusion, it's the involuntary confinement of, uh, of, of, um, of a student alone in a room. So it's, it's really basically putting a child in a room without the ability to get out. So locking the door or physically, uh, standing in the way of the door and holding the door closed so they can't get out. Next
00;29;40;55 slide please.
00;29;44;41 [Shantel Meek]: So if we look at the data, we know that 86,000 children were physically restrained in a, in a single school year. Um, we, the, the government accountability office, uh, uh, released a report on abuses of seclusion and restraint, uh, in the last several years. And this is just an excerpt, uh, from that report that finds, that said a four year old girl who was restrained to a wooden chair with leather straps to resemble an electric chair was later diagnosed with PTSD. The catalyst for
00;30;16;46 the restraint was uncooperative behavior, and there are many, many stories, um, as disturbing as this one in that GAO report and in several kinds of investigative reporting, uh, that's been conducted ever since. Um, just recently, um, a young boy, a 16 year old boy, um, was killed, um, after being restrained by several staff members, uh, and not being able to breathe for throwing, uh, a piece of food in the cafeteria was the catalyst
00;30;49;40 19 States have no limits on restraint of children and 12 States have no limits for restraint, even for children with disabilities. Next slide please. So if we look at seclusion again, this is kind of solitary confinement for young children. We see that 36,000 children was secluded in a single school year. We know that with many of these or there may be reporting issues, uh,
00;31;14;56 that, that actually under count, um, the, the phenomenon, but here is another kind of, um, excerpt from that same, uh, GAO report that found that a boy with a learning disability in elementary school was locked into a seclusion room, 75 times over a six month period for multiple hours at a time. The reason cited for this occlusion, all of those different times included things like whistling, slouching, and hand-waving just recently the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica released an investigative report looking
00;31;48;00 at the use of seclusion in schools in Illinois. Um, and I'll quote from the article. It said children were sent to isolation after refusing to do classwork for swearing, for spilling milk, for throwing Legos school employees used isolated timeout, just what they call them, the quiet rooms for convenience out of frustration, or as punishment sometimes referring to
00;32;10;50 it as serving time. And next slide, please.
00;32;18;43 [Shantel Meek]: So when we look at seclusion policies across the country, here's what we find. Um, I think the main takeaway here is that blue key, right? The blue States are the States that ban seclusion outright. And when I, what I just described, right, there's only two States in the entire country that bands occlusion outright. Some States ban seclusion for children with disabilities. Some States limit seclusion for children with disabilities. Some States explicitly limits occlusion for all children, um, and, and really narrow it down for incidents involving a
00;32;52;30 serious safety threat. Next slide please. So here is part of our, our policy agenda, right? And we'd refer you to the full report because these recommendations are only a sampling of what is in the full policy agenda, but I'll go over some of the key findings here and recommendations. We wanted to ensure that all of our recommendations were, were actionable and
00;33;17;12 specific and concrete. So we'll start with the Congress, uh, peace congressional piece. The first thing that we recommend is really passing legislation, uh, discipline reform legislation that would end corporal punishment and seclusion and exclusionary discipline, and with limit restraint and put appropriate parameters around its use across all programs that serve young children and receive federal funding. We recommend making some changes, uh, when Ida, the individuals with education, uh, disabilities education act, uh, comes
00;33;51;22 up for reauthorization addressing the issue of suspension and addressing the issue of seclusion and restraint within there as well. Um, and in particular eliminating that 10 day allowance, uh, that, uh, that gives schools and districts, the ability to kind of expel or suspend children with disabilities for 10 days at a time. And seclusion and restraint is largely silent in the law. Um, increased funding for mental health interventions and for mental health and social, emotional, uh, personnel,
00;34;22;04 and really looking at prioritizing children's mental health and positive school climate over unitive discipline in budgets, such as school resource officers.
00;34;31;41 [Shantel Meek]: When we look at federal agencies, um, one of the first ones that we bring up is kind of using that bully pulpit and that national stage to raise awareness and continue raising awareness about the negative impacts of harsh discipline and the rights that families have, uh, to, uh, to, to kind of fight the disproportion and the disparate impact of these things. Um, increasing, tying federal funds to state progress on reducing and reducing arts discipline and disparities in their use reinstating guidance that discourages the use of exclusionary discipline
00;35;03;05 and addresses and investigates racial disparities, and really requiring States to report the use of harsh discipline and its disproportionate application in childcare settings, which is a major data gap right now. When we look at States, you know, some of these recommended recommendations are nested. So we see, we recommend similarly prohibiting corporal punishment, seclusion, exclusionary, discipline, and learning settings that serve young children, investing in data systems and professional
00;35;32;15 development. And we tie those two things together because tracking the data and tracking desegregated data and disparities kind of on a real time, uh, in a, in a rapid cycle and being able to feed those data back into professional development and policy change at the local state and local level, we think is really critical to addressing this issue. Um, and the other piece is developing infrastructure to receive, investigate and act on parent complaints. Uh, in, in too many places, there is no place and no system and
00;36;04;37 no infrastructure for parents, um, to, to send in grievances and to kind of, um, make the case and, and appeal and things like that. And so we recommend developing a, some sort of infrastructure, including potentially, uh, child protective service infrastructure and expanding that to include, um, abuses that happen at school. Um, finally, if we look at the district recommendations again, they're nested, um, banning harsh discipline, even
00;36;33;53 in States where it remains legal.
00;36;35;19 [Shantel Meek]: So even if districts reside within a state where corporal punishment is legal, it doesn't mean they have to do it. They can, uh, implement their own policies to not do it. Um, ensuring that young children, again, this seems like quite low hanging fruit, and unfortunately we have to say it anyway, but ensuring that young children never have negative interactions with school resource officers via intimidation, inappropriate restraint, handcuffing, or arrest, we have seen, um, more than more than we should ever see of cases of kindergarteners and first
00;37;08;37 graders being handcuffed and actually put in police cars, um, police vehicles, and taken to the station for behavior that is either developmentally appropriate. And our search certainly be handled by a social emotional specialist or mental health specialist or special educator or other folks that can provide support as opposed to, um, causing that trauma. And the last piece I'll mention is investing in systems for
00;37;38;38 training, coaching, uh, and evaluating the use of positive discipline and anti-biased approaches, you'll see that theme across many of our recommendations bias and antiracism, and the effects of bias in perceiving behavior and in making discipline decisions has to be core 12 of our professional development, preparation and professional development ongoing on an ongoing basis. We can't think about behavior without thinking about bias because bias
00;38;06;49 colors the way in which we perceive behavior. And it affects the way that we make decisions and who, you know, what we decide based on each individual child. Um, so I will stop there and encourage folks to look at the full report for the fullest of recommendations that we make. Um, next slide please.
00;38;28;59 [Shantel Meek]: So now I am, it is just my distinct honor and pleasure to introduce and hand this over, uh, to chair Catherine E Lhamon.. Uh, Catherine Lhamon is the chair of the us commission on civil rights, a position she was appointed to by president Obama in 2016. She also serves in the cabinet of California, uh, California, governor Gavin Newsome, where she has been legal affairs secretary since January of 2019. She previously served as the assistant secretary for civil rights and oversaw all of the data collection that we talked about today, uh, at the
00;39;01;58 us department of education until January of 2017. Chair Lhamon, we'll hand it over to you.
00;39;08;48 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you so much, Dr. Meek, and I will say what a deep pleasure it is to see the civil rights data collection still in good use. So thank you for your presentation. Thank you to the children's equity project and the bipartisan policy center for bringing us here today to discuss school discipline as a key area of reform to achieve racial equity in education. The way school discipline is imposed in pools around the country has been a longstanding concern for parents, educators and civil rights advocates for decades. I am so grateful to see this important issue
00;39;38;29 given attention in the report you issued this month discussed alongside other critical issues and equitable education opportunities for all students. This report that we discussed today is embracing and what it tells us about the state of school discipline for children across the firms. What I have seen throughout my civil rights work, including from the U S commission on civil rights, 2019 report on civil rights issues relating to discipline of students of color with disabilities.
00;40;06;42 [Catherine Lhamon]: The very first desegregation agreements, the federal department of education's office for civil rights was initially created to secure and enforce in the middle 1960s included disparities in school discipline as core components of their desegregation work. All those years ago, racially disparate school discipline was a feature, not an aberration of segregated school. And so I am especially glad to see the strong recommendations in this report consistent with commission recommendations
00;40;37;18 specifically on school discipline, as well as generally on federal civil rights enforcement crawling for federal agencies to reinstate federal discipline guidance that discourages the use of exclusionary discipline and promotes positive school climates and mental health supports the office for civil rights appropriate role. The one Congress has assigned to it now for six decades is to investigate facts and where at determines that the law has been violated to work with schools, to ensure that they operate
00;41;04;45 nondiscriminatory going forward. OCR has mandate is to open for investigation, any complaint over which it has jurisdiction that mandate now means. And historically has been that OCR investigates, hundreds of complaints, alleging discrimination in school discipline practices on the basis of race and disability, and specifically about the use of restraint and seclusion rules. So glad to see the recommendations to direct more funding towards support for students like counselors, social workers, training for educators, consistent with one of
00;41;38;25 the commission's primary recommendations as well. And I want to emphasize to you all what I know from the commission's investigations, and also as the former chief civil rights enforcer in the nation schools in the Obama administration, finally, as a mom of two girls in public schools, when discrimination is visible and unchecked in our schools, we send a message to all our kids that it is permissible. When students see that students of color are more likely to receive exclusionary discipline for behaviors,
00;42;09;29 white students engage in who do not receive like discipline for students learn.
00;42;15;09 [Catherine Lhamon]: And our schools reinforce discrimination that has for six decades been legally anathema in our nation. We owe it to them and we owe it to ourselves to correct that pattern and instruct our students consistent with our lawful values. With that. We'll now turn to our panel is quite distinguished and which includes Dr. Rosemarie Allen assistant professor in the school of education at metropolitan state university of Denver and founder and CEO of the Institute for racial equity and
00;42;45;52 excellence and Dr. Kent McIntosh professor in the department of special education and clinical sciences at the university of Oregon and director of education and community supports that Walter Gilliam, professor of child psychiatry and psychology at the Yale university child study center and the director of the Edward Wigler center in child development and social policy and Dr. Tunette Powell, director, UCLA parent curriculum project. For those joining us online, please submit your questions for the panelists using the
00;43;17;24 live chat function on YouTube Facebook, or on Twitter with the hashtag BPC live, or start with equity. I'll begin with a question for all of our panelists, and I'm going to begin with Dr. Allen, and I'll just let those who are joining us online, know that we'll monitor the questions, and then when it's time to open for those questions, I'll be able to go through the questions that have come in and share them. So beginning with Dr. Allen, can you contextualize the findings and policy agenda in the start with equity report with the current uprising
00;43;46;26 against social justice in this country that we're in the midst of in your view, is this time different? And if so, what do we have to do to maintain the issue of harsh discipline on the agenda for reform? And after Dr. Allen goes, you go to all of the panelists. Thank you. Thank
00;44;03;00 [Rosemarie Allen]: You so much. I, in my view, I do believe that this time is different. As we see people taking to the street demanding justice, after the murder of George Floyd, we're seeing things that we've not yet seen, that we've not seen before. The protest itself is not new, but I believe the multiracial multigenerational approach is very, very new. And I believe what happened is that there was this perfect storm of COVID-19 and
00;44;37;12 what we witnessed on television with George Floyd, COVID-19 had us in our homes unable to turn away from the death, from the murder that we've witnessed. We actually saw George Lloyd take his last breath right before he called out to his mom who had died 18 months earlier, what we have to
00;45;06;41 understand is what happened to George Floyd. Isn't unusual in this country, Shantel, Dr. Meek talked about what happens in early childhood environment and the soil was fertilized for what happened to George Floyd early in our early childhood programs and early childhood programs. We have future doctors, future lawyers, future police officers, and they're
00;45;34;23 learning in our early childhood programs right now. Who's dispensable. Who's not who's valued, who is not. And when we look at what, what is also happening in our programs is based on research. We know that as early as three, four and five years old, young children, especially black and Brown boys are subjected to adult suffocation. So they are always assumed to be
00;46;03;59 up to five, I'm sorry, 4.5 years older than they are. So an early childhood, they lose this precious gift of innocence. So they're thought to be more, more culpable or a criminal. So if they're already seen as more criminal F four, imagine what happens at 14 at 24 at 34, and where they're also thought to be more of a threat and more aggressive. If they're bigger
00;46;35;09 right here in Colorado, you look at the case of Elijah McLean who was thought to be over 220 pounds, and he's 140 and lost his life at the hands of police officers. So yes, this time it's different, but it's not new address these issues early. Then we won't be our today's preschoolers won't tomorrow's protestors
00;47;00;05 [Rosemarie Allen]: Because we will have taken care of this issue.
00;47;03;56 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you, Dr. Allen, we can try next to Dr. Mackintosh. Okay. Dr. Mackintosh, I think you're on mute. So we see you talking, but we can't hear you. We still can't hear you. I'm able to hear you. Maybe I'll I'll, I'll pause on that. And we'll turn to professor Gilliam and we'll come back, see if we can get your sound
00;47;32;33 working, professor Gilliam.
00;47;36;01 [Walter Gilliam]: Well, I mean, it's a great question in terms of what's different now, I, um, I don't really remember much of the sixties and it was only when the sixties finished know a lot of folks who do remember the sixties and what they tell me is the diversity of those who are protests and the diversity of the voices that they're hearing from. Um, and, and there's hope in that. I, um, I find myself hopeful by myself, hopeful that that will be different now because it's us. And maybe that's a
00;48;10;50 bit egotistical for me to be thinking that way about us in general, but you know, every, every moment has an us and, and how that moment turns out of that moment, it's going to depend on what people who are in that moment and whether they recognize we are in a moment right now, but it's a moment
00;48;30;32 about a problem that we've had on our soil here for over 400 years. I'm glad that you mentioned career chair, Oman, uh, the history of the civil rights, but the history of course, of, of African American experience in United States goes back for centuries. And of those four centuries, those 400 years, 350 of them almost were spent in either slavery or segregation. We've had our 50th, those years spent when it was illegal in most places for black children to go to school, illegal for them to have a book illegal for them to become literate. And then another hundred years of
00;49;08;47 it's where, where it was in quicker data schooling, or there were far less opportunity provided for them. And only recently, any effort to change any of that. And then to find ourselves with that kind of history now, expel children. Why is the right preschool programs? If they're African-American I find it just completely intolerable. I mean, just the notion. I mean, you could spend 350 years systematically denying opportunity to African
00;49;40;35 American children. Then when we create preschool programs to give them opportunity two times over, it's build them up the back, out the back door, just absolutely just I'm speaking in terms of what that means and the, that, that,
00;49;55;04 [Walter Gilliam]: That, that we absolutely have to solve this. When we're talking about exposure, we're talking about a civil rights issue here. We're talking about access, access to opportunity. Preschool programs are about opportunity. And when we talk about denying children, an opportunity to be able to participate in these programs, that's a denial of access, and that is most definitely a civil rights issue. You want me to
00;50;28;25 keep going? I can keep going.
00;50;31;59 [Catherine Lhamon]: I wanted to turn to Dr. Powell and answer this question if we could.
00;50;36;21 [Tunette Powell]: Uh, yes. So, uh, first off you take time to uplift the families who are watching, who have experienced this, who continue to live and experience this because this is, you know, as their real lives, it's what they deal with. It is the trauma that free day in and day out. So I want to lift them up and I'm not as hopeful as Dr. Allen, but I want to be. And I say that because as I watch what's happening all around the
00;51;06;10 country, and we think about Taylor and Tony McDade, and we think about George Floyd and we are horrified, and we're in a moment where we want to do something. I'm just hoping that we will not only focus in silo. Um, our thing that we will be able to see how that violence that we saw in the video of George Floyd is also happening in schools in a different way that we're able to see that there are so many systems of violence and we have to
00;51;37;56 dismantle all of them. And so sometimes, um, you know, the mother and me, the, the scholar in me who has done this and the educator and me loses hope at times, because we tend to look outside of education. These things are bad. Schools are these great equalizers, but we know that from the report and from tons of reports that we've had over and over again, that schools
00;52;02;06 are also spaces and sites of trauma. And there is a violence there.
00;52;09;35 [Catherine Lhamon]: Maybe we can see if Dr. McIntosh will be able to hear you this time.
00;52;13;44 [Kent McIntosh]: So that's, you know, I can't imagine saying anything better than what doctors Allen Gilliam and Powell said. I do see this as a fleeting opportunity. So, um, I think that while there's this momentum, uh, we need to take it and move with it.
00;52;37;19 [Catherine Lhamon]: So let's, let's use that for this conversation. And I hope that each of you, and, and why don't I start with Dr. Powell for this, this question, but I hope that each of you could personalize what we've been talking about. We had a lot of data that, that we heard in the initial presentation. Thank you so much for that. That data is so critical for us to have that our eyes open to, to what, what this problem is that we need to solve. But let's also talk about a child, an educator, a school situation, uh, that, that, uh, you are fee in the work that you do so that we can, we can bring this conversation to the, to the specifics of who the
00;53;07;39 kids are and what the educational experiences are that, that we're trying to work on. So, Dr. Powell, could you start us off?
00;53;14;36 [Tunette Powell]: Sure, absolutely. And I know I'll, I'll tell, uh, for the sake of time there was, you know, in my most recent work, I interviewed across country sample of parents, of black parents who all had a young child, suspend it for some parents, their children were suspended, you know, to go for some, it was over the last couple of school years. And there was one parent who is in the Texas area. And her son was suspended when he was two years old. And, you know, people say, well, Oh my gosh, two
00;53;47;03 years old, been off the chain, but it was not that at all. He took his clothes off and they sent him home. And I think this notion that Dr. Allen was talking about, about, um, the innocence that is robbed of young black boys and girls, most impressionable in earliest stages of their lives, that the appropriateness of a two year old taking their clothes off could be perceived as something that you needed to be sent home for is something
00;54;14;35 that is startling and is heartbreaking.
00;54;17;34 [Tunette Powell]: Um, and you know, another story that I'll share, and this story is I share this because it was so long ago, there was a mother in my study who son was suspended about 25. And I shared this story because when I interviewed her over the 2018 a year, she's sharing this story as if it was yesterday. And she is talking about what she carried on as a grown
00;54;47;23 person who has gone on with his life is no longer in the home, but she kept talking about the poetry that she was writing. And in her poetry, there was this loss of self. There was this loss of commonality that has, there was these feelings of powerlessness even to this day. And so when we talk about what this means, thinking about the souls behind the statistics is incredibly important for us because we have a two year old that was taking off his clothes. We have parents that have to live with these type of situations, and they
00;55;21;08 have no power to be able to appeal these processes, even though they try, they have, you know, they have to deal with the internal battle of losing, shifting an identity where they went from thinking they were doing a good job to believe in that they are bad parents. They are they're damaging, right? There's damage done to those most intimate bonds and relationships that they have with their children and other family members while they're pushing through, we celebrate that resilience, but we shouldn't have to
00;55;49;00 keep surviving these systems that are meant to build us nurture care for our kids. And so I share those stories because I want us to think about digital trauma, but the collective trauma and the experience of young children being suspended and pushed out of school.
00;56;07;17 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thanks so much. Maybe we can turn to Dr. Gilliam
00;56;11;52 [Walter Gilliam]: Sure. I mean, there's, there's so many, so many stories that you can tell, you know, so I'll tell you about, about one story. So there was this, um, there was this child who was three years old and he came to a preschool program. I know about this because I was, I was involved in the, in the story, uh, trying to work with the childcare program because they were concerned about this child. And what does this three year old child did? Was he, um, as soon as he enrolled in the childcare program, he would have this tendency at nap, time to crawl up in his teacher's lap and curl up into a ball. And some of the times he would
00;56;45;07 lay there in the teacher's lap and just fall asleep during, during, during that time, or during the time when the teacher was reading a book to all your, the children, but some days the child would crawl up in the teacher's lap. And instead of falling asleep, he'd look up at her and look her in the eyes and punch her in the face. And the teacher never really knew, which was going to happen on any given day. And the teacher was, was, was wanting to
00;57;12;04 keep the child in the program, but wasn't a, wasn't sure how to do this. And she was, she wasn't sure what to do. And so, um, so I got involved and we, we, we met with the family. I met with the family and I, and I tried to find out some of the story. And the story was that, um, for this child, this child, um, um, was, was, was brought to the child's biological father and, um, introduced to him at about three years old. And I'm told that, um,
00;57;45;02 this is your child, and can you watch him? I have an emergency and I'll be right back.
00;57;49;41 [Walter Gilliam]: But for whatever reason, mom never came back. And so the child ended up staying with the, uh, with his biological father and his biological father, his wife, and they both had jobs and they needed the childcare. And so they enrolled me in a childcare program. And, um, it's, it's one of those stories where if you don't understand the backstory of the stress that was happening in the life of this child might not make sense what this child was doing. But when you understand some of the
00;58;20;46 backstory, you might realize that this is a child who is three years old. We're talking about a baby here. And this child is barely out of diapers. We're talking about a child who misses his mother. And at the same time is very angry about his mother and the closest thing to mother at that time. And that program was this childcare provider who was taking care Of him. And some of the times he wanted to curl up in her lap. Well, some of the times you wanted to haul off and hit her. And I'm not saying that
00;58;50;44 knowing the backstory, she fixes the problem, but certainly knowing something about the stress that children are going through, or the families are going through, or even the childcare providers going through can sometimes give us the tools that we need in order to be able to come up with solutions. And if not, give us the tools that we need to come up with solutions, hopefully at least give us what we need to have a little empathy. And to realize that this is not an easy thing for providers,
00;59;19;16 there's probably not an easy thing for that child either. And it's not an easy thing for that family. And so in a way, what I, I think I've told you is not a story about a child who was expelled. Like I told you a story about a child who probably would have been under a lot of other normal circumstances in this case, because we knew more about the story because we cared to find out this child wasn't.
00;59;42;26 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you. Maybe we could turn to Dr. McIntosh. Okay.
00;59;46;35 [Kent McIntosh]: Sure. I'll, I'll tell a slightly different story, um, of a black school principal, who I know who has regularly seen the school to prison pipeline coming through his way in terms of the students who are sent to his office for discipline. And, um, I think one of the things that's most hurtful or painful is, uh, being on the receiving end of these students who are being excluded from instruction, being asked for what to do, and also working in a school district where he is one of very
01;00;22;03 few administrators of color, um, and is being expected to, uh, follow through with a disciplinary code that he doesn't necessarily agree with. And, um, you know, when it comes down to the question of, uh, who is he trying to protect and who, um, does he need to comfort and discomfort? There's the challenge of not being able to speak openly and directly about,
01;00;52;33 uh, equity in school, discipline about equity and classroom practices and being the person who is carrying out a unfair and unequitable school discipline practices.
01;01;08;12 [Catherine Lhamon]: Dr. Allen, could you bring us home on this question?
01;01;11;17 [Rosemarie Allen]: Absolutely. I'm thinking of course. And Dr. Gilliam Said there are so many stories, but one that's just really coming to mind for me today is the story of an African American boy named Riley four years old, who was first suspended for kissing and hugging a girl. And it wasn't enough that he was suspended, but it was the labeling of the behavior that he was sexually harassing this young lady. And then the label stuck with
01;01;42;18 him. So that every time he was near a girl touched a girl, played with the girl, the mother was called over and over and over again. And what was so painful was to see this family begin to even question their own child. Do you think we need to put him in counseling? Is his behavior abnormal? Should I be concerned that he is interacting with these girls?
01;02;10;04 [Rosemarie Allen]: And it was amazing because in our organization, parents call us when they have these issues. And I went to observe the child in the classroom and he played with boys and girls almost equally, but anytime he became very close to a girl rather than play or whatever the teachers, it was like, they were hyper focused whenever he was near a little girl. And they had basically, again, using that adultification, robbing him of his innocence hyper-sexualized and his behavior, they
01;02;41;50 labeled him and he couldn't escape it. And we see these behaviors over and over. He ended up being suspended twice for them. Sexual harassment is what they called it. But of course he was too young to be referred to the police, but it was really, really unfortunate the way that this child was hyper-sexualized. And adultified just being a boy playing with both boys and girls in his childcare facility.
01;03;09;53 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you. Our next question, I'll also ask all of the panelists and this time just a fair warning. I'll start with Dr. Gilliam, the policy recommendations in the report that we're discussing today are very detailed and extensive, which I delight in. Uh, and I wonder if Right, One of the recommendations that you think is highest priority for you or the key priority for you for how we move forward in an equity agenda on this topic. So Dr. Gilliam, will you Start us
01;03;37;59 [Walter Gilliam]: Great building off of my good friend, Dr. Allen, we have another story from about 25 years ago, 30 years ago, when I was doing this kind of work directly in childcare programs. I got a call from a childcare program because they were worried about this African American boy that they were saying, the teachers were saying, like to play with the dolls naked and like to make them do things. And I said, well, what do you
01;04;08;38 mean do things? And they said, well, do things with the naked dolls, come out here and take a look. And I took a look and I watched the child for about an hour or two hours playing with dolls and playing with other types of things, all sorts of things in the classroom that a lot of other children would do. And he indeed like to play
01;04;35;25 [Walter Gilliam]: With the dolls and he would make them walk together and do things like go to the store, go play here or talk to each other. And of course, you know, the teachers were right that the child was playing with the dolls and they were naked. Um, and then just on a whim, I decided to go walk around the classroom and I have to report back to you. Um, there were no clothes in that classroom for these girls to be wearing. These holes were naked because literally would literally not a stitch of clothes to be found to put on the dolls. And so it was interesting how, how that
01;05;10;40 play took on a certain meaning for those teachers in that moment. When in fact the reality of that play was probably very, very different. And that brings me to the answer to your question, or at least my answer to your question in terms of what I think are the two best recommendations. And they're both about harsh discipline. And one of them is to one stop doing that, just stop doing it, stop kicking kids out of preschool
01;05;36;18 programs, but to, to do something else invest in early childhood mental health consultation systems where people can come into a childcare program and work directly with the teachers and be able to see what's going on and give them feedback and help them be able to maybe see circumstances in a different way, or to be able to form a better, stronger relationship with parents work to invest in, in positive behavioral interventions like Dr. Kent Macintosh can talk to us about anything. The, the, the idea behind
01;06;08;20 this is that preschool, expulsion and suspension, and even corporal punishment. These are not solutions. These are non solutions. This is what we do when we don't know what else to do. And the tragic about that is that we do know what else to do. We just don't invest in it. And instead we kick these children out of these programs in order to appear in some other program later on down the road, um, preschool childcare programs are not
01;06;36;06 Las Vegas. What happens in preschool does not stay in preschool. Uh, when we treat children in this way where they're disposable, when they're two, three, four years old, that sticks with them, and that's going to be the way in which they see themselves in the relationship to school, probably for the rest of their educational career. Thank you,
01;06;58;15 [Catherine Lhamon]: Dr. Allen, can we hear from you?
01;07;00;49 [Rosemarie Allen]: Um, yes. And I appreciate so much for Dr. Gillian's that, and I think the first rule, the recommendations is do no harm. We are doing harm these, the interventions, the harsh discipline, exclusionary, discipline, seclusion, and restraint. They just don't work. So again, like he said, stop doing it. What I absolutely love about this report is the supports, the recommended supports for staff and for children. Um, the
01;07;29;18 focus on mental health. I also Love that it's multilevel. So we go from Congress to federal institutions, to state level implement recommendations to local and school district recommendations, and they're all aligned. So we can start high and low start low and high, do what you can, where you can so that we can stop this
01;07;54;35 insidious practice of doing harm, especially to our youngest children.
01;08;02;04 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you, Dr. Mcintosh, how about you?
01;08;05;54 [Kent McIntosh]: I agree with those entirely. I think one of the things that we want to watch out for is spending so much time on what not to do that we don't actually equip our educators, uh, with the skills to actually, uh, build positive relationships with students, be clear about what we want from them, teach them the skills that they need to be successful. And I think about, uh, some of the direct work that I was doing earlier on is a much easier, better, and more effective way to do it.
01;08;39;38 Instead of just saying, here's what not to do, give them the tools that they need and give them invest in a system of coaching so that they are able to put those into practice and have people come in and be able to consult with them on, on what it looks like, fit it to their classroom, fit it to their situations, uh, and, uh, and be supported in the work instead
01;09;03;39 of blamed for a lack of, um, possible options for discipline.
01;09;11;16 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you, Dr. Powell, thank you.
01;09;15;18 [Tunette Powell]: Uh, I think I agree with all at what everybody has said here. I think that number one, yes, we need to stop doing it. I think that, you know, that has been, you know, suspension and expulsion has have been lazy responses to behavior. I also think that this point about and indifferent training for educators is extremely important. It always amazes me, especially in the early childhood education setting, how many educators have never heard the term implicit bias? And so we have a lot of work too,
01;09;48;51 because some of the work that's being done around, how do we support a behavior of young people and how do we respond more at a developmentally appropriate age? It's important work, but it doesn't allow us to think about when children are doing things that are fine. They don't need a response, but educators still see them as older than they are. Um, as more, you know, guilty and less innocent. And some of these things that continue
01;10;16;14 to play our system have to be able to deal with what happens when a child did nothing wrong. And it was simply on the part of adults because of some of the implicit in at times explicit bias, we have to have something in place to be able to deal with it.
01;10;33;39 [Catherine Lhamon]: I'm going to come back to you with a question, but I want to just say, we're coming close to the time when I'm going to open up for questions from our audience. And so I just want to remind folks, I'm seeing questions come in. I'm very grateful for it, but for others, you can use the live chat on YouTube and Facebook. And on Twitter, if you use the hashtag BPC live or start with equity, we'll see the questions and then I can feed them up for us. But now coming back to you, you wrote an op net a few years ago that I see at the time and I've carried with me since it was
01;11;03;58 incredibly meaningful that you talked about your experience as a parent of a child who had experienced this kind of discipline. And I wonder if you could share a bit about that with us today?
01;11;14;33 [Tunette Powell]: Yeah, absolutely. 2014 is never far away from my mind. Uh, you know, my two oldest sons, they were three and four years old in 2014 and they were both suspended from school and it was something that rocked my world. I want to get a PhD and study this. It was, I probably, you know, I experienced so many different emotions and for me, and I also see this with parents because my children were so young, I wanted to carry a lot and I wanted to protect the innocence that they still did have left.
01;11;49;22 So, you know, when my oldest son was suspended and I remember it was a, he was at the breakfast table at his early childcare center and he was crying. It said, if you're crying, you have to leave the breakfast table because you can spread germs. So they made him leave and he pushed a chair. And because of that reaction, right, being told to leave and then pushing a chair, he was suspended. I'll never forget when I wrote that piece in 2014,
01;12;18;00 all of the comments from people around the country saying, you know, your son, he's going to end up in a prison. You're probably just a single mother on welfare. Your baby's dad is in, um, something's wrong with your son mentally. And again, this is what we do, right? We, we say, you know, that if a child, a young child is being suspended, then it must be something wrong with that child. It must be something wrong with that. You put black
01;12;44;11 in there. That mother must be single. She must be on welfare because two parents and two parent homes that are middle class, or, you know, beyond middle-class, this doesn't happen. That is what we begin to tell, um, tell about what's happening and who it's happening to.
01;13;00;26 [Tunette Powell]: And so it was very difficult for me because I internalize my experience as I must be a bad parent. And especially as someone who was also suspended and expelled and Charlie out of their early childhood education spell from preschool. And so it was a very difficult time for me. And if it had not been for the data that was also released in 2014, from the office of civil, I might've stayed in that place. And that's why this report is important because as soon as that data was released, which is around the same time people were sending it to me. And it was this
01;13;32;30 moment where I said, I'm not the only one. My kids are not the only one. So I wanted to start doing work around this. And I started supporting other parents that is the power of data. And being able to share these reports is that we were no longer alone. And that was important for my work. It was important for my story.
01;13;52;59 [Catherine Lhamon]: I just want to tell you my, my personal thanks to you. I ran the office for civil rights at the time. And, uh, I'm very, very grateful that you have taken that Baton and shared it with so many other people. And I'm glad that the data reporting, uh, what's helpful to you and it's helpful in the country as well. And that same hopeful note, when I asked Dr. McIntosh and past you, you run that, uh, national center on PPIs and have I hope and ideas about some, some of the good working progress that PPIs, which is the model that most often gets lifted up as an
01;14;25;18 alternative to exclusionary school discipline. I hope that you could share with us some of the kinds of principles that you know, to work and are available to schools.
01;14;35;15 [Kent McIntosh]: Absolutely. Thank you. So we know from multiple studies that if you implement PBIS positive behavioral interventions and supports with fidelity, you can actually decrease. We've seen two studies showing decreases in disciplinary inequities or disproportionality in exclusions. Um, however they don't get rid of them entirely. And so we have an equity work group that has been working, um, for the past six years on developing free resources for educators and
01;15;07;32 administrators and district and state administrators for putting, um, uh, effective, but also feasible strategies in place to do that. And now we've got multiple examples, uh, across the country of, uh, schools implementing, uh, the approaches that we look at. So we talk about looking at, uh, using discipline data, not just to identify the extent of disparities, but also to identify specific situations where educators and administrators are more
01;15;39;59 likely to be disproportionate than others. Um, and that changes things up a whole lot. When we were able to say, under these circumstances, this time of day, these specific behaviors, these settings in the school, you're able to make equitable decisions. And under this set of circumstances, you're making inequitable decisions where your implicit or explicit biases are influencing the decisions that you make. Um, so that in combination with,
01;16;08;40 um, implementing cultural, responsive elements of classroom management, including, uh, giving students and families voice in what their education look like, Uh, and then also training responses for neutralizing implicit bias or bias harsh responses in the classroom. So you can find all of those for free on
01;16;31;35 our equity page, on pbis.org.
01;16;36;17 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thanks so much. I'm going to turn to questions that have been coming in and just remind folks who are participating again, that you can use the chat function on YouTube and on Facebook to submit your questions. And also on Twitter, we will look for them, but here are a couple of questions that have come in first Leigh Ann Courville was asking, uh, she wonders if we also have data on native American students in the early childhood years or where we might find that. And I will just take a pause to say that I know that the civil rights data collection does include that data. And if you go and Google CRDC data, you will be able to find
01;17;08;47 that, and I'll invite the other panelists. If you have specific topics or thoughts about native American students and their experience in this area, I'd love to have you speak to that. I'm going to also just turn to one of the questions so that we use our time efficiently. And this question comes from Alan Guttman and he's asking, could you please speak to the intersection of corporal punishment and educator caregiver requirements under mandated child abuse reporting laws. So I will invite our panelists to speak to both topics, if you can. And maybe Dr. Allen, we could start
01;17;39;50 with you, Dr. Allen.
01;17;50;58 [Rosemarie Allen]: I often say that educators can abuse children actually hit children with weapons in our schools with impunity. If parents did exactly the same thing, then teachers would be required to report them to social services. And schools are the last institutions in America where you can actually abuse children. You can't do it in youth corrections. You can't do it in our penal system. There there's no place else and no other institution where you can hit children, literally with a wooden weapon,
01;18;24;19 leave marks and cause harm in not be subjected to any consequences for it.
01;18;32;19 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Gilliam.
01;18;37;08 [Walter Gilliam]: Well, I want to go back to the question if I can about native Americans and to be able to say that when we first came out with our report on preschool expulsion and children being expelled from preschool programs, and that was a report that was released back in 2005, one of the very first groups to respond to it with any degree of policy regarding how they're going to approach this and what they thought about it and the need to reduce the likelihood of expulsion and preschool programs was the Eastern band of the Cherokee nation. They jumped on top of it
01;19;11;25 really quickly and saw that indeed, that's something that happens within the native American population of these, for Eastern band Cherokee. And we're highly involved in it. We oftentimes forget our native American children and families in these kinds of analyses, but, uh, they have, they have, uh, specific, specific vulnerabilities and needs that we absolutely need to be taken into consideration. And I'm glad that the office of civil
01;19;39;24 rights under, under your watch chair, um, was, was, was making sure that we were keeping track of information on them.
01;19;49;33 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thanks so much. Thanks so much Dr. Powell,
01;19;53;24 [Tunette Powell]: Oh, I don't want to add anything to that. You know, just the after, um, adding, say I agree, both of those things. I think that when it comes to, you know, native American students, early child education, we know that there's also a, um, there are also huge disparities when we think about,
01;20;09;44 [Tunette Powell]: Um, school suspension and expulsion. So yeah, Everything that a doctor and yeah, I don't want to add anything else.
01;20;18;04 [Catherine Lhamon]: So I will jump in on that. You said the benefit of the work I've seen on this both in my time at the commission and also before then, when I was at black for civil rights in the Trump administration, the office for civil rights, uh, closed a, uh, an investigation of, of discrimination against native American students in a California school and concluded that the students were subject to exclusionary school, discipline and rates that, um, did not coincide with our white peers in school. They were a pretty small number of the students in the school and a very large proportion of the students who were
01;20;48;28 subjected to exclusionary school discipline. They also were not offered, uh, supports for behaviors that were, um, discipline, uh, disability based, even though the teachers were over and over and over asking for those kinds of supports and evaluations for the students in school. So, uh, those, those kinds of harms for those students that violate our core federal civil rights laws. And I've been grateful to see that the office for civil rights and the current administration continues to enforce important ways on that topic. So the question about how this, this experience occurs for native American students is current present and
01;21;20;09 deeply harmful in the, in the kinds of ways that we are seeing for other students as well. So I just wanted to make sure to lift that up, but, uh, Dr. McIntosh, did you want to speak to the first question as well or the second?
01;21;32;20 [Kent McIntosh]: Oh, I, I would only add, um, the smallest little bit in that, uh, in those States that allow corporal punishment. We have information in the, um, policy guide to say, there's no reason why you can't as a district restrict or end corporal punishment. And, uh, I think we're beyond the time when we think that hitting children is an acceptable response.
01;21;59;48 [Catherine Lhamon]: Very much agree with that. Thank you, Dr. Gilliam, you, you, uh, public the first study about 15 years ago of the, uh, early childhood discipline and disparities and harms that can follow from it. I wonder if you could just share with us what, what prompted that work then and what has changed in the intervening decade and a half? Uh, what, what has not changed on where you think we are with respect to that?
01;22;23;22 [Walter Gilliam]: Well, it was, it was a really 15 years ago meeting over before my own eyes, like a long time ago, in a way it seems like a very long time ago. It was, you know, it really wasn't even a study of, of, of, of expulsion. It was supposed to be a study of how preschool programs were being implemented across the nation. And it so happened that while we were getting ready to be this nationwide study of how the preschool
01;22;53;07 programs were being implemented across arising child, psychiatrists, and psychologists and social workers, learning how to work with young children and I couldn't help. But notice when I was on the other side of those two way, mirrors watching people cry to learn how to work with young children, that many of the children coming into our clinic at Yale for evaluations were sent to us at three and four years old because they've been kicked out of a preschool program where, because where they were told that if they don't go to a place like Yale and get an evaluation, that they will be
01;23;21;46 kicked out of the preschool program.
01;23;23;17 [Walter Gilliam]: And so I had no idea how common this was very much like what Dr. Powell was saying before. If you don't know, then you certainly don't know, because this is not an issue that anyone's bragging about. Parents don't brag about it. Nobody has a bumper sticker that says proud parent of an expelled preschool, and no teachers going around talking about how glad that they were, that they kicked a child out of school. They don't want to do it either. They do it because they don't know what else to do. And so this is one of those silent issues. And, but I was seeing it
01;23;53;50 because we were seeing the fallout. Um, and so we just literally threw some additional questions into this big national study. And in the end, that's what, that's, what drove the entire study, because we found, we found something that we really didn't expect to find, which was that in preschool programs, largely programs in public schools, like two thirds of these were in the public schools, were expelling children at a rate more than three times that a grades K through 12 combined. And that's just incredible director three and four year olds. We're talking
01;24;25;02 about children who have been talking in sentences for a couple of years or barely out of diapers, and they're already being kicked out of school before they even get to school. You know, it's just, just, just mind boggling. And when we found that it, it changed my, my, uh, my career, because then, you know, before then I was mostly concerned about the quality of preschool programs and how do we get children into preschool programs, not being aware of the fact that there are forces within
01;24;53;11 preschool programs that kick them back out the back door and they kick them back out the door with prejudice, that more times the boys two and a half times or so, the right African American children. And if you're a boy and
01;25;07;58 [Walter Gilliam]: African-American, then you're at a much greater risk of being expelled. And so, you know, in terms of what's become different, you know, I wrestled sort of a lot more awareness around this and an awful lot of that I can, um, I can attribute to my good friends, Dr. Allen and Dr. Powell, uh, because they write about it and they present about it. And they tell the stories about this and the humanize, this, I mean, like one of the things that I love about Dr. Powell and the work that she does
01;25;37;39 talking about the parents' perspective of this is it humanizes the fact that we're talking about how children and families and the relationships. And I'll tell you really quickly, once I was never here, I never heard the story of a child who was expelled from preschool program when the teacher and the parents knew and liked each other. I just hardly ever hear that and finding some kind of a way through, through their work to be able to form
01;26;05;54 better relationships with parents and providers. I think that's the key.
01;26;11;50 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you. So we are closing on time. If you want to give Professor Meek a chance to close us out. So I'm gonna do a lightning round. If each of you could just do one finding that you want to make sure that our participants take home from this report, what would that finding be Dr. Powell, will you start us?
01;26;30;30 [Tunette Powell]: I think for me, I think it was this, um, this statistic that there is nowhere in the country where it is mandated, you know, that you have some form of antibiotic like that. So there are suggestions, uh, things like that, but there is nowhere in the country where that is mandated. And so that's something that I want people to stay focused on and think about as we think about next steps.
01;27;00;32 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Allen,.
01;27;05;02 [Rosemarie Allen]: What has touched me so much during this webinar is the fact that both Dr. Powell and I were both suspended from early childhood programs, and now we're looking at our children being suspended. So the takeaway is to ban exclusionary, discipline, seclusion, corporate punishment across the board and provide our early childhood workforce with the support that's needed so that they can actually enhance the development of young children.
01;27;34;19 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you, Dr. Mcintosh,.
01;27;37;47 [Kent McIntosh]: You know, the problem is widespread that's across the entire country. And I think the most important thing when you look into the report is that there are solutions. You can no longer sit back and say, we don't have anything that's been shown, you know, through rigorous research to increase racial equity in school discipline, we have it. So we just need to take the steps to fund it, support it, and put the systems in place To support our educators.
01;28;06;16 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you, Dr. Gilliam,.
01;28;09;17 [Walter Gilliam]: I think for me, the, the overarching finding even still today when education doesn't work, right, for whatever reason, it doesn't serve the needs of children and families. Our default understanding of that is that it must be something wrong with the child, get rid of the child or to hit the child. And we have to do better than that. That is not what education is about.
01;28;38;49 [Catherine Lhamon]: Thank you to all of these extraordinary panelists. And I will turn it back to Dr. Meek to close. Thank you very much for today.
01;28;47;38 [Shantel Meek]: Thank you, chair Lhamon, and thank you to our distinguished panel. You know, I think it's abundantly clear from what we found in our report and from what we heard on this panel, that we can't wait any longer, we're doing harm and the harm is disproportionate. Like so many other issues in our society is unfairly put on the shoulders of our black community. The solution requires federal state and local policy as we reviewing the report. But if I could say what I think is the most important policy recommendation in there is really federal legislature legislation to end this harm or real punishment leaves physical marks on kids. And it doesn't
01;29;20;02 differ based on what state they live in. Seclusion is just as harmful in Texas, as it is in Mississippi, a child's suspended in California, misses days of school and learning just like a child suspended in Ohio, something as harmful as what we're seeing here today has to start with federal legislation that provides protection to all kids, regardless of where they live. I want to encourage folks to check out our full report and the full policy agenda and the report. You can find it at the links listed here. And
01;29;46;59 then I'll also like to remind folks to join us for our final two webinars in this series, the dates and topics are listed there. You can sign up on the children's equity project or BPCs website listed there. And with that all, I'll leave it at that. Thanks for joining us and have a great evening, everyone.
Video Transcript
00;00;06;17 [Linda Smith]: Welcome to the third in a series of four part series on starting with equity the early years to the early grades. Um, as many of, you know, have you been on these in the past? My name is Linda Smith and I'm the director of the Early Childhood Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC. Uh, we are a by, uh, Washington D C based think tank that tries to take the most, the best ideas from both sides of the aisle to drive policy for, uh, the issues that are facing our countries,
00;00;38;25 uh, you know, that are critical to our country. So, um, there's nothing more critical these days than the issue of equity in everything we do. And we all know here that this starts in the earliest years. So before we get started, I want to thank the Heising-Simons Foundation for their generous support of this, uh, work. Um, we released a report earlier in the month with the Children’s Equity Project from Arizona State University. And I'll talk to you say a little
00;01;06;29 bit more about them in just a second. Uh, the report covers three very critical issues, one harsh discipline, which we talked about on last week's webinar. This one we will examine inclusion and the implications for the early years. And finally, next week we will be doing one on dual language learners. Uh, we brought together over the last year, 70 national experts to come together to examine each of these issues. What was needed in research? What does the data show, what do we need to do about policy? And
00;01;37;15 so the report, if you haven't checked it out, I urge you all to do it. I think it is one of the best, um, compilations of data and research and ideas for how we approach this issue going forward in the country.
00;01;52;03 [Linda Smith]: So I want to thank the panel who has agreed to be a part of this presentation today. Um, I say to people I'm always that inclusion in the earliest years is the easiest thing we can do. It's good for children. It's good for families and more than anything, I think it's, for us, it's good for children to learn from each other. And especially in the topic we're going to cover today. It's important that children who come with special needs and with disabilities are around children who, who learn
00;02;28;00 how to do work in an inclusive environment. So, uh, just, I know before we get started that we will get questions. Yes, the slides will be posted on both the Arizona State Children’s Equity Project website, as well as the BPC website. Um, and as is the report. Um, and finally, the other housekeeping is that we will be taking questions through the chat function
00;02;52;07 on this. Um, so if you have questions as you hear the presentation, uh, feel free to, um, to enter your, Put your questions in the chat and they will be discussed at the end. So without that, I just want to thank our panelists for joining us today. We have an excellent panel who really knows this topic inside and out, and I think you'll find the conversation extremely enlightening and hopefully informative. So with that said, I'm going to turn it over to my longtime friend and colleague Shantel Meek, who is the founding director of the
00;03;26;15 Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University. And who is the primary author on most of what you are going to hear today? So Shantel, I'm going to turn it over to you.
00;03;39;13 [Shantel Meek]: Thanks, Linda. Uh, we are, uh, at the Children’s Equity Project, excited to be partnering with you and the Bipartisan Policy Center on what are critical set of issues around equity and learning settings. We're especially pleased to be here today with an outstanding panel of experts and advocates immediately on the heels of the 30th anniversary of the Americans with disabilities act. I have to start by saying thank you first and foremost. So the disability advocacy community led by disabled Americans for getting the ADA over the finish
00;04;09;22 line over 30 years ago. And what was probably the most significant civil rights legislation since the civil rights act for bringing us so far in realizing the rights that every American is entitled to in this country. And importantly, for continuing to push, because we have a long way to go, uh, to be the country that we want to be discriminative policies that promote exclusion and make basic rights inaccessible across almost every facet of life from housing and healthcare to participation in our democracy and elections to education and wealth building disproportionately hurt
00;04;41;09 people with disabilities, especially people of color with disabilities, though. We've undeniably made important progress, thanks to disabled advocates, leading the charge. It's a basic fact that full inclusion and accessibility has never fully been realized in this country today. We're here to talk about our youngest learners and about how we can get it right from the beginning, the right to inclusion and accessibility starts at birth every American system, including those that serve our youngest children must be accessible and inclusive. And it's against this backdrop that the
00;05;10;27 Children’s Equity Project and BPC funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation developed a new equity policy agenda from the early years. So the early grades is Linda mentioned that is actionable, and it's directed at the federal government at States and the local communities. If we could pull up the slide deck, great, we engage deeply with three key issue areas that we know disproportionately exclude harm and disadvantage kids from
00;05;38;26 historically marginalized communities, issues that we know have solutions.
00;05;42;27 [Shantel Meek]: They include discipline. As Linda mentioned, inclusion and dual language learner issues. We know that across all three of these issues, children with disabilities are disproportionately affected. They're more likely to be harshly disciplined, corporately, punished, occluded, restrained, and pushed out of school, English learners and dual language learners with disabilities have a more difficult time being accurately evaluated and et cetera, accessing appropriate supports that meet their needs because of the intersecting inaccessible and inadequately prepared systems that they depend on for services. And of
00;06;13;15 course our topic today, inclusion and all that is associated with the decision that adults make that dictate where children can and cannot learn who is allowed in and who is not, who has to learn over there within each of these issue areas. We reviewed the data and the latest evidence-base, and we provide a set of actionable recommendations that will help bridge opportunity and accessibility gaps and get us closer to the education system and the early learning systems we all want and know are possible. So
00;06;41;13 before we jump in, we want to have a brief discussion on definitions. When we talk about meaningful, uh, high quality, just basic inclusion. Uh, this is the definition that we use. It is a definition that was put forth by the U S departments of health and human services and education back in 2015, uh, in a policy statement on expanding inclusive learning for young kids with disabilities. And it says inclusion in early, early childhood programs refers to including children with disabilities and early childhood
00;07;15;03 programs together with their peers without disabilities, holding high expectations and intentionally promoting participation in all learning and social activities, facilitated by individualized accommodations and using evidence-based services and supports to foster their development. Broadly speaking, cognitive language, communication, physical behavioral, and social, emotional friendships with peers and sense of belonging. This applies to all young children with disabilities, from those, with the mildest disabilities, to those with the most significant needs. I will say
00;07;46;05 though, that the much of the data that we're going to discuss today, isn't referring to this level of inclusion.
00;07;53;28 [Shantel Meek]: The way that the federal government kind of collects this information for young children is really a matter of the physical placement and where children are receiving their special education, special education and early intervention services. So when we say inclusion in referencing the data, what we mean are children with disabilities are receiving their special education services or their early intervention services in either regular, early childhood programs or general education settings. We know that there are kids who receive special education and
00;08;27;18 early intervention and might also kind of separately go to an early childhood program, but don't receive their services in that program. We do not consider that inclusion when we're talking about it in this report. So now let's jump in to a review of kind of what we found when we looked at the data and we will look at the research. We know that, um, when we look at trends across accessibility in early intervention, and then when you
00;08;55;17 look at the special education system, uh, children of color are overrepresented in K-12 special education but underrepresented in early intervention and preschool special education. We know that there is, uh, like a century almost of, of research, uh, that supports, uh, the benefits of inclusion for kids with and without disabilities. We know that there is a federal civil, civil rights law specifically, uh, guaranteeing free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment for young
00;09;25;27 kids would disappear. Despite We know that inclusion of children with disabilities, especially our youngest children. So preschoolers has not increased in decades or has very minimally increased in decades. We know that when we think, uh, when we talk about our preschool kids, less than half of them are receiving their special education services and inclusive settings, we know that this number varies by age with the younger children, youngest children, actually having
00;09;55;21 a less inclusive learning and the older children, uh, having more, uh, and we know that there are some differences when it comes to race, but, uh, not, not large gaps, at least in preschool. When we get to the K-12 system, we know that Latino, black and AAPI children spend the least amount of time in general education settings. We know too, that disability categories are associated with inclusion and that some categories are more or less likely to receive services in inclusive settings, including children who
00;10;25;24 have multiple disabilities, uh, children with intellectual disability, emotional disturbance, autism spectrum disorder, and definitely in this are included at lower levels than their peers with other types of disabilities.
00;10;38;17 [Shantel Meek]: We know that inclusion is a basic right beyond everything. Uh, but we also know, as I mentioned, that it is effective academically, social, emotionally, uh, across a broad range of outcomes, again for kids with, and for kids without disabilities. We know that there's no bad candidate or inclusion. Uh, there there's, you know, there's no kind of level of need where there's a cutoff that the child can't be included anymore. We know that inclusion works across kind of the realm of disability. We also know that inclusion policies and inclusion rates vary
00;11;10;22 drastically, uh, across States and also within States and across districts. And then we know from, from a lot of research, that's been done that there have been several barriers to inclusion that have been cited by the research, including ableism and attitudes and beliefs about an assumptions about kids with disabilities, about their ability to be included and be supported in general education settings. We know that lack of teacher preparation and skills, and self-efficacy, uh,
00;11;40;17 have been cited as, as key barriers. We know that there have been lots of perceived policy and financial barriers, uh, when it comes to inclusion, we know that the lack of coordination across systems, uh, is, is a barrier. And many of the systems that we'll be talking about today, you know, childcare public pre-K headstart, the K-12 system, special education preschool, early intervention. There are many systems that, that are involved in the inclusion of young kids with disabilities. And we see very little
00;12;11;03 coordination in many places across these systems, which stands in the way of greater inclusion. We also know that there's a lack of oversight and accountability and monitoring with respect to inclusion and there's, um, just way too much leeway, I think, uh, in, in part that explains, you know, why there's this gap between having a law that clearly intends to have the least restrictive environment be the first, uh, the first consideration for
00;12;40;19 all kids, yet more than half of preschoolers, for example, disabilities are still not in inclusive settings.
00;12;47;13 [Shantel Meek]: Um, we know that that monitoring the accountability is part of that, both at the federal level, and then going down to the state and local level. And we also know that a lack of will to change the status quo. Uh, we know that, uh, preschool programs, preschool, special education programs were developed before often many of the more recent state public pre-K programs have been developed in the past, you know, 10, 15 years or so in the have really grown. Um, but as opposed to kind of integrating those. So when as, as opposed to kind of expanding and bringing
00;13;21;11 together those two systems of, of general public state funded pre-K and the preschool special ed special education system, a lot of places have just kind of perpetuated and continued this kind of outdated separate system over here, um, for kids with disabilities So we dig into the data a little bit. I won't go over all of these numbers, but really the trend that I want you to take away from the table on the
00;13;48;19 left is that inclusion is the lowest for the youngest kids. So you'll see three year olds, um, are actually the least likely to be, to receive their special ed services in, uh, regularly learning programs. And it goes up. So if we're looking at the preschool category, um, five-year-olds have, have the highest rate. This is important because there's a research finding that shows that kids who start and are included earlier are more likely to remain included throughout their trajectory and kids who are excluded or
00;14;20;26 segregated earlier are more likely to remain on that track. And so if only, um, you know, this, this kind of small percentage, a third, I guess, of, of three-year-olds, you know, we're, we're really only setting that third up on this track that research tells us is more likely to result in inclusion leader in the trajectory on the right side of the screen, that table, uh, is really looking at differences in race and ethnicity, uh, respect to
00;14;47;11 receiving services and inclusive settings.
00;14;50;28 [Shantel Meek]: Um, and as I mentioned, aren't any kind of major, uh, racial differences in gaps. Although there are some, you know, one and two point differences across different groups. So one of the things that we looked at, one of the things that, uh, we hear often is that the reason that there is not more preschool inclusion is because there aren't enough, uh, state funded pre-K slots. So there are some States that have, uh, very few slots and there are some States that
00;15;21;13 have a lot of slots. And so we kind of, we looked at an analysis comparing the number of public state pre-K slots in each state, and the number, the percentage of kids who are receiving inclusive services, um, in, in a public state pre K program. And there's actually no correlation between those two numbers. So the argument that, Oh, we don't have more inclusion here because we really don't have enough pre-K does not pan out in the data. And in fact, some of the States that have, that served the largest proportions of young four year olds in their States in public, pre-K have
00;15;55;18 significantly lower percentages of kids with disabilities, getting services in inclusive settings, in some places, the differences as much as 40 percentage points. So if you look at Florida, for example, um, they're serving 77% of their four year olds in their public pre-K system, but not even a third of kids with disabilities are getting services, um, in the public preschool system there.
00;16;22;11 [Shantel Meek]: So as I mentioned earlier, uh, K-12 inclusion also varies by disability category. So this table really outlines, um, uh, the, the extent to which kids are included, uh, based on different disability categories. This is for K-12. So the data are collected differently than, than in the preschool system. There's a breakup of the percentage of time in the day that kids spend in a general education program. So the highest level of inclusion in the data collection is spending 80% or more of the
00;16;52;12 day in a general education classroom. And the lowest is spending 40% or less of the day in a general education setting. And what we find here is that there's, there's huge disparities. So if you look at, you know, speech and language impairment, the top one on the list, 87%, um, are spending a lot of the day or most of the day in inclusive of gen ed settings, where, you know, file only 5% are spending less of the day there. If you look at, uh, kids with, for example, uh, intellectual disability way at the bottom
00;17;26;28 of the chart, only 17% of those kids are getting spending 80% or more of the day in general education settings. And nearly half of them are spending 40% or less in gen ed settings. We see similar kind of trends in emotional disturbance in autism. And some of these other categories, multiple disabilities, uh, is actually one of the places where we see the lowest rates of spending more time in general education. So
00;17;55;11 [Shantel Meek]: We also know that in K-12 settings, uh, inclusion does vary by race where, uh, Asian, black, Latino, and Hawaiian students are more likely to spend less than 40% of the time in inclusive settings or general education settings. Um, and, uh, kind of the converse, uh, in, in the, uh, greater inclusion category. We also know that there's a significant, uh, intersection between race and disability category. We know
00;18;26;27 that black children are at least two times as likely to be identified with intellectual disability or emotional disturbance than all other racial and ethnic groups combined. We also see them overrepresented in learning disability category. Um, and oftentimes what we see is black children are overrepresented in categories that are more subjectively identified and, in some cases, more likely to receive services in segregated settings. So, as we mentioned, both in intellectual disabilities and emotional disturbance categories, um, are much more likely to spend time, uh, less time in, in
00;19;01;14 inclusive settings. We also know that some scholars have, have really brought up this issue of looking at comparing and differentiating, differentiating the incidence of disability versus the documentation of disability and how race plays into that. Yeah. So when we look across state lines, there is huge variability, uh, with respect to who is included in who is not included. Um, if we look at States
00;19;27;23 like Colorado and Nebraska and Wyoming and Vermont on the left hand side of your screen, those yellow bars, we see that, you know, over 80% or three quarters, in some cases of kids are, uh, preschoolers are served and regularly childhood programs. And we look on the other end of the spectrum on the far right. We look at Louisiana and Alaska and Louisiana, not even one out of five, every kids, uh, receives their special ed preschool services in a regularly childhood program. We also looked at, um, the rates
00;19;59;09 of inclusion, uh, comparing the rates for children of color, uh, native American children, black children, Latino children, uh, compared with, with the state average and what that looked like.
00;20;09;29 [Shantel Meek]: And we found that in 13 States, kids of color, uh, in preschool settings are served at, um, in less inclusive settings. More often, uh, we see a similar trend, although the disparity is not quite as big as we just saw in preschool in the K-12 space where, uh, Alabama, uh, includes, uh, children at the highest rates in that 80% category, um, followed by Nebraska and Vermont. And on the lower end, we see Hawaii, New Jersey and New Mexico, uh, including less than half of their kids with
00;20;43;06 disabilities, uh, in regular classrooms, 80% or more of the date. I should that. And I'll just remind folks of this when we're talking about inclusion, we're not talking about that quality definition that we started at the beginning. This is a, this isn't a conversation here about are these data don't get at that, that quality piece they really get at where kids are getting their stuff. So a little bit about, about the research landscape. And this is just a,
00;21;12;15 more of a view from what I mentioned earlier. Um, inclusion has beneficial for kids with, and without disabilities. Again, there's actually no research that shows that it's not or shows the reverse trend. We know that children with disabilities in inclusive settings, uh, that's associated with greater cognitive communication, social, emotional reading, and math gains and better attendance. We know though that the benefits of inclusion depend on meaningful inclusion and that we see greater benefits when inclusion starts early and continues across trajectory. Um, research has
00;21;44;12 also identified a number of key inclusion indicators in, in several folks have, uh, in the field, including, uh, the division for early childhood have identified, um, a number of inclusion indicators, um, that help us measure the quality of inclusion. Here we list as an example, um, one inclusion measurement tool called the inclusive classroom profile that helps assess, um, and, and, and understand the quality of inclusion in
00;22;11;24 early childhood programs. We know, as I mentioned earlier on that there are several barriers that have been cited to inclusion. I will say that none of them have to actually do with children with disabilities. Um, and they've all been cited in the room
00;22;24;13 [Shantel Meek]: Research, Get the policy landscape. Um, you know, we know that federal law through the eye through Ida has mandated free, inappropriate public education and least restrictive environment, uh, for, to the disabilities for decades. We know that Ida presumes that the first placement option considered is the regular classroom or the regular early childhood program that kids would attend. If they did not have a disability, we know that the us department of education monitor States for compliance, but does not include all of
00;22;59;16 those kinds of monitoring indicators in determining a state's funding and state's performance. So one of the things that they do not count, um, are any preschool indicators at all, including a least restrictive environment, a provision within preschool. We also know that the federal government and Congress has never fully funded or met its commitment to fund special education programs for all ages, from infants and toddlers at the, at the early age and early intervention, all the way up are severely underfunded
00;23;27;19 and have been, um, since the inception of the program, um, the department of education has put out a series of dear colleague letters and guidance and, and, uh, policy statements, uh, here on the right hand side, you'll see the recommendations listed in a policy statement that was released in 2015 from the departments of health and human services and education, uh, with recommendations for States and for, uh, local communities in early
00;23;54;20 childhood programs. So I think to take away there's in, in this particular issue area, it's such an area where the science doesn't match up with what we're seeing kind of implemented at the state and local level research tells us that inclusion is most effective when it started early. Yet the youngest children are the least likely to be included. Research tells us that inclusion has been official and possible for kids across any type of disability category, but we know that children are included at drastically
00;24;25;24 different rates based on disability category. We know that research says that inclusion produces the greatest academic, social and emotional outcomes. Yet more than half of preschoolers with disabilities are not receiving their special ed services in inclusive settings. We know that decades of research find that inclusion is better, but we also know that between 1985 and 2015 preschool inclusion has increased by 5.7% and across all of these things, we know that children of color are underrepresented in
00;24;55;14 early intervention in preschool special education, which is a critical time point for intervention and, you know, in, in brain development and development more broadly, but then they're overrepresented in the K-12 space. Um, and we also know that in the later years as we've reviewed, they're less likely to be included.
00;25;18;22 [Shantel Meek]: So with that, I am going to hand it over. It's my distinct honor to introduce, uh, Mark K Shriver, uh, to kick off our panel this afternoon. He is the president of save the Children Action Network, where he leads an effort to mobilize Americans to ensure that every child in the U S has access to high quality early childhood education, and that children around the world survive and thrive. Um, Mr. Shriver’s career fighting for social justice and advocacy and service organizations, as well as elected office has focused on advancing the right of every child to a
00;25;50;29 safe and vibrant childhood. His family comes from a long legacy of fighting for disability rights, and we couldn't be more thrilled to have him here to provide a few remarks and moderate our distinguished panel here today, Mark.
00;26;03;08 [Mark Shriver]: Wow. Uh, wow. Uh, dr. Meek was an amazing presentation. I mean, uh, I'm sitting here in my house and I'm just overwhelmed by those statistics. I can't wait to hear from our panel here. They're some of the leading experts across the country. Um, I can't wait to hear because there is the data you've shared is both inspiring and challenging. It's exhilarating and it's kind of depressing at the same time. We've got a lot of work ahead of us. Um, and I just want to thank you
00;26;35;25 so much for that comprehensive overview for all the hard work you've put into this. Um, and for moving the conversation forward, I have the great honor of moderating the panel here. I'm just going to do a quick introduction and then throw out a question or two, I hope you all will go. Um, and, uh, and put questions, um, into, uh, the box there, um, on YouTube or on Twitter, uh, submit questions for the panels using the live chat
00;27;05;01 function, just making sure I use the right language.
00;27;07;19 [Mark Shriver]: Um, but I got a couple of questions myself, but again, I, Dr. Meek, thank you so much for that very, very comprehensive, um, set of data and overview. So we're going to be joined by Dr. Mary Louise Hemmeter, who is a professor of special education at Vanderbilt university. Her research focuses on effective instruction, supporting social, emotional development and addressing challenging behavior and coaching teachers. Um, Michael Yudin, who's a pal of mine who I've known for a while. Uh, worked on behalf of the Obama administration, uh, at the us
00;27;41;19 department of education for six years, where he served the secretary of education in a number of, um, capacities, including assistant secretary for special ed and rehabilitative services and acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. Rebecca Cokley is the director of disability justice initiative at the center for American progress cap, uh, where her work focuses on disability policy. Uh, most recently Rebecca served as the executive director of the National
00;28;12;07 Council on Disability an independent agency charged with advising Congress and the white house on issues of national disability, public policy, and last, but definitely not least Dr. Evandra Catherine is a postdoctoral research scholar on the Children’s Equity Project. Uh, the doctor's work, uh, research focuses on inequalities in the implementation of exclusionary discipline practices. Uh, we just heard a lot about that and the placement
00;28;41;04 of preschool aged children in segregated and self-contained settings, uh, with an emphasis on boys of color, uh, which again, we just heard quite a bit about, so thanks to all four of you for joining us. Um, oftentimes they put the moderator in the moderate cause he, or she doesn't know much as the panel and in this case, it's not only half as much. I don't know anywhere near what you all do on.
00;29;06;19 [Mark Shriver]: I'm really very honored to, to be with you all. Uh, so let's jump into it. Uh, throw out a question to all four of you. Um, uh, maybe, uh, Rebecca, you want to start, can you contextualize the findings and the policy agenda, and we're the report with the current uprising against social injustice that we see, you know, all across America, specifically through the lens of disability rights and inclusion, what do we have to do to get the issues of any qualities affecting our babies born with disabilities, especially our, our black, Brown and native babies with
00;29;38;14 disabilities on the public policy agenda. Want to jump Rebecca, please?
00;29;43;25 [Rebecca Cokley]: Definitely. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mark, for asking me that question. Um, I've been thinking of about this a lot in the context of this weekend's 30th anniversary of the ADA, uh, and given your family's significant contribution to make sure people like me. I was about to call myself a kid at 42 let's face it. I'm not a kid anymore. Um, so that people like me and children like mine could receive the education that they're entitled to by law. Um, I also want to bring another
00;30;14;20 congressional, no forefather into the space, and that would be, um, congressmen and former Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Major Owens, um, Major was a huge champion for this exact issue for the conversation around disability rights, as civil rights in particular, as it led to a conversation around education. And one of the things that Major used to say all the time was that our enemy is not each other.
00;30;40;12 [Rebecca Cokley]: Our enemy is segregation. And I remember back to the 1997 reauthorization of the individuals with disabilities education act. And there was an attempt by folks in the physical disability community to limit the amount of protections afforded to people with learning disabilities. And there was a huge hubbub and a pretty significant blow up on the Hill. And, um, I remember actually, and I've, I've been told this
00;31;11;12 story cause I was actually still in high school when this story happened. But one of the things that major was very clear in saying is that at no point in time, would we ever be willing to Institute a paper bag test on the education of students with disabilities? That all means all and inclusion is for all. And so when I think about this time that we're in right now, I would like to remind everyone, listening that the notion of people with disabilities fighting for their rights is not a new thing. People with disabilities have fought for inclusion in society going all the
00;31;43;17 way back to right after the revolutionary war. Every time this country has had a significant conflict, we've seen an increase in disability policy, usually starting around employment and then moving into healthcare and then finally education. Um, we've seen this repeated, um, post civil war. We saw this after Vietnam as well. There's this need for a broader conversation on inclusion? You know, I think, um, noting the 30th anniversary of the ADA,
00;32;13;27 uh, this last weekend and the tremendous amount of media coverage. And it's gotten this year more than any other year, probably because it's 30. Um, but within that media coverage, a specific lens focused on the impact, uh, of disability policy on black and Latino, disabled people in API, disabled people. Um, you know, to me, the fundamental issue that we continue to talk
00;32;38;15 about without naming, and I think it's very important.
00;32;41;02 [Rebecca Cokley]: to name is abelism. Um, and specifically, you know, one of the things that was in the report and I was really pleased to see was, um, a conversation about ableism, you know, which is, and I'm going to use the definition from TL Lewis, the system that places a value on people's bodies and minds based on what society constructs as normal intelligence, excellence and productivity. Um, these ideas are rooted in anti-blackness eugenics, colonialism, and capitalism, and this form of oppression make society, puts society in the position of determining who's
00;33;14;05 valuable and worthy based on someone's appearance and or their ability to satisfactorily reproduce Excel and quote unquote behave. And if you think about this report and what it talks about in terms of the inclusion of students with disabilities, um, when you think about the using an intersectional analysis that incorporates race and gender, and what we know about the 7 million students, kids with disabilities in our public school system, it really does clearly show that there is much more to do. Um, and
00;33;43;29 as a parent of three children, two of which have disabilities, um, it's all well and good for us to talk about inclusion from the aspect of, um, uh, where a student sits in the classroom. But if we're not talking about inclusion in terms of having the right to make decisions about yourself and what inclusion means in the context of autonomy and our students' education, um, it's an incomplete dialogue. So I was really pleased to see
00;34;12;12 this report come out and I'm really looking forward to seeing how States decide to adopt various recommendations.
00;34;20;14 [Mark Shriver]: Uh, thanks so much, Rebecca. Um, uh, Dr. Hemmeter, do you want to jump in there?
00;34;26;21 [Mary Louise Hemmeter]: Sure. I'll jump in. Thanks. Thank you, Mark. And, um, I kind of hate to follow that, um, response because it was so eloquent, but, um, I'm sitting here thinking about how, um, I finished graduate school right before Public Law, 99-457 was passed, which was when was the law that basically strengthened the provisions for young children with disabilities. And it was right before ADA was passed. And I remember
00;34;57;04 thinking then, um, how different things were going to be for children in 20 or 25 years, um, that we were finally going to have inclusion, all those things. And now 35 years later, it's just so disappointing to hear that we really haven't made much progress. And I, um, work in this space of very young children with disabilities. And I really believed at that time that we would see early childhood inclusion is just a way of being, um, and in
00;35;31;21 fact it really haven't made any progress since that time. And that I think what's most concerning about this me is That in the current context, um, children with disabilities are just one more time going to be left behind. There's going to be something more pressing. Um, there's going to be other things that people are, think need to be done, and we're going to leave behind children with disabilities. And
00;35;58;16 I think that as Shantel said that, um, earlier is better, um, earlier is better for children in terms of their cognitive development earlier is better for families in terms of learning the special, the very complex special education system. And yet what we know is that early intervention, which is the time when children should receive those services and families
00;36;27;06 should receive those supports, um, that our children and families of color are least likely to be receiving those supports and are more likely when they do receive them to drop out. Not because they don't want to do it, but because we're not providing those services in a way that supports families in their context. And so I just want us to kind of start this conversation today, thinking about what happens to children in the first thousand days
00;36;58;12 of life. That's the first three years that helps children be successful in life. Um, what barriers are there to support for children and families during the first thousand days of life? And what can we do during the first thousand days of life to set children on a trajectory of inclusion rather than exclusion?
00;37;25;08 [Mark Shriver]: Um, I want to ask the other two panelists to the same question, but I, um, when you talk about the lack of progress, like my, um, it just, it gets me so irritated. Yeah. I mean,
00;37;43;02 [Mary Louise Hemmeter]: We have everything on our side to be making progress right. In terms of laws and effective practices.
00;37;51;05 [Mark Shriver]: Right. But we're not doing it. So what's the answer to that. I don't know. Um, Michael, if you want to jump in on that, or I know just so frustrating, or do you want to answer the question that I originally thought is there?
00;38;07;05 [Michael Yudin]: Yeah. I'll, I'll do both. Yeah. Thanks Mark. Um, you know, as we see this increasing awareness of racial injustice, you can isolate that from the fact that we're actually in the middle of the pen, the beginning of a pandemic, right? And so we're facing public health and economic crisis. Um, and what these kind of two different situations, the, the, the, the, the, the uprising against racial justice, as well as the pandemic, the inequities are coming to bear, right? These decades of, of,
00;38;41;27 of injustice and inequities are really coming to light. We know that in the pandemic, that communities of color are, are, and will continue to be disproportionately harmed and impacted by this pandemic, both health wise and economically. And as we think about all of this together, we already know that, you know, kids, you know, school's closed, right? We, we, we know that, um, kids are experiencing significant learning loss, but we know that kids of color kids
00;39;10;13 with disabilities are already experiencing significantly more learning loss. We know that there are digital divides and access to connect into connectivity and technology, the social emotional needs that, that, that need to be paying attention. We need to be paying attention to, um, there a lot to, to, to grapple with. And again, you know, there's an awareness that I haven't seen in my lifetime, particularly around these kinds of systemic
00;39;38;24 inequities that we know exist in our, in our schools. Um, not the least of which is funding. Um, and so as we think about moving forward, how do we, how do we make sure kids learn?
00;39;53;28 [Michael Yudin]: And how do we address these learning losses in this digital divide? We can't go backwards, right? We gotta go forwards. And what is critical is that we, we go forwards with this awareness, right? That, that there are these decades of inequities. And then our kids, and particularly kids of color in particular, kids of color with disabilities are going to disproportionately bear the burden of, of, of this crisis. Um, the other piece I want to just make sure to mention is that's not without
00;40;27;23 fight, right? Because we are, we are aware that there are efforts to remove the rights associated with Ida and waive the rights. Oh, they're going to Sue us all. And let's, let's, this is an emergency. So we should wave civil rights, right? Like, well, that's clearly the wrong answer, and that's clearly the wrong approach, but that's existing today, right? Like we have
00;40;51;22 organizations and associations that are actually trying to do that. So we really need to take advantage of this opportunity and, and, and move forward. And one final thought to piggyback or whatever, but he says, actually, we know how to do this. This is not, um, this is not rocket science, right. We know how to do this. We have decades and decades of research. There are a ton of resources available online right now that share, uh, there's, uh, educating all learners is, is a database of, I don't know, 50, 60 different organizations. And it's a, uh, a bank, a
00;41;25;17 library of resources and how to make sure that kids with disabilities get the services.
00;41;32;09 [Mark Shriver]: Thanks so much. Um, uh, Michael. Do you want to jump there, Dr. Catherine, I'm saving you last but not least.
00;41;41;15 [Evandra Catherine]: I don't know. I think that, um, everyone was able to capture it very nicely. I perspective that I would share would be that of a mother and a black mother at that, to know that it's been over six decades that we have in writing, just to be included in education in general, like just to get in schools at the Brown versus board. And it seems like these efforts that we fought hard as a black disability advocates and others, that Rebecca mentioned that it seems that we get into these, uh, we advocate and we get to a good place, like, like we said, and then we looked
00;42;12;02 back at the progress that we've made. And so in this time, right now, during the George Floyd killing, and then a COVID, of course, it's like, we want to see black bodies, um, that are protected. And in the system of special education, we are excluded, especially our black boys out of the system. And so in a time like this right now is a, is a great opportunity to look at these data and try to apply some of this research to practice and sort of just to tie it into COVID-19, just to make sure that who are getting slots are kids of color kids with disabilities. And that we try not to
00;42;43;26 create new racial barriers in between children during this time of COVID. And it is about it all like segregation is the enemy is not one another. And so I would just share those, a few words based off of what everyone else has said.
00;42;57;25 [Mark Shriver]: Tell us a little bit about, uh, you mentioned, um, Evandra, that you have a child, you have a son with disabilities.
00;43;08;13 [Evandra Catherine]: Yes, yes.
00;43;11;21 [Mark Shriver]: That experience. And, uh, I know you've, you spent many years fighting for inclusion. So can you give us a little personal insight into that, please?
00;43;21;15 [Evandra Catherine]: Sure. Thank you. Thank you for the question. Um, my son originally, well, he was born, I would look down at him and feel like there was something that wasn't necessarily right, but I wasn't sure. And so I specifically chose a black pediatrician just so that I can make sure I was doing what I needed to do for my son. And she started to notice that when he would come into the pediatrician's office, he could read words on the wall. He could spell letters, spell letters, spell words, and make letters sounds, but she wasn't talking conversationally. So she suggested,
00;43;51;24 you know, we go get him checked for speech. Maybe it was a speech delay, but nothing to alarm us about our son, he was totally normal. And so in the process of that and getting him evaluated, we found out that he had initially was very early. He was about two and a half years old. So it was just pervasive development disorder. He didn't have accessible or receptive language skills. So those were his deficits. And so we went into the special education system since he was two and a half years old. We were in Virginia. We were able to go ahead and, um, access part V6 19, which is preschool special education. And
00;44;24;15 initially the process for the evaluation. It was great. The city that I was in served as very, it was a mostly black city. So I didn't feel like there were many barriers in the process, but what did happen was my son was put in a self-contained classroom immediately with three to five year olds, um, with a speech delay and no children in the classroom really could speak at all. So after about a couple of weeks, the team comes back and say, we think we need to move your son out of the self-contained setting and put
00;44;52;27 him in a more inclusive setting because his behaviors are starting to go backwards.
00;44;57;10 [Evandra Catherine]: And so right there at that moment, I didn't know, as a parent that self-contained setting, was it the best setting for my son? It was introduced to me as the best placement for him. And that's where he would be able to get his services for speech. And so, um, early childhood, I mean, preschool was okay, three and four year old was fine. It was a really great program. But then when my son got school age, he was suspended. Immediately. School started in September. He was suspended in November after advocacy at the school board and advocacy at the state
00;45;29;06 department. They vice principal basically stated in a room that they did not have the services available for my child. And this is in November. And my child was there in September. And this is after his second suspension. And to know his suspensions were coded as fighting. And so for me as a black mother, and at this same time, the ACLU report came out that Virginia was number one in the nation for school to prison pipeline. And if your child was black big and a boy with a disability that he was like, sort of first in line in that trajectory. And so all of my
00;45;59;21 advocacy started there. I enrolled at my PhD programs specifically to advocate for parents and to advocate that the law is more equity equitably, implement it with families of color and particularly with boys of color. Um, and this success story that I can share today is that because of early intervention, my son turned 10 this year, but last year in the fourth grade at nine, he fully came off of his IEP and was taught all of the services and all of the strategies and methods that he needed to manage his
00;46;27;23 disability in an educational space.
00;46;29;28 [Evandra Catherine]: And so I say that my activism is going to continue in that effort and hope that other people do not feel or other families, especially families of color and black families, that special education is a lifelong, like an educational diagnosis that follows you through, um, high school. And then lastly, Prince Albert, which is my son's name, he, uh, recently on the third grade Sol his first time taking the Sol, he got a perfect 600 on the math. He is the spelling bee champion for the entire, um, city area of Richmond, Virginia last year. And then he just
00;47;03;16 recently took the PSAT and scored a 750. And so it just shows that what society views your child as it's not their true potential. And so my push is to continue to, to advocate for those families and that they get the right services that they need and a self-contained setting. Isn't the first place that they're put.
00;47;24;14 [Mark Shriver]: All right. Well, I don't know who wants to follow that. That was a powerful Rebecca. You put your hand up. Did you want to jump in there?
00;47;32;27 [Rebecca Cokley]: Yeah, I, there were a couple of things that were said that I think are really important and that I really think we should drill down on. And I think a big piece of that is the, um, the notion that the notion that special education is a right versus a place. I think so often we focus on a location versus services. Um, and I think that does a lot in terms of reinforcing the notion of segregating disabled kids. Um, I
00;48;03;17 think even just the use of the word disability is powerful. I think, um, for centuries, uh, non-disabled people have taken liberties at labeling our community. You know, if you were poor, you were crazy. If you're rich, you're eccentric, um, and the way you get treated as crazy, um, is way different than you get treated as eccentric. Um, we see the term special needs.
00;48;28;22 [Rebecca Cokley]: We see the term differently abled handicapable physically challenged. None of these were terms that were chosen by disabled people. These were all terms that were defined by non-disabled people to make non-disabled people feel more comfortable. And I think that level of, um, linguistic ableism is really critical to talk about, um, because our kids are so significantly othered. I know we saw, um, when my son started preschool, um, he got in a fight with another boy, um, and we
00;49;04;01 ended up having to jump in and defend the other student. Um, you know, both young men, our young men who are, um, African-American and disabled. And it was very clear that colorism was also at play and they were trying to let our son off the hook. And we're very quick to say, well, we're going to suspend this other kid. And my husband and I had to jump in and be very
00;49;29;05 intentional and say, why are we talking about pushing him out instead of as a school community, like pulling him in. And they're like, because he's dangerous. And I'm like, he's five, all five-year-olds are jerks. Like they run around, they rubbed their boogers on each other. They fart on each other, like nobody likes hanging out with five-year-olds, let's be real, um, that they were very clear that like their immediate response was let's get him out. He's the problem. And so I
00;50;02;12 think there's also a responsibility for school communities to really think about how do we push back on the push out problem? How do we embrace a model grounded in the values of Idea grounded in a civil rights framework, and instead moved to something modeled on actual true societal inclusion about creating the kind of communities where all kids thrive, um, versus
00;50;33;16 removing those that we see as some sort of problem.
00;50;38;28 [Mark Shriver]: Well, you've, you've spent a lot of time, Rebecca, right, working on public policy inside the government from the white house to the department of ed, to HHS, uh, to lead the national council on disability. Um, when you look at that, um, why haven't we seen a greater progress, uh, on the issue of inclusion, what levels of, uh, leavers of government, uh, haven't we pulled haven't, we pushed, uh, that we should be focusing on, uh, to do a better job, to be more effective.
00;51;10;02 [Rebecca Cokley]: We don't tell our kids about their services. I mean, I, both of my parents were disabled. Um, both were little people like me. And so I grew up sitting in my IEP meetings and my 504 plan meetings. As I got older, I understood that I was disabled. I understood what accommodations were. I might not have been able to say the word accommodation in, in pre-K, but I knew that I had stools in front of water, fountains and toilets, so I could access them. I knew that if there was a fire drill, I was to take the spot at the front of the line. So I wouldn't
00;51;42;22 get run over by other kids. And it's because my parents and my teacher sat down and talked to me about that, you know, under current Ida, there's no real mandate for disabled students to be part of their IEP process. And I think that's a huge problem. Um, you know, I also think given the time that we're living in with, with COVID with it also being hurricane season, um, let's also be real, uh, Flint, Michigan still doesn't have
00;52;10;26 clean drinking water. Um, one of the things that, that I proposed for a long time is, uh, sort of a fast track of funding within Ida for communities that experience either significant social unrest, national, uh, natural disasters, or some other sort of crisis for those school districts to be able to pull down funds immediately. Once they start noticing that there's a problem. Um, the fact that so many of those students in Flint should be entitled to services under Ida, but Flint's also one of the most
00;52;41;05 poorly funded, uh, special education systems in the country is it's a fundamental example of injustice. Um, we really have to look from, I was going to say the womb to the tomb, um, in terms of the education of students with disabilities and think through how do we do it better and how do we actually do it inclusively? And I don't feel like, um, our policy makers on the whole are really thinking with that mindset.
00;53;10;26 [Mark Shriver]: So there are, there are staff in here, maybe Mary Louise. You could jump in here. I know you are national renowned expert on young children on social, emotional development and inclusion. Uh, Rebecca just talked about what are those key components in the classroom and at the programmatic policy that we know work but are just not being implemented at scale. What do we know works, but just are not being implemented at scale. Why aren't they, can you tell us a little bit about that please?
00;53;41;03 [Mary Louise Hemmeter]: Yeah. I feel that like, that's kind of my life's work, but, um, I think as Michael said a minute ago, it's not that we don't know what to do, it's that it's not being done. And so I wanna just kind of say a couple of things in response to what Becca just said as well, which is that, um, one of the big problems related to inclusion is that in many cases for children to be included, it takes families navigating the complex
00;54;13;00 web of special education and having to make decisions that families shouldn't have to make, um, because the system's not set up to support inclusion. So I think there's a lot of things at the policy level that need to be done, but I'm going to speak a little bit more programmatically. Um, and I want to just say a couple of things from the beginning, which is that kids or children are more likely to be included if they start out included.
00;54;40;00 [Mary Louise Hemmeter]: So children who are included in pre-K are more likely to move to elementary and being included. And so one of the things we need to think about is how do we do better inclusion in the pre-K years? And I think that we have, and somebody mentioned this at the beginning that we have a lot of early childhood service delivery systems. We have headstart, we have childcare, we have public school. pre-K we have family childcare home, and we need to figure out how to build the capacity of all
00;55;11;06 those programs to support children with disabilities. And that means that we have to think about how we blend funding streams so that special education money can support children in childcare. It means we have to figure out how to train all early childhood providers to work with children with disabilities. It means we have to figure out how to let, how schools and childcare and head start can work together. Um, another really big thing that I think, um, is critical if we're going
00;55;44;12 to do inclusion better is that we have a trained workforce. It's simply unacceptable to have teachers in our schools who don't know about children with disabilities. Um, it's very common for children, for teachers to be, to come through a general education program and take very little coursework on children with disabilities. And that doesn't mean they have to be
00;56;10;17 experts, cause there's always, there should be supports for those teachers. There should be related services people, but they have to know that children with disabilities belong in their classroom. And they have to know how to implement the recommended practices that we have in the field for supporting children with disabilities. And the last thing I want to say, and y'all have heard a little bit about this from everybody on this call, which is we also have to not let the responsibility for inclusion falls
00;56;45;21 solely on the shoulders of teachers. We have to have systems that say inclusion is a right. Children are going to be fully included to the point that they can be. Teachers are going to have the support they need to fully include children. And having children with a disability in your classroom is not a choice. If that's where the child belongs, that's where the child
00;57;11;14 will be. And the appropriate services will be available to children there.
00;57;19;03 [Mark Shriver]: Michael? Yeah. Go ahead, Michael. Yes, please.
00;57;21;29 [Michael Yudin]: Yeah, just to, to a couple of quick points. One is money, right? Money's not everything, but part C is funded. What is it like $500 million, right? We can do all our screening. There's a lot of attention paid to ACEs and traumatic experiences, which is really, really important. But if we don't have services to provide our kids, there's no greater bang for your buck and part C early intervention services. And it gets no money as we elevate outright the full funding of Ida, but equitable funding, um, is a very serious problem, right? Like our highest poverty
00;57;55;00 school districts get less money, then our more affluent communities do, right. I mean, funding is critical to Mary Louise's point. Teacher preparation is all, all of these things, political will, um, data, right? Like, you know, I, I I'd love the chance if we get into it to talk about the equity in Ida, but having a real honest conversation about data and what that looks like is absolutely critical. But at the end of the day, this is about overcoming inertia at, at a school
00;58;28;07 district level, at a system level. This is about overcoming low expectations. We have decades of research to show us that kids with disabilities do better when they're held to higher expectations. And that seems common sense. And it is common sense. This is also research. We know that kids do better, but low expectations. This is where your kid's going to belong, right? This is where your kid is from day one. How many parents
00;58;54;08 are told, no, your kid's not going to be able to do this. So, no, no, no, no, no. What teachers are saying, I don't have those skills. That's not what I do. I'm not a special ed teacher. I'm a general ed teacher, right? When we put out our guidance around inclusion of kids with disabilities in early childhood programs, back in the Obama administration, which was this joint effort, it's a great piece of guidance.
00;59;13;29 [Michael Yudin]: The report identifies and talks about it. I went and I had a chance to talk with a, with a director of a preschool program in Houston. And they took that guidance really seriously. It was a large program. She said it was the hardest thing they ever had to do, but they knew it was the right thing to do. I had one of the teachers, their general ed teacher, who said to me, I've been teaching pre-K for 25 years. I am a better teacher now because of this than I've ever been before. So kind of just breaking through, but that's hard to, to mandate, right? You can't
00;59;45;03 mandate expectations and political will.
00;59;49;21 [Mark Shriver]: So how do you do that? I mean, uh, I mean, dr. Meek talked about a lack of political will Michael, you mentioned it, the founder has got her hand up, go for it, please.
01;00;01;05 [Evandra Catherine]: Um, it's a really quick point, but the research and the policy and the data, we have it, and we have the tools that we need to do, but none of those things are sort of changing the minds of people. And so it's the, anti-blackness, it's the anti-racist policies. It is the perceptions of nonwhite people in this country. And so we do find that we have these laws, it says, right, we should do right. But we do see that special education is sort of another tool used to resist sort of the efforts of Brown versus board. This Theresa segregate our kids. And so I
01;00;31;25 think just to answer one of your questions that you asked a second ago, Mark, like, what is it that policymakers could do? We need to find ways for people to reflect on sort of their space that they're in and meet us as, and we can meet them where they are, but these things are not changing the minds of people, the beliefs or people nor the perceptions of people. So I just sort of wanted to share that piece.
01;00;53;28 [Mark Shriver]: Rebecca, did you want to jump in there? I saw your hand movements there.
01;00;58;29 [Rebecca Cokley]: I really do think it's a, it is a civil rights issue and we don't talk about it as a civil rights issue and, you know, to, to build on what Andrew said, like we can't get at discussions of ableism without getting at discussions of racism, um, because they are so intertwined in the special education system. Um, I remember talking to my nephew when he was five, uh, we had gone down to South Carolina where they only guarantee students a minimally adequate public education. Like let that sink in for a moment. Like that's what they tell families. We will
01;01;31;22 guarantee your child a minimally adequate public education. And we were talking to my nephew, um, who is raised by a single father. And, um, it wasn't kindergarten and was like came home from school sobbing and was like, I'm the bad kid. And I was like, what? And he's like, I'm the bad kid. I'm the reason that other kids don't learn. I am the problem in my school. And I'm like, you're five, that's an awful
01;02;02;10 lot of responsibility they're putting on a five-year-old. Um, and to actively have to sit there and then pack with him and name why he was being discriminated against. Um, and no one should have to put that. No one should put that on a five year old, you know? And I think the, the push for conformity, the push for what is seen as, as appropriate behavior and what
01;02;32;09 that looks like. I mean, we've, I've never seen us really roll out universal design for learning the way it's needed to be rolled out. I've never seen us, um, effectively roll out PBYs the way it needs to be rolled out. And I think these are all tools in our toolbox that are very quick to get adopted and commodified by the general education system with no nod to the fact that these came out of special education and, and these, you know,
01;03;01;16 should be applied as part of the, a toolkit for inclusion for all students.
01;03;07;16 [Rebecca Cokley]: Um, but at the end of the day, it ends up that disabled students are fighting for the bare minimum in a lot of places. I mean, my, my son goes to a school that, um, has a self-contained classroom for autistic kids. And it really pisses him off because he's like, wait a minute. Why are all the autistic kids being put over there? Like my uncle who's autistic founded an organization and worked for President Obama. Um, my cousin who's autistic is an artist. Why, why are those kids put over
01;03;41;20 there when I'm over here? Like, he's like, there's not a class for little people. There's not a class for deaf kids, but yet we're pushing autistic kids over there instead. And the kids notice it like the kids know when they're there watching that level of exclusion and we'd had to work with him and my daughter to make sure that they don't buy into that structural ableism and that they continue questioning why those kids are in a separate
01;04;10;09 classroom at the back of the school versus in school, in class, uh, with their peers with disabilities and their peers without disabilities.
01;04;21;18 [Mark Shriver]: Okay. I want to just ask folks if there are any questions out there to submit them, uh, for the panelists using the live chat function on YouTube or on Twitter. Um, I want to just, um, quickly ask one more question. Uh, there between a doctor makes a presentation and this discussion we've covered, obviously a lot of ground. Um, what is the one thing I'll start with you? Uh, professor Hemmeter down there at Vandy. Uh,
01;04;54;25 what's the one message. One finding one recommendation that you think or hope that people will take away from this conversation. Um, and I'd throw it out to all of you, but maybe I'll put you on the spot, Mary Louise.
01;05;08;01 [Mary Louise Hemmeter]: Well, there's about 10, but in the interest of time, thank you, Mark. I mean, not share what you said at the beginning, Mark, which is the frustration that we're where we are today after 35 Years of really hard work. And I think what everybody said today is that we have everything on our side. We have the research on our side. We have the laws on our side. We have, um, uh, we have in many cases, regulations on
01;05;40;25 our side. We know that inclusion works. We know that when we improve inclusive settings for kids with disabilities, we include, we improve those settings for all children. And it's like, everybody here said today, it's about getting the public will for this. And I don't know how we do that. I mean, it feels to me like, um, we have everything we need to be doing inclusion well, and we're still not doing it well. And I think that for too
01;06;12;23 many years, I mean, I think Becca, you said this, that we've thought about, we got to get kids in inclusive settings and then we get them there and they fail because we don't build the supports in those systems for kids to be successful. And I think that gives inclusion a bad name. I don't think we should have, um, Michael, you were saying that you went to a program in Houston and it's like, we all have to think hard about good examples of where this is
01;06;40;18 working. And after 35 years, we shouldn't have to think hard about where to figure out good places that this is working. So I don't know that I have the answers, but I am really frustrated and have been, as we've developed this report to just think about, um, how little progress we've made. And just to end on a positive note, I want to say that there are many good, special educators out there, and there are parents fighting every day for
01;07;10;08 their children and their administrators committed to this and policy makers committed to this. So I don't want to paint it as if nobody is, but it is frustrating.
01;07;20;12 [Mark Shriver]: Well before maybe the rest of you jump in there. There's a question in here from Sweta Alberta. What about grassroots organizing for parents of children with disabilities and adults with disabilities? Are there regional or state efforts to organize this group? Um, and I think you talked, you touched on that, uh, Mary Louise just, uh, about having the data and the research, but the political will, are there regional or state efforts to organize this group? I don't know if anybody wants to jump in on that.
01;07;51;13 [Michael Yudin]: under the law under Ida, every state has at least one in many States have multiple parent training information centers and they are critical in this, in this, around this set of issues they provide. Um, there's not enough money cause there's not enough money in anything, but there were in every state and they provide information and advocacy support to parents all around the country. So the parent training information centers are, I met a mom in Boston who,
01;08;22;06 um, told me this story is years ago. She told me this story, her, her, her young kid was getting ready for preschool and had very significant disabilities in the school, which was a fairly well resourced school said, no, you know, we don't really know how to do this. Well, we'll send him over here. He'll get great services. It's just like, no, I want him to go to school with his brother and the other kids on the block. And they're like, yeah, but we don't really know how to do this. She's like, that's not my expectation now. And she went to her PTI parent training information center and they gave her the support and the tools. And she worked with her
01;08;52;22 school district and she has gone an inclusive preschool program. And she was like, I am an agent of change. Right? Because now there is an inclusive preschool program in this school district, but she couldn't have done it without the help of her PTI.
01;09;08;04 [Mark Shriver]: Agent of change. My sister does a lot of work in empowerment work and they call it, she calls it architect of change. I mean, I look at you four on here and it's, you all are agents of change, architects of change, um, that anybody else want to jump in on. I mean, maybe we covered that in, go back to the earlier question about what are the one or two things, um, that you want, um, folks to take away from here.
01;09;38;06 Um, as a result of this Evandra, do you want to jump in?
01;09;43;14 [Evandra Catherine]: Yeah, sure. Thanks. I think her, we have this thing where we work with the Children’s Equity Project. Is it the fishes at the Lake or the groundwater? And so for me, I, I think in this instance, what I would like to leave is that teachers are one of the general ed teachers. I one of the first referrals for, for kids. And maybe if general education teachers, when you think about referring a kid, especially a black boy for special education services that you take a moment to think about, is this a bias that may be playing a role? Is it something that you feel is wrong with the child or whatever those biases come from for our general education
01;10;17;04 teachers and others think about that moment before you refer, thank you. If there is a teacher or someone you can confide in and ask them, you know, I'm having this trouble with a child in my class, is there any strategy or support that you use before your first thought is to refer these children for special education?
01;10;32;24 [Evandra Catherine]: Because oftentimes such as the case is my son he's twice exceptional. And while he did have behaviors that were a manifestation of his disability, he just wanted to learn. And today I see that my son still just wants to learn and, and he has gotten that opportunity to Mary Louise point. He had a phenomenal, special education team that were willing to hear me out, but at the same time as a parent, I had to hear strategies that I felt like were a little bit extreme for my child to bring my kids to school every day and a one size smaller set of
01;11;05;21 under armor so that he can help regulate the environment in the amount of stimulation that he's getting. And as a parent, I had to meet those they're across the table. Like that's a bit much for me to do as a, that doesn't seem appropriate, but I did it. And then also for teachers to understand that there are just cultural differences amongst children and every culture approaches, things like disabilities, different, what may be a disability theater society may not be seeing so within families. And so I just asked
01;11;33;27 that we find those opportunities along the way within the probe and sort of take a moment to reflect on why we're referring a child for a disability.
01;11;47;06 [Mark Shriver]: Micah, do you want to jump in there about the one thing that I'm in the report needs to be amplified?
01;11;54;17 [Michael Yudin]: Yeah, sure. Um, and I think Linda Smith said it earlier when she kicked us off, I had like, the best thing we can do is inclusive early intervention, right? The best bang for your buck. Right. We, we, you know, we, we do a lot of work around developmental screening, but again, we don't have enough money, right? Like a $500 million, right. Is, is all were, were appropriating for part C if I could do one thing, I would, again, evidence-based approach kids do better. Kids have less need
01;12;27;03 for special ed, whether they need special ed or not, or they have disabilities that may need special ed for years. It doesn't matter. It is an effective program. Um, that really, uh, can just make all the difference in the world. So yes, for me, it's early intervention in part C and let's fund it let's fund it robustly.
01;12;48;22 [Mary Louise Hemmeter]: Hey Mark, can I say one real quick thing about that, which is that I was working with a principal one time who had this family who wanted their kid fully included in kindergarten. And he said to me, they're one of those preschool families. And when I kind of drilled down on that, they were a family that went early intervention and realized that they had rights and could advocate for their child. And so I think that starting at early intervention is really one of our best hopes. So thank
01;13;19;22 you for saying that Michael.
01;13;21;20 [Evandra Catherine]: Yes, and I would second that my son has been a phenomenal student and I think it for sure was early intervention.
01;13;32;03 [Mark Shriver]: Love it. Rebecca, do you want to jump in there about don't one or two recommendations that you hope folks will amplify?
01;13;39;05 [Rebecca Cokley]: Michael did such a great job hitting on the parent training and information centers. Um, when I was coming up in the youth leadership movement in the disability community, we actually proposed and got funded the creation of youth resource information and training centers, um, that were led by young people with disabilities that were funded out of HHS to support young people, transition age youth with disabilities and their advocacy and training up the next generation coming behind them. Um,
01;14;09;21 and I think today we see sort of the legacy of those, our state youth leadership forums, which are week long Training programs in a number of States around the country that support disabled youth in hanging out with other disabled youth, learning about self-advocacy learning about disability history. And to me, that's such a critical piece. Um, I would ask everyone on this panel, but I know the answer. When did you have your first disabled teacher? Um, I bet likely none of y'all can answer that. In most cases, I had a guidance counselor in
01;14;42;29 sixth grade named Dick Coast, who was a double amputee and he had every disabled student in that school running their own IEP and their 504 plans. Um, we don't talk about disabled teachers and we don't talk about the importance of all students, not just students with disabilities, but also students without disabilities being taught by openly disabled people. And how that shifts, what you think disabled people are capable of.
01;15;07;10 [Rebecca Cokley]: There is no truer shift and expectations than having your, your reality face back at you in an education setting, I think. And so I think that's also really critical. And the last thing I would say is that I hear a lot of times from other parents of kids with disabilities, well, that might work for your kid, but that doesn't work for my kid. My kid, my kid is more it's that it's the manifestation of the hierarchy of disability. My kid is so much more disabled than your kid or whatever it is. And, um, I, I tell the story of a friend of mine, um, Elena, who is the
01;15;42;26 founder of Little Lobbyists and she had her kids in the car and they were coming home from a playground they had gone to, and her daughter, Xiomara, who I keep saying, we're all going to work for some day has multiple complex disabilities and was, uh, Elena was told very early on that Xiomara, would not be communicative growing up. And so they're coming home from this playground and they're talking about the playground and they had been told it was an accessible playground and
01;16;07;18 they got there and it wasn't. And so they had pulled everything out of the car. And you know, when you're a parent of a kid with a disability, you got all kinds of extra crap. So they're pulling it all out of the car, they get it set up and they can't play. So they're in the car going home and Elena just sort of like size and her daughter from the back seat, Xiomara bless her heart says, well, that was a shit playground. And I always think about that and laughed because there was no better observation than that, but
01;16;38;01 this is a child who her parents were told would not communicate people in society were told, ignore this child. She can't communicate. You will not have opinions about things. And I firmly don't believe that there is a six year old on this planet that is more opinionated than Xiomara. And when given the chance disabled people have always communicated, it's just that non-disabled folks haven't been taught how to listen.
01;17;03;10 [Mark Shriver]: Sounds like she had her a pretty clear message and pretty succinct summary playground. Right. All right. We're going to go. Um, Alan Guttman, what should institutions Of higher ed play in nurturing the current and next generation of educators, special educators and school administrators to be the best practitioners and advocates? What role should institutions of higher ed play? Um, anybody want to jump in?
01;17;31;29 [Michael Yudin]: Can I start? And then, then of course Mary Louise should probably take it being one, right? But we are facing just to set the stage. We are facing crisis. We are in crisis with regards to the preparation of teachers. And particularly with regard to the preparation of special ed teachers, we are in a crisis of, uh, teachers of color, um, and building a pipeline of diverse teachers’ representative to Becca's point. Representation actually matters. We have research that shows kids of color do better when they have access to two teachers of color, but we are, we
01;18;03;11 are in a crisis. We are, we do not have enough teachers. We are providing emergency credentialing. Um, and that's not going to cut it right. We need, we need well-prepared, uh, educators to deal with this. And with that, I'm going to pass it to Mary Louise
01;18;22;04 [Mary Louise Hemmeter]: Hey, I mean, this is a hard question and I've said some of it already, but I think, I mean, it's just so hard to train teachers to do everything teachers need to do in these, in, in the context of our public schools right now. Um, but I do think that we've got to figure out a way that higher education programs, um, train all teachers to
01;18;52;05 work in inclusive settings. And I don't think that means we don't need special educators. I think it means we need really well-trained general educators who understand inclusion, who understand what effective practices are and who can implement them when given this support of special educators related services people. Um, but it it's back to the will to it's back to, you know, people go into regular ed sometimes because they don't want to
01;19;23;14 work with kids in special education. And at some point we've got to help all people going into the field of education realized that they could be working with any of our children.
01;19;36;09 [Mary Louise Hemmeter]: Um, and it's back to what I think Becca, you said at the beginning, which is, are we getting schools ready for children? Are we expecting children to get ready for school? And I think we've got to move to a mindset of it's our job as schools to get ready for all the children that are going to come through our doors. And I don't begin to think we do it right. But, um, I think Michael you're right, that there's gotta be a lot of reform. And again, it gets back to money put into higher education
01;20;09;26 around these issues. I don't have a good Answer.
01;20;14;29 [Michael Yudin]: Can I just have one more, one more point. There was a report. I think it was the council of chief state school officers. I believe with the university of Florida that is called promises to keep, it was a few years back, but it kind of turns the framework of how do we educate our, prepare our educators in it gets to the point that Maryland has just made. Like we have to start from the, from the, the, the, it's almost like a, you know, multi tiered system of support. We have to start from the universe, the place where each prayer, all, all of our teachers in how to differentiate instruction and how to meet the needs of learners with
01;20;47;23 diverse learning styles. And then we build up our specialized expertise in special ed Juul language and reading specialists and the other. But it's a really good resource. It's a few years old, I think, um, having looked at it in awhile, but it's called promises to keep and it really kind of streaks this conversation.
01;21;09;13 [Mark Shriver]: Okay. Folks, I'm afraid. We're at time, I'm supposed to send it back to Shantel, but I want to thank each of you so much. I had a couple other questions. I was going to ask each of you, whether you had questions to ask the other panel members, but I guess run out of time here, but wow. What a, what a collection of talent, what a collection of great ideas, uh, Shantel, you're back on and thank you all very much and tell you're on. I hope.
01;21;37;29 [Shantel Meek]: Yeah. Mark. I think we have a couple of minutes to do a lightning round. If you wanted to ask that last question,
01;21;45;06 [Mark Shriver]: The voice of God that I wasn't allowed to ask any more questions I will do a lightning round. Does that Michael, wanting you to jump in there? Is there any question you would ask quick, one that you would ask any of your panelists writing last point you want to make not to put them on anybody else on the spot?
01;22;04;12 [Michael Yudin]: Um, yeah. Evandra. What's that?. Um, I, I don't know what you forgot to ask, but I would love to hear more from the founder of like how she got into a PhD program to learn how to be a better advocate and her kids kicking butt and doing amazing things and clearly, but where is she going with this and what is she going to do? Because I want to watch
01;22;34;26 [Evandra Catherine]: Definitely a great question. It's Shantel who I'm following behind here at the Children’s Equity Project. So under her mentorship and her guidance, I look forward to being influential piece of equity policy and just sort of taking a different way to look at special education and continue to put the research out there. There's good. Continue to have policy actions that are effective. And so I'm trying to stay in that space and continue to watch my son. He amazes me every day and I hope that other parents don't feel as though an IEP has to follow your
01;23;05;12 child all the way to high school. I think for me, it was a story that when I first shared, I got looks like, what do you mean your kid came off of his IEP. He doesn't have a disability anymore. And I'm like, no, but he has the tools to maintain and manage his disability. And I've had to be a huge advocate for him. So, Michael, thank you so much for asking, but just continue to follow the Children’s Equity Project because I, I feel very comfortable here to continue that advocacy.
01;23;32;10 [Michael Yudin]: Excellent.
01;23;32;25 [Mark Shriver]: Sorry. Did you say, are you in Virginia or where are you? Did you say your, you grew up, the son grew up in Richmond?
01;23;40;07 [Evandra Catherine]: Yes. My son is still in Richmond. He has been in a title one school since head start all the way till now will he'll be going into fifth grade, but I'm with the Children’s Equity Project in Arizona right now. So he's with his father in Richmond, Virginia.
01;23;53;04 [Mark Shriver]: Got it. Excellent. Alright. Do you want to throw the lightning round question? Anybody else here since you're on Evandra?
01;24;03;14 [Evandra Catherine]: Not our, we have a question to throw around. I'll share the floor.
01;24;07;20 [Mark Shriver]: Alright. Alright, professional, go ahead please. I'll throw a question out to Evandra and Becca. We had that little discussion about higher ed and I'd kinda like to hear what y'all have to think, have to say about what you think we need to do better or differently, or in addition to in higher education to prepare people to work with your, your kids.
01;24;37;22 [Evandra Catherine]: Um, I think that it's what Becca hit earlier about teachers being exposed is representation. A lot of teachers aren't even exposed to kids with disabilities. When we were sitting here, I actually thought about something that happened to my son that I totally pushed backwards, but he was actually expelled. It would be like a soft expulsion and kindergarten. And the reason why his teacher said that she had never taught a child with a disability before there was only one class, a classroom at that school that could serve my son. And so we were asked to move to a different school in the district and that move was the same day.
01;25;11;05 But when I think about just that moment right there, that my son couldn't be at a school because the only teacher that could teach him, I had never taught a child with a disability before and did not know how to work with my son. So in the higher ed space, I really do think in these like field experiences that teachers have an opportunity to work with individuals with disabilities. So the classroom isn't the first time.
01;25;36;06 [Rebecca Cokley]: I would definitely agree with what Andrea said. I think one of the things that blows my mind is that we spend more time. Um, there's, there's more time spent teaching barbers how to cut hair. Then there is spent teaching general education teachers how to teach students with disabilities. Um, and in some States is actually the identical amount of hours to the amount of time that law enforcement gets trained on how to engage with people with disabilities. Which if you think about the fact
01;26;06;24 that 50% of, uh, individuals killed by law enforcement are disabled people of color. It tends to make a lot of sense. It's terrifying. Um, but I do think, uh, an increased level of, of education and training for general education teachers. Um, and frankly, I think spending time specifically in the classrooms of teachers with disabilities, I really do think that there is a significant power dynamic. I mean, I've seen it merit even in the disability community. When
01;26;39;08 you take a bunch of folks with physical or mobility disabilities and have them in a training, run by somebody with an intellectual or cognitive disability, and you watch the expectations shift. And I think for a lot of people without disabilities, y'all have never been in a position with disabled people telling you what you have to do, and the fact that you have to do it, that it's not like a suggestion, or you can be like, Oh, that's nice. But I was thinking X, no, you're actually having to do what disabled
01;27;08;04 people are telling you. Um, and I think that experience would be extremely powerful for, uh, for educators both in general education and in special education.
01;27;20;11 [Mark Shriver]: Thank you all so much. Oh, got to hurry up, bro. Shantel s going to let you have it.
01;27;25;29 [Michael Yudin]: Okay. It's a question for you mark so what would your mother?
01;27;33;08 [Rebecca Cokley]: Yeah, that's a good question.
01;27;36;27 [Michael Yudin]: What would your mother tell us? We need to be doing what I'm going to tell you,.
01;27;39;12 [Mark Shriver]: Do you want me to give you the polite answer. Do you want me to give you the real answer? What she would say is what she said all the time is let's get going. You got to get to work. We got to put pressure on our political leaders. You know, the fact that you said that it's underfunded with $500 million is disgraceful, you know, and then we ought to hold them accountable and we ought to get into the political arena. You know, like Teddy Roosevelt said whatever a hundred years ago, and you're going to get knocked around and we're going to get defeated, but we've got to keep pushing and we've got to
01;28;10;29 keep pushing. I mean, we've heard, just heard from two mothers that are fired up. And if you look at all the great political movements, I think someone said it earlier, it doesn't come from, you know, political leaders, most cases, it comes from people that no one's expecting to lead the charge, whether it's Rosa parks or, you know, Martin Luther King was I think 28 or 29 years old, something crazy like that. You know, it comes from people that aren't that rich and powerful. It comes from the people
01;28;39;21 that are, you know, fired up as I'm a very good friend. Who's got a child with learning differences and she started her own school and is starting a, um, a place where the kids can live in an inclusive environment in Rockville, Maryland. I mean, there's, she's fired up. And I think that's what my mom would say is let's get at it. And, but let's, let's get organized and let's push hard politely, relentlessly Shantel over to you. Pushing harder
01;29;07;10 [Shantel Meek]: Thank you, Mark. And thank you all our incredible panel. Um, I learned so much from you guys and I've had the good fortune to learn from, from all of you guys for years. Um, Becca, who was my very first mentor when I was with brand new to D C as an intern over a decade ago, I continue to learn from and will always learn from Michael, who I had the good fortune of working with during our time in the Obama administration, Mary Louise and Evandra were both dear colleagues and have played such a foundational important role in the birth and implementation
01;29;40;05 the Children’s Equity Project. You know, I, I sit back and think here, and I'm so sorry that the rights of people are still kind of up for public will. Uh, I think that's, that's more than frustrating. I think that's embarrassing as a nation. And so I think we focused a lot on why we haven't moved in and I do want to end this kind of building on, on, on what Mark just said. And, and let's be hopeful because in this area, perhaps more than any other area, we're
01;30;08;28 equipped to move where we're ready. Now we have a law with clear congressional intent, prioritizing inclusion. We have the science, we have the practices, we need to do it. We need to break up this bureaucratic, outdated segregated system that too often makes the status quo segregation. So, uh, I urge you guys to check out our full report. We have a full, very detailed roadmap, uh, policy roadmap, uh, with recommendations for Congress, with recommendations for federal agencies, for States and for
01;30;39;20 districts and early childhood programs. I urge you to dig into that and join, uh, disability advocates and disabled folks who have been leading the way on this for, you know, since Becca mentioned since the beginning and founding of our nation, uh, to really kind of have this time be different and, and get us over that line and making real progress. So with that, thank you guys again, thanks to Linda and BPC for partnering with us. Um, I urge you guys to please check out our report and also sign up for our last
01;31;11;03 webinar in our four part series on dual language learners. Uh, you can find that on the Children’s Equity Project website or BPCs website, um, and that's a wrap
Video Transcript
00;00;03;11 [Linda Smith]: Well, good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to the fourth and final webinar in a series that we've been doing on start with equity from the early years to the early grades. My name is Linda Smith and I'm the Director of the Early Childhood Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center here in Washington, DC um, if you don't know us, we are in Washington DC based think tank that tries to take the best ideas from both sides of the aisle to create policies that address the most pressing needs
00;00;33;18 of our country. So with that in mind, this there's nothing, I think more pressing than the one before us today. And that is the issue of equity in the earliest years with our small children. So in the past we have had, we have looked at we've had three different webinars already. The first one that looked at the issues around the overall report and the challenges and opportunities there. Um, the next one, we looked in depth at harsh discipline and its impact on
00;01;05;04 our youngest children. Then we looked at children with disabilities and what were those challenges and opportunities there? So each of those, just for those of you who missed may have missed one of them, those are all on line at both the BPC website and the ASU website. So if you haven't seen them, you still have an opportunity. I encourage you to do that, uh, when it comes to the report, um, I just want to acknowledge all of the people, the many people who contributed to this report, if you haven't looked at it
00;01;37;09 and read it, I would really invite you to do that. It's probably, I think one of the best sources, if you will, of information, data, and research on this issue in the earliest years, I want to thank the over 70 national state, local and tribal people who experts from across the country, who contributed to the report, uh, to the Heising Simons foundation for their
00;02;01;25 generous support of this work.
00;02;04;07 [Linda Smith]: Then to the ASU and the BPC staff who worked behind the scenes for the last year to put this together with, um, all of us and with the experts who provided information. So now I want to turn it over to Shantel, make, um, who is the Director of the Children's Equity Project at Arizona State University and the primary author and driver behind this. Um, we look forward to a robust discussion at the end of it, just so you know, these slides will be posted. We always get that question immediately.
00;02;34;18 We will post the slides along with the report. And, um, if we, we will be taking questions in the chat. So if you, um, are, have a question, please enter them in the chat. If we don't get to all of the questions by the end of this, we are keeping those questions and we'll be posting answers to your questions later on. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Shantel Meek. Thanks, Shantel.
00;03;02;26 [Shantel Meek]: Um, we're excited to be partnering with Bipartisan Policy Center and your team on what are critical set of issues around equity and learning settings. Today, we're here to talk about the almost 24 million kids in the U S to speak a language other than English at home are beautiful, brilliant bilingual babies. Two of whom live in my home. We here to talk about what we know are their strengths. Uh, I know firsthand that was one of the kids and my two kids today are two of those things and all of the kids in my family, and there are many are the kids who are going
00;03;33;14 to be talking about today. We're here to talk about how, despite all of these great strengths, our systems, our instruction, our schools, our early childhood programs, our policies, our society broadly starting at the top, continue to put barriers in their way, making them work twice as hard to reach their full potential.
00;03;52;01 [Shantel Meek]: We're here to tell you about all that we found in our data and our research dives and how it's not at all aligned with wide-scale policy and practice. We're going to focus on access to doing with done bilingual learning opportunities for our doing with centers, because we think that when done well, when fully resource, these models can be a game changer for our kids, for DLLs and for English learners, we know that growing their bilingualism, isn't a nice enrichment or an add on like it is for kids who speak English at home, these opportunities can actually
00;04;24;08 make or break their access to a quality education. Altogether. We know that the science is clear that these types of learning programs work and produce better outcomes. But we also know that this is about more than research and child outcomes. This is about their right to a free inappropriate quality of education for too long. Language has been used as a tool for exclusion as an excuse to provide a subpar education with proportionately affecting Latino children, but dual language learners more broadly. And we know there are many dual language
00;04;54;09 learners with many different languages. We know that continuing to play ping pong on the issue of language of instruction is really malpractice. At this point, we know what works, the science is clear, and we're really denying the large and growing subset of the population, the right to thrive. So with that in mind, we're here to propose actionable specific public policy steps to get us closer, to making sure that the science and the policy is more aligned.
00;05;21;21 [Shantel Meek]: So if we can put the slide show up now, great. If you have been following our four part webinar series, um, you know, that we're here to lift up our new report and actionable policy agenda outlined in our start with equity report, it was generously funded. As Linda mentioned by the Heising-Simons Foundation. And in the report, we engage deeply with three key issue areas that we know the proportionally exclude harm and disadvantaged kids from historically marginalized communities,
00;05;53;00 children of color, children with disabilities children in tribal communities. And many of these, all of these are issues that we know have solutions. Uh, the three issues that we focused on were discipline inclusion of kids with disabilities and dual language learning within each of these issue areas. We reviewed the data and the latest evidence. We provide a set of actionable recommendations that will help bridge opportunity and accessibility taps and get us closer to the education
00;06;21;09 system we all want to know possible. So with that, let's jump on to what we want. We want to start with just a bit of branding and definitions and terminology. Um, dual language learner have me use the term in the report and in this, um, presentation are usually children. They're learning their home language while also acquiring a second language. And they're from a home where a language other than
00;06;56;00 broken English learners are typically referred to they're school aged kids. They're also from a language where a language other than English is spoken, but these kids were screened and found to be below proficient in English. So it's really an official classification category for what services that may be eligible for services. We know there's a lot of controversy with terms and, you know, I think our preference is bilingual children, but
00;07;25;28 policy. And then, you know, right now uses the term DLL. And because this was a policy report and we wanted to be clear with what policy recommendations we have and where those schools are, where those live or has oversight over those. We use DLL and ELs respectively throughout report.
00;07;47;25 [Shantel Meek]: So here's what we know and what we found when we reviewed the data. And we wrote when we reviewed the research, we know that birth reach eight, who are dual language learners are about 11 million kids, or about a third of all kids under eight. We know that English learners, there's about four, almost 5 million of them. And they're just under 1% of the total population. And as they progressed in age, the numbers get smaller because kids get more likely to get proficient with
00;08;21;18 great growth in grades. We know that there are major data gaps with dual language learners in particular, our youngest kids. And part of this has to do with the major data graphs in general, early current education finals. Um, but, but where we see a lot of gaps with respect to the language background that kids have, and the exposure of different one with is that they have at home men and for bilingualism that they come with, we know
00;08;48;06 that DLL emails are diverse. Every member will go into a bit of that in just a second, but regionally they live everywhere. They have a variety of different languages, different languages at home, different income levels, different immigration statuses, and generational levels. Um, uh, really diverse. We know that they have cultural linguistic and cognitive strengths, including, uh, the many cognitive advantages associated with bilingualism. That we'll go over a bit
00;09;20;20 today. We know that DLLs and yields tend to do better in high quality dual language or bilingual models of instruction compared with English dominant models. We also know that there's limited data that show that ELs, uh, maybe underrepresented in these exact models. We know that segregated learning is harmful and it doesn't work, but it's still prevalent. And we know that there are major gaps in assessment, uh, individual child
00;09;50;20 assessment, and in global classroom quality assessments that really enable us, you know, are standing in the way of enabling us to understand what quality looks like, uh, for deals.
00;10;03;08 [Shantel Meek]: We know that there is a wide array of policy and standards that vary across systems. So childcare pre-K, head start K-12, um, and across state lines. And within state lines, we know that head start in particular is a system that has kind of the most comprehensive set of standards for DLLs. We know that no state pre-K system or program has a comprehensive set of high-quality standards for DLLs and 18 of them have no policies at all specific to DLLs. And we know that funding for English
00;10;38;03 learners is woefully inadequate, uh, Title III, uh, which is the part of the nation's education law ESSA, uh, that provides support for English learners has been stagnant for years and has not even kept up with inflation or the increase in the EL population. So who are DLLs and ELs? Let's jump into this diversity that I mentioned earlier. They live everywhere across the country. They're, they're diverse racially,
00;11;06;25 uh, by immigration generation, by country and language of origin by income, by parent education. We know that most, despite this diversity, uh, the majority of DLLs about two third of them come from Spanish speaking homes and identify as Latino or Latina. Um, we know that about 75% of them identify as Latino Latina. Um, we know that an overwhelming majority of these children are us citizens, even though they may live in mixed status
00;11;35;28 families, or they may be children of immigrants, but the vast majority are us citizens. We know they're more likely to live in two parent households and multi-generation households with grandparents and others. Uh, we also know that they're more likely to be low income and have a parent with a high school education.
00;11;55;15 [Shantel Meek]: So now we want to talk a little bit, we dove into bilingualism in misreport, as you'll see, and, and really tried to understand kind of this, this bilingual advantage, uh, that we hear talked about a lot. So what we found in the research is really that infants are born with the capacity to learn as many unlimited number of languages. Um, there's a common notion that young kids will get confused if you introduce them to a second language and they're still learning their first. Um, but the research really finds that from, you know, infants are really born with
00;12;27;24 the ability to, to pick up, uh, and understand and learn as many languages as we, uh, expose them to, of course, uh, the, the quality of that exposure and of that language really matters, uh, in terms of how, how they develop their language and their bilingualism. We know that neuroscientists have observed advantages in bilingual children as early as seven months, uh, but really across kind of those early years in an array of different outcomes, uh, and cognitive outcomes, including
00;12;57;20 problem solving executive functioning skills, attention, shifting perspective, taking and self-regulation. And, um, if you know a lot about child development, we know that all of these are critical and really make up a big part of how kids learn, uh, which directly affects what kids learn. We know that, uh, bilingual exposure. So if you're a really young child and you're exposed to more than one language, uh, these children have
00;13;26;19 greater neuroplasticity and gray matter density in the brain gray matter contains most of the neurons in the brain and the brain regions involved in some really important, uh, cognitive functions, like memory, emotion, speech decision-making, um, and lots of others. We know that the science isn't, uh, sure, or certain like what answers or what kind of makes up or explains, uh, this kind of these findings that they found in bilingual babies. One hypothesis that that's out there. And that is, um, articulated
00;14;00;00 in the literature is that this kind of this cognitive exercise of having to at all times suppress one language and then execute one language and kind of switching back and forth between those is like brain exercise. Um, and that it kind of works parts of the brain, uh, that kind of build up the muscle in, in the memory for some of these other cognitive skills.
00;14;25;12 [Shantel Meek]: So based on all of these great things that that are associated with, with bilingualism, and, um, we know that a dual language, immersion models, or other types of kind of bilingual instructional models, where there are two languages of instruction that are kind of split across days or weeks to various percentages, um, have improved outcomes for dual language learners, but also who came from, for kids who speak English at home, one kind of distinction, there's, there's a whole variety of different types of bilingual learning models. Um, the ones that we're
00;14;58;27 talking about here really have the goal of bilingualism and biliteracy, as opposed to other programs that are more transitional, like bilingual transitional program, where the goal is to eventually phase kids out of dual language and have them reach whatever level of English proficiency, and then kind of phase them out and transition to English only instruction. So let's take a look at some of the outcomes that are associated with bilingual learning and dual language immersion. We know that kids who are
00;15;30;07 in dilemmas, emerging models actually become proficient in English more quickly. Um, we know that they outperform their peers in math and in reading in elementary school and beyond we know that they reach national academic performance norms, and we know that they're more likely to become by literate. There's also a whole number of other benefits that they've found in early childhood. So a lot of this research that's on this slide is
00;15;56;26 kind of from K-12. Um, but in the early years, uh, it's been associated with a number of social, emotional outcomes, as well as a number of kind of pre academic skills and learning outcomes, um, and in adulthood. So at the other end of the spectrum, um, there have been studies by from UCLA and other folks, uh, that have really found that kids who are DLLs or come from a home, uh, that speaks a language other than English and who remain kind
00;16;26;14 of bilingual over time.
00;16;28;02 [Shantel Meek]: So who, uh, whose bilingualism is kind of strengthened, kind of remain balanced bilinguals over time. So they keep their home language as well as acquiring English, um, compared to dual language learners kind of lose their home language over time, or become less proficient in it. And then kind of becoming English dominant over time. We know that that first group of kids is more likely, uh, to go to college or to a four year institution. They have higher earnings later in life. Um, and we also know that by literacy is associated with a number of
00;17;00;05 kind of professional advantages, uh, in this global economy, more global now than ever, uh, that we live in, despite all of this, uh, we know that this type of instruction, dual language immersion is not a reality for most deals in eels, uh, instruction across particularly the early care and education is primarily in English where the home language is used. Uh, some research has found it's for behavior supports, which is not confer the same types of benefits exposure. We also know that exposure to the home
00;17;32;03 language in early childhood education generally decreases over time as kids grow older. So, um, more common in infants and toddlers, and then, uh, decreases over time. And we know that, um, uh, more, there's more, they're more likely to have a provider who speaks the home language in non-center-based settings. Um, so in family childcare settings or other kind of community-based settings that are not in the center, um, although we will
00;17;59;05 point out that just having a bilingual teacher provider does not equate, it's not the same thing as having dual language instruction and some of these other models, it's, it's a necessary component, but not all of it.
00;18;12;27 [Shantel Meek]: So when we look at the different systems and what the standards are across systems, as I mentioned in earlier on head start really has kind of the most robust systems, uh, standards for DLLs. They're not, uh, fully comprehensive and there's still room to grow here, but they are far and away kind of, uh, ahead of the rest of the field in terms of standards. Um, we know that 28% of children in head start are DLLs and nearly 80% of those, uh, speak Spanish. And in terms of the standards that they have, uh, we know that there's explicit language there about valuing
00;18;44;10 the home language. Uh, we know that the home language and English, um, are re are required for DLLs within instruction, uh, for the youngest children, uh, the newest regulations say that you have to use primarily their home language and instruction with English exposure and for preschoolers, it kind of swaps it. So, you know, English exposure continued and increased English exposure with also continued exposure to the home language. Uh, bilingual staff who speak children's home language are required. If more
00;19;16;18 than half of the kids share the same home language, they conduct assessments in English and the home language. Um, and they have a whole number of culturally responsive family engagement, um, requirements and supports, uh, for programs to use. If we look at childcare, um, it's a lot more variability across the country. We know that data are scarce, um, as it is for many things in
00;19;43;04 childcare, in terms of child outcomes, um, so much more fragmented system, uh, and state led, um, as of 2017, only about, uh, 40% of quality rating and improvement systems in States included any indicators specific to DLLs. And even when DLL indicators were included in quality rating systems, the standard of quality was often quite low, like providing resources to families in their home languages, quite a low bar. When we look across, uh, childcare plans, uh, States, States develop these childcare plans every
00;20;15;11 year, uh, and, and report them to the federal government every few years. Um, we know that there were some policies listed, um, in, in those state childcare plans. Um, but again, uh, quite a low bar. And if you look at some of these categories, very few States are doing them. So, you know, for example, state referencing DLLs and their professional development plans, and in most cases, this wasn't that it required providers have training and dual language learning, but it, it, it, uh, it was an option for providers
00;20;46;08 to take, or it was available to, to take, which is also quite a low bar, particularly considering the large number of DLLs in some States and communities. Um,
00;20;58;14 [Shantel Meek]: One, So if we look at state pre-K systems, um, we know that less than half of state pre-K programs collect data on home language use, including some States that have some really huge, uh, DLL populations like Arizona, Florida, and New York, um, of those that do collect the data, uh, about, uh, they report that about 29% of the kids enrolled are DLLs in terms of policies. So I mentioned earlier, uh, that 18 States had no policy supporting, uh, specifically DLLs and in preschool in these public
00;21;31;11 preschool programs. Um, we know that Illinois, uh, really explicitly requires bilingual instruction if there's 20 or more DLLs in the same of the same home language in enrolled in the same program, although the mandated, I should notice for transitional bilingual, uh, as I mentioned earlier, which is distinct from dual language immersion models. Um, and just a few other examples of, of other policies have all of these are reviewed in a near report that was released a couple of years ago. Um,
00;22;01;13 seven States, uh, have programs that require staff to have training and qualifications for working with DLL. So S uh, seven States, uh, out of, out of all the ones in the country, um, 19 state programs have policies for assessing children in their home language. Um, the, the rest do not Go to the next slide, please. Can we go to the next slide? Great. Um, so now looking a little bit at, at
00;22;48;13 the K-12, um, landscape and providing a bit of a, of an overview on kind of the EL, the English learner part and the nation's education law, the,
00;22;59;04 every student succeeds act, which was passed, uh, five years ago now. Um, so here's a number in the report. We go into more depth about some of the changes, uh, within ESA for, for English learners, um, uh, you know, a big part of our big kind of takeaway message here is that a lot of the responsibility for English learners, uh, switch kind of from the federal level and accountability to really state flexibility, um, States are not required to develop standards, uh, in entry and exit procedures for
00;23;31;20 determining whether a student is an English learner. Um, States may include students, formally classified as English learner in the English learner subgroup for academic assessments. Um, they, it, within the law, it includes requirements for engagement, uh, for English learners, um, in terms of funding. Uh, we know that as I mentioned earlier, title three is woefully underfunded, and that the effects of that are exacerbated, or
00;24;00;21 perhaps that exacerbates the effects of base education funds being woefully, uh, both inadequate and inequitable.
00;24;12;08 [Shantel Meek]: So We don't have a ton of time to dig into this. I do encourage you to read the report and to get more information on this piece of it, but we did want to touch on what the reality is and kind of how that's tied to the history in terms of language and segregation and bias. I mentioned earlier kind of that that language has been used as a tool for exclusion since, uh, since the Mexican American war. And then there was integration efforts started. We know that, um, early on that, um, there were actually Mexican schools
00;24;42;13 that were established, uh, that placed all kids of, of kind of Hispanic or Latino origin, uh, within them. And they explicitly used the language as the tool of exclusion saying that these kids didn't know English, so they couldn't go to the regular school. So they created all Mexican schools and systems of Mexican schools, um, to put these kids into often time, these kids only spoke English, uh, and oftentimes, or most of the time, they weren't even assessed for their English assessment, but really there's a
00;25;11;07 long history with language being used as a tool of exclusion over time. If we look at kind of more contemporary research, uh, you know, there's been some studies, one study in particular used national achievement data and found that the degree of segregation between English learners and their peers was really the greatest predictor of disparities in achievement. We know that, um, today segregation looks a little bit different, right? So there, we don't have Mexican schools quote unquote anymore. Uh, but a lot of English learners, particularly in K-12 are segregated at the classroom
00;25;45;02 level. They're pulled out to get English services, um, or they're, you know, they're, they're immersed what they call, uh, there's a model called structured English immersion, um, which was the law of the land, um, in Arizona until just recently where children, uh, English learners were pulled out for at least four hours a day, uh, and kind of self, self-contained English learner classrooms just to learn English.
00;26;12;09 [Shantel Meek]: And so when you think about four hours a day, and then you add in lunch, and then you add in recess, and then you add in transitions that doesn't leave a whole lot of additional time, um, for math and for science and for everything else, uh, that a student needs and deserves, uh, in order to graduate. And so then it's perhaps not surprising that Arizona has one of the lowest graduation rates for English learners in the country. Uh, but it's not just happening in Arizona. There are many other places that have these kind of pullout models. Um, we also know from
00;26;45;15 research that teachers have lower academic expectations for English learners that grow over time as kids get older, but researchers found that it's not the case in bilingual schools when there's somewhat of an evening kind of, of the language playing field in terms of what is valued. Uh, there's research that finds that one, surprisingly bilingual teachers are more effective with dual language learners. We know that there are major issues in assessment bias. Um, everything we assess for the most
00;27;12;25 part, there, there are not very many States that assess kids in the home language and in English. And so really we get into this more in the report, but really a lot of our assessments are telling us, uh, what we already know, uh, what the kid knows in English, as opposed to really understanding kind of the full breadth of what they know across all of their languages. Um, what we also know is a really interesting piece that it's not just kind of the teacher part, the classroom part, the school part, the state part, but there's been research that's been done in kind of multilingual
00;27;45;05 societies where bilingualism and multiple languages are valued.
00;27;50;02 [Shantel Meek]: Um, and the achievement gap between native language speakers of the country and their peers is small or nonexistent. So we know that kind of broader societal bias, uh, for, you know, monolingual, uh, English, uh, and this kind of obsession with, with just, uh, focusing on English is, is really big, uh, in the field. The other thing that we will note, um, when it comes to dual language immersion programs, we mentioned this a little bit earlier on, um, but there's emerging evidence that, that
00;28;25;10 DLLs and ELL is, are underrepresented in these models. And this, uh, this report is an equity report, and that is one of the most profound inequities that we can think of this, this kind of double standard, right? So for kids who speak English at home, typically white children, higher resource children, bilingualism is, is kind of this there's really wonderful
00;28;49;06 enrichment like this there's really great add on to an education. It's, it's a really prestigious thing. There are language schools kind of cropping up all over the country. Um, but for English learners, when they kind of come to our doors, uh, bilingual, uh, instead of kind of building on that strength and that, that language that they're bringing to the door and seeing it as like this really prestigious thing that we want to build on, like we see for, for this other group of kids, instead, we kind of just focused on teaching them English and it's all about English and let's
00;29;21;14 exclude them because they don't speak English yet. And let's segregate them, uh, to, to just focus on the English and actually get rid of the bilingualism, because we don't care about kind of cropping up and developing that, that growing bilingualism, unless you're in this other group of kids over here. So kind of this double standard that's appearing across the country, um, is quite problematic and kind of without this explicit focus on equitable access to these dual language immersion programs, um, we have, there's the potential to exacerbate existing equity
00;29;54;07 inequities that we see already.
00;29;57;02 [Shantel Meek]: So with all of that in mind, I, um, here is just a subset of the many policy recommendations that you'll find in the report. Um, so I'll go through a few of those that we think will kind of get us closer to aligning the science, um, with, uh, policy. So first and foremost, in terms of Congress, uh, funding is always a tremendous issue. So at least doubling funding for kids, learning English through title three, uh, and any other relevant funding streams. As I mentioned before,
00;30;27;13 it's been stagnant for a really long time. It has not been updated. The number of kids has grown. So it's woefully inadequate at this point and fun and doubling it is, is the kind of very bottom line least we can do requesting a government accountability office study on federal funding for dual language learners and English learners. Where is that funding going? Uh, what types of models is it supporting, uh, is it supporting things that are evidence-based or things that are ideologically based? Um, uh, the third is really aligning policy with research and our main point here that
00;30;59;01 we're trying to drive home in this report based on the data and on the research is prioritizing dual language and strength based approaches in learning and tying that prioritization to federal funding alongside phasing out these ineffective English only approaches that often require, uh, or result in, uh, segregation. We recommend holding hearings on best practices and really lifting those up and funding models that optimally support yields and deals, um, and using that information to inform, you know,
00;31;30;02 investments above and beyond the doubling of title three, you mentioned earlier. Um, and finally, because we know that one of the key requirements to expanding access to dual language immersion models for deals and DLLs is a workforce and the number of teachers to be able to do that.
00;31;46;16 [Shantel Meek]: We recommend funding a national effort to really expand the number of qualified bilingual educators and early childhood providers in terms of federal agencies, really looking at piloting and investing and really growing our capacity and knowledge on strength based bilingual education and linguistically diverse workforce preparation programs. Um, investing as a, you know, we mentioned that there are some assessment bias and there's also a lack of assessments and all of the languages that we need them in. So investing in classroom assessment tools to assess the quality of dual language approaches, um, and child level
00;32;19;17 assessments to better understand kind of the breadth and be able to accurately capture what kids know and requiring States to report their plans, to equitably expand access to doing this pro again, in terms of the, at the state level, you'll see some of these are nest data repeated across, but really discontinuing segregated programs for English learners and English only programs for English and dual language learners, because it's clear that they're ineffective, I'm using federal funds to expand bilingual
00;32;46;24 programs and prioritizing deals and eels. And then, and so that's a really important point. We see a lot of cities and communities and States starting to expand access because of demand like families love a lot of these bilingual programs. Um, but if there's not a specific kind of equity considered in the policy, so if yells or deals are not explicitly prioritized in that policy of expansion, and there's a number of ways to do it, that we write out in the report, there's weighted lotteries, there's putting them first in line, there's expanding
00;33;19;10 dual language slots in certain communities. So there's, there's ways to do this, but if we're not cognizant and intentional about equitably expanding access, which means putting DLLs and yells first in line, then you kind of end up with, with the systems that right, we're expanding bilingual learning, but yells and DLLs get pushed out. We also recommend adopting head start DLL standards in state funded pre-K. Um, we know, as we mentioned earlier, that head start of the existing standards that exist with DLLs, uh,
00;33;49;21 have the most robust standards. And as we learned in the report, one of the common themes is standards are only as good as your monitoring and accountability systems are tied to them. And so really tying and incorporating accountability frameworks, uh, and the availability of funds to accurately fund these, uh, into those models. Uh, and finally kind of nested across, you'll see again, improving existing and creating new workforce preparation programs to expand linguistic diversity and knowledge
00;34;20;21 of DLLs.
00;34;24;26 [Shantel Meek]: So, um, with that, it is my distinct honor to introduce my mentor, my colleague, and my friend event scientist, when this, uh, event brings extensive experience, um, in providing services to young children from low income families at the local regional and national level, she was most recently the president for the national Alliance for Hispanic families. Before that she served as a director of the office of head start nationally as a presidential political appointee at the us department of health and human services. And prior to that, um, Yvette
00;34;58;12 served as executive director of the national migrant and seasonal head start association, where she worked with early education services, policies, and resources for migrant and seasonal farm worker, children and families. She is going to lead a really exciting panel of colleagues and experts in dual language learners and English learners. Uh, so with that, I'll hand it over to Yvette.
00;35;21;06 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Great. Well, first off I wanna thank Shantel so much for inviting me to facilitate this panel and it really is going to be a discussion, but I also want to thank everybody behind the scenes who Has made all of this work possible and really for all of the work, uh, to bring this all full word and to light. Um, often I think it feels like we're preaching to the choir. So my hope really is that with this work, we
00;35;55;13 can expand it and really start to talk about very specific recommendations about how we move forward. Um, so first off, I want to share a little bit about my journey, and then I'm going to start by asking each of our esteem panel is a really specific question so that you can get to know them and then we'll move into a panel discussion, and then we'll have some time for Q and a, and we've actually already been getting questions. So we'll have
00;36;22;16 to really balance out our time so that we can have a full discussion. Um, so this topic, this subject is really personal for me because I can remember my parents and my grandparents talking about these Mexican schools and talking about how, when you spoke Spanish in school, you'd actually get paddled so that, you know, would talk about the big paddle that they would use and you get sent to the principal's office.
00;36;47;22 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Uh, but in my own really sort of personal life with my son, I will share that he is a trilingual child. And when we actually enrolled him in public school, he's now going to be a senior, uh, on your form. You had to, uh, write whether or not you spoke another language in the home. So obviously we did, we said English Spanish, and he speaks in indigenous language. Uh, so not known to us when he gets to school a week after that, this is kindergarten. He comes home one day and he's super
00;37;21;16 excited. And he's talking about how he is taken out of the class and he's going with this other teacher and four other kids, and they're doing these amazing activities and it's so much fun and he's loving it. Um, and I'm sort of thinking to myself like, huh, what's going on here? So when I go to check in, I'm told that when I let her Sandra was enrolled in the school, he was given this grid where he had to identify what each of
00;37;49;29 the words meant. And on the grid, there's, it's a 12 by 12 grid. There was the word duck. Um, so this little boy who's five years old is thinking that it's a duck like quack, quack. when in fact what they wanted him to say was you have to duck to go under the tree. So because of that, he was put into what we call Esau a, I don't think we use that anymore, but back then we used, you saw, um, so really for us, I really, from that just became
00;38;22;24 something that was wow. Like we need to figure out what's going on in our public schools and start to become the advocates that we can.
00;38;29;13 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: What I really loved about this report is the intentionality that Shantel and all of the participants and everyone who got the intentionality around, really making sure that we talk about how diverse, uh, DLL and ELL children and families are everything from ethnically to culturally to economically, uh, and that these kids and these families and our communities that we really bring these strengths that should be celebrated. And as Shantel mentioned, um, in her opening, not
00;39;02;24 really used for the purposes of exclusion. And so just to give the panel a little bit of a heads up, I'm hoping that we can have a discussion today around this whole idea of language as a tool for exclusion, especially when we're really in the middle of this pandemic, we're in the middle of these uprisings around racial injustice. Um, and what does it mean when our kids and our families come into our public institutions and I'm not celebrated
00;39;31;21 for the bilingualism that they bring. So just a little bit about that. And then obviously I always appreciate hearing about head start, and I would just add that, uh, when we actually worked on the 2007 head start reauthorization, we were really intentional about making sure that there was language in there for supporting and promoting bilingualism as it relates to English language learners. And I think that that work really helped to kick it off. And as Shantel mentioned, really put forward those standards along with the
00;40;01;29 accountability, the professional development and the training that has, hopefully in some communities moved, moved us forward in ways that we're celebrating our kids and our families and our communities, and that we're also respecting our workforce and all of the adult caregivers that care for all of our young children, both from birth all the way into college. So with that, let me kick it off and start with a question for each of our esteemed panelists.
00;40;29;14 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Um, and I'm hoping that as you sort of respond to the question, if you can also just tell us a little bit about what you're currently doing, um, and then get into the question. So I'm gonna start with, uh, Dr. Gene Garcia, who is a professor at Arizona state university. So Gene you've been a school board member, a federal policy maker, the department of education, a Dean of colleges of education. You are married to a teacher, your daughter's a teacher clearly have a long history of
00;41;02;21 teaching, both for yourself and your family. Um, can you, with all of your years at all of your experiences, can you first tell us a little bit about what you're doing, but then also, could you please reflect on how you've seen this issue or this topic, or this work change over the years, and is it getting better?
00;41;25;06 [Eugene Garcia]: Well, thank you very much for the, for the question. And I'll try to answer that it's very complex, but you're right. I have some deep roots in, uh, in education with both my wife and my daughter, uh, engage with presently in one way or another in teaching your children, even in this, uh, very demanding and very different climate. Uh, they are working every day with, uh, children, teachers, and others to enhance the educational levels of, of our young children who come to school. Uh, not speaking English clearly over time, and I'm not a historian, but I've lived
00;41;57;22 through a historical period. Uh, we began to move to shift, uh, our understanding based on science. And I think if we want to, we want to do anything today is in this pandemic, is that we are many times not paying attention to the science. Uh, I think mostly when it comes to language and multilingual development, uh, is important to pay attention to the science and the development of that science over the last 15 to 20 to 25 years,
00;42;30;00 keep in mind that in 1993, 94 federal policy and us department of education supported something called developmental bilingual programs.
00;42;39;22 [Eugene Garcia]: This is really what we call dual language programs today. However, however, the majority of children and Shantel points out even today, uh, are not exposed or have the opportunity to participate in programs that essentially, uh, utilize their native languages and culture as a resource, as they move into English and other academic learning, uh, activities. So I hate to say this, but what bothers me most is that we are not following that science very well in the DLL world most significantly.
00;43;15;11 Uh, I want to be sure that the key policy, uh, uh, lever that I think is critical is issues related to human resources of those individuals who are serving this population and these families, uh, we do not have as Shantel's report. Uh, the equity project's efforts have very clearly identified is that we don't have the kind of, uh, teachers, the kinds of instructors, the
00;43;41;13 kinds of, even other kinds of administrative, uh, credentials that are necessary to make sure at, at the, at the center level or at the program level, uh, at the school level that we have the individuals who understand the children who understand the, uh, design and implementation of instruction for those children and how they communicate to the families and the communities in which those children live early childhood education has always been not just about children, but about families and about the
00;44;13;08 comprehensive care social workers, uh, instructors. We understand who the population is. So what, what really we need to do is pay attention to that science, uh, the, uh, the, the, the very best, uh, uh, portrayal of that science or summary of that science, not only in this report, but in, in a promising futures report by the national academies spends lots of time talking about the workforce and then society to have
00;44;39;27 the kind of workforce, therefore our federal, our state, even local programs and centers need to understand how are we ensuring that we have the right people who design implement, communicate, and otherwise enhance the learning opportunities and developmental opportunities of children who come to them, not speaking English.
00;45;02;21 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Yeah. Great. Thank you so much. And I want to get back to that conversation around the science, cause I think it's a really important point since an early childhood over the last decade, we've really been focused on the brain research. So it's interesting that we haven't come that far as it relates to DLL, but let me move now to dr. Dina Castro, happy that you're here with us, who is the Velma at each mint endowed chair of early childhood education and a professor at the university of North Texas Dina. You're a nationally renowned researcher in DLL, as it relates
00;45;36;16 to early childhood issues. Talk to us about what you've seen, what you think has held us back, uh, and how we can get to where we want to go. And I wonder if you could talk about how this policy agenda fits into that?
00;45;53;20 [Dina Castro]: Well, good afternoon, um, Dean colleagues, all colleagues is, is very good, uh, to feel, to be around friends and colleagues who have been working. And as we say, fighting the fight, uh, for quite a while. So thank you for the invitation also Chantel from the children's equity project, and to mean that from the Bipartisan Policy Center, um, your question is quite large and also very big and see, um,
00;46;29;14 we've been working on this issues, uh, particularly conducting research that is related to what it's strategies for classrooms. It's really, uh, something that we identify very early. My career in the United States has been the, I've been the fact that teachers were not really prepared in
00;46;54;18 every type of classrooms to work with dual language learners. And, um, so that, that was one of the pieces that I think was central. It has been central to my work over the years.
00;47;05;26 [Dina Castro]: And, uh, and also, uh, as we continue working in, in, in, you know, classrooms around the, around the country, what was kind of frustrating for us was that we couldn't see, um, the, the information that came from our rich research be translated into the policies and in the classroom finally in changes in the way, uh, breakfast is, were being conducted. So that's, that's something that has made me move or will be
00;47;41;03 more recently into the policy arena and try to see how, how I could also contribute with this piece of, you know, the research informing, uh, policymaking. And that's why I'm, so I'm so excited about this effort and, um, um, you know, and the possibility of continuing, you know, generating change to improve the quality of education for dual language learners. Um,
00;48;08;28 so more recently, as I said, I'm moving, I'm living in Texas now, uh, as soon as the lesson for the last six years and something that we are, um, working now in partnership with, uh, organizations are working on advocacy in early childhood, as well as, you know, generating and proposing policies is an effort to focus on improving the quality of education of dual language learners in Texas. So here in Texas, we have about 49% of the birth to eight years of age
00;48;43;23 population are dual language learners. So it's a large population and the majority of them are, um, coming from, um, you know, from communities where Spanish is spoken. So, uh, there are some issues that I have with the term to using the terminology of home language that maybe we can get into later.
00;49;07;20 But just to finish with this piece of what I'm doing now is that this initiative is, it has a purpose of increased access to dual language, immersion education for all children who are classified as dual language learners or English learners in the state of Texas. So that there's a, um, we are, you know, pushing this piece of policy in the state and we hope we in generating this participation from, you know, uh, at all levels,
00;49;39;01 teachers, childcare providers, policy makers, um, administrators in schools, and get to start programs. So is an initiative focusing on the birth to eight population in Texas. And, um, we are hopeful to have some good results from this effort. I think I will.
00;50;01;01 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dina. Um, next we'll go to dr. Conor Williams. Hey, uh, currently, uh, Conor is a fellow at the century foundation. And so Conor, you for an extensive rate, uh, on dual language learners and English language learner issues in a variety of outlets. You tell us a little bit about how you came to this work. And also if you had to pick one or two of the policies that are in this report to push to the top, which would they be?
00;50;30;23 [Conor Williams]: thank you. That's a, I'm really glad to be here, Julie, for that quick question, I came to this work out of a autobiography like, like many people I, I went to, um, to struggling sometimes even dysfunctional public schools for, for my own education. I came out of that. Our schools, our district I attended were surrounded by more segregated and
00;51;03;26 better funded and higher quality other schools near us. And I was just always mad about it. It was a class warfare issue for me. I was always angry that we couldn't afford to live in a place where the schools were always excellent, where the experiences every day would have been highly, uh, rigorous. And, and a lot of my kids who have education was just so hard to be over. So I came out of that night, I went to college and, and encountered more people who had had a private school education send this
00;51;33;10 extraordinary privilege.
00;51;35;12 [Conor Williams]: And I, I couldn't put that away. I couldn't stop looking at it. So I started from that position of just, just outright fury at educational inequity and, and sort of a grudge that I carried out in my own autobiography. And so then as I've grown into this career, I, uh, I began as a first grade teacher and my interest and exposure to the, um, the world of dual language learners and English learners for the began there. I was a Spanish language learner, but like many, um, people that my demographic, I started taking it in middle school and high school. And, uh,
00;52;08;08 I picked it up that way. So the, the other side of me, of those students who were learning English when they came to us schools, that was something new to me. As a teacher of night, I kept digging and kept digging. And the next thing I was doing, and it was all I was thinking about. So, so that's how I've come to it at century foundation. That's the bulk of my work is focused on, uh, children of immigrants, dual language learners, and older English learning students in us, public schools, a couple of things we could do better. I want to echo much of what's been said. I think
00;52;38;14 Gene was right on the nose when he said that one of the big things we need to focus on is, is the human capital in our public education and the education systems. We, we have so many multilingual and bilingual adults, many of whom have higher, higher education degrees who have some credentials, but for one reason or another, aren't able to become fully licensed teachers in the front of early education classrooms or, uh, elementary or secondary classrooms in the United States. We should be
00;53;10;22 reforming our teacher licensure system to provide alternative path alternative pathways for these teachers, so that we can have more bilingual adults in these, in these classes.
00;53;19;28 [Conor Williams]: And so that we can offer more dual language programming for dual language learners. Right now we have it as a scarce resource, which makes it an equity problem so that when there aren't enough dual language seats to go around, you can always count on those of privilege, being able to leverage inequitable access to that scarce resource. If we had more bilingual teachers that wouldn't be as big of an issue, I'll also echo what Shantel said earlier. And I think this is actually, uh, eminently doable right now is that we're well overdue for a significant increase in federal funding related to dual language learners
00;53;50;13 and English learners. That should be happening as soon as possible.
00;53;57;15 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: You so much. Thanks. That was great. And then I'm happy to meet dr. Kelly Edybyrn. Wanna make sure I said that correctly. I'm so happy to meet you. So Kelly currently is with the children's equity project at Arizona state university and Kelly, you're a measurement expert. So talk to us about some of the measurement issues that are holding back greater equity for our bilingual children. And if you could share with us one example of how these challenges manifest themselves in the
00;54;29;05 determination of services, and then finally, where should the federal government be focusing its energy as it relates to measurement.
00;54;38;29 [Kelly Edyburn]: Great. Thank you. Um, yeah, again, I'm so happy to be here with all of you and thank you for the opportunity. Um, I've had experience both as a researcher and as a clinician, uh, conducting a lot of different types of assessments, um, developmental assessments, language assessments, academics like educational, um, full psychological evaluations, um, working with very young children up through young adults in schools and juvenile justice facilities.
00;55;04;07 [Kelly Edyburn]: So I've seen like a range of how our assessments are used, how they determine what access to services children get. Um, and so I think I've seen that the, the measurement issues, the assessment issues fall into kind of two broad buckets. Um, the first being this issue that we've been talking about with the workforce and training. Um, and so the training is currently inadequate for the folks who are using these assessments, whether that's education, like education professionals, such
00;55;38;02 as school, psychologists, speech, language pathologists, or teachers themselves, um, or administrators. So, um, the, the training and education piece, and then the other bucket would be, um, validity issues. So the liquidity related to the assessments that we currently have available. And so I'll speak to the validity issues first. So, um, basically the tests that we have right now that we use the assessments that we use, aren't
00;56;03;07 designed by and large with dual language learners in mind. And so often we don't have norms for dual language learners. We don't have evidence that the test functions, psychometrically how we think they're supposed to. Um, so we don't actually know that the tests are measuring what we think they're supposed to measure. And so, um, an example about how this relates to services, uh, Lisa and Jeff mix Swan and Kelly roll stat, and others have done studies looking at like a language proficiency assessment in English, for example, or in Spanish, and giving those
00;56;36;10 assessments to young dual language learners and seeing that they systematically over identify those children as being, having low proficiency in both of the languages, to which they've ever been exposed. So, um, these are typically developing children, not children with speech or language impairments, but, um, typically developing children and being identified as having low or no proficiency in the only languages they speak.
00;57;00;25 [Kelly Edyburn]: So that doesn't mean that the children are flawed. That means that the assessments are not measuring what we think they're measuring or what they purport to measure. And so this has tremendous consequences for, um, particularly special education eligibility, because you can imagine that if I, if I get an assessment result back and says that this kid is entirely lacking in language skills, I might actually assume that they do have some kind of language disability. Um, rather than assuming that this measure wasn't intended to be used with dual language learners, or we don't have validity evidence that it's functioning the way
00;57;32;06 it's supposed to function. Um, so I think that has serious consequences, not only for special education eligibility, but our inferences that we make about children, the beliefs that we hold about, what they're capable of and what kind of instruction they need and what kind of intervention they might need. So, um, so there's this validity issue. And then there's also the issue of training because, um, if we have teachers and school psychologists and speech language pathologists, who haven't gotten enough training in this
00;58;01;02 area of bilingual language development, um, they are likely to systematically misuse the data they do have access to. So even if we do have these assessments that aren't, um, aren't ideal that aren't fully up to what we want them to be right now. Uh, we do have ways of making culturally linguistically responsive decisions for kids and, and strengths-based decisions for children. And if we don't have the right education and training for those folks, then they're not going to be able to make those decisions. And they're going to systematically misuse data in
00;58;33;27 a way that allows us to perpetuate inequities that already exist. Right.
00;58;38;06 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: So, excellent. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. Oh,
00;58;42;21 [Kelly Edyburn]: In terms of, I mean, like the recommendations for, for the federal government, I think follow those two lines. So I mean, providing more of an investment in creating and examining assessment tools and also more workforce development and workforce training programs and funding those, um, and really making sure that folks know how to conduct culturally and linguistically responsive assessments.
00;59;04;12 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you to all of you. Um, so we heard about the brain science. We've heard that, uh, dual immersion programs are really the gold standard. We've heard that, uh, families, white families in particular, uh, want their kids to be bilingual. So we've got the, we've got the science, we've got the Research, we've got the data, uh, why, why are we, why are we not listening or what, or who's not listening who could be listening. Um, and I guess I'm
00;59;35;08 wondering, is this a definitely a role for the federal government, but is there something that local school districts schools, uh, early childhood programs can do in order to ensure that kids are getting equity, equitable access, and also that the workforce is being supported? Um, all of you have mentioned the human capital that is critical in making sure that our kids and our families and our communities get the access that they absolutely
01;00;05;12 deserve. So that's to all of you, anybody can start, everybody was smiling, so, okay. Yeah. That's okay.
01;00;20;00 [Eugene Garcia]: Let me, uh, let me get at your broader question. And that is why are we not doing something that we know we should be doing? Keep in mind that we didn't do anything for, uh, non-English-speaking children in the cupcake 12 sector and ports interceded, unless we would have had Lau, uh, in the seventies, unless we would have had Serrano in Texas, uh, in the seventies as well, keep in mind in resource restricted environments in which we are in now. I mean, we, we, we just don't have a
01;00;50;09 lot of money. Uh, then why, how can we make people respond to what we know needs to be done in this case? Uh, is something we're trying to follow up. Do these kids have the same civil rights at age three and four that the K-12 sector has, the courts have determined that in K-12 you must do something to address the language diversity and difference. That's not the case that, uh, ages three and four, as those kids go into either federally
01;01;20;07 or state funded preschool environments, they do not have the same protection civilly and court wise as their brothers and sisters in the K-12 sector. Not that they are doing wonderful in that K-12 sector, but at least it essentially allows us to have programs and States pay attention to the rights of these children, to what we know is best for them.
01;01;45;03 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Excellent. Dina. Yeah. Jump in.
01;01;48;19 [Dina Castro]: Yeah, I think, um, I think that, um, you know, use these keywords, uh, right, right. Um, I agree completely, you know, some time ago, I wasn't, I would share a little anecdote here about that. Um, I was invited to a presentation and when I finished, uh, towards the end of my presentation, I was just asking during my final remarks and ask if this was, uh, an audience of early educators. And I told them that they in their
01;02;21;25 hands really was the future of the children. And I was asking them to be advocates for them and for the children, dual language learners and the right to be bilingual. So when we went, when I was leaving and the person who had invited me asked me this question, he said, Dina, may I asked you a personal question? And I said, yes. And she said, when do you become so
01;02;51;07 radical?
01;02;53;15 [Dina Castro]: So talking about bilingualism and rights for young children was considered radical. I was just really blown my mind, but that was the, sometimes the ma does that mentality. So we're not thinking about buying anymore as a right for young children. And I think that it's important in definitely I will. I'm behind any oldest efforts that we'll put, take young children and especially young children, all bilingual
01;03;23;23 children, but in particular young children out of this invisibility, and there's brings this other point. So my concern, and then when I'm, we're thinking about why is that changes are not happening? I think there are reasons that are beyond research. We do, we see in the report and we can find the research. The research is there to support that, uh, the benefits of bilingualism and, and, and development and learning. So why, if we do
01;03;55;10 have the research changes, do not happening at the policy level, why does, uh, even sometimes when you have the policies, they are not translated into practices. So we need this patient. So there are structures, there are societal structures that they really are more related to discrimination to racial injustice that are behind the, this result in this are not, that's why it is so slow. We're so slow in making change happen. That's my
01;04;27;28 perception.
01;04;28;22 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate just you and Gene calling it out. Kelly?
01;04;33;04 [Kelly Edyburn]: Yeah, I would jump in and just add to that. I think this report is incredibly timely for that reason because, um, these, I think more and more folks are waking up to the idea that these are interconnected systems of oppression. We're not just the problem of a man with bigoted beliefs and access to an assault rifle, walking into a Walmart last year and terrorizing a lot next community in El Paso is not distinct from the systematic segregation of dual language learners into English only
01;05;03;17 classrooms. It's. These are undergirded by the same origin of, of white supremacy of racism and xenophobia. And I think there's no, unless there is kind of a social will and a political will. I don't think a top down policy change is going to happen. I mean, this is, we've had this research for decades that we know what works for supporting these children, and we know how to affirm them and support them and celebrate their strengths. And we're not doing it because there's a, a, an ideological foundation of white
01;05;33;17 supremacy that undergirds education, early childhood, pretty much every social structure in this country. And so we need to dismantle that simultaneously. I think,
01;05;44;10 [Conor Williams]: Yeah. Let me also, in this one, I talked about why I do this work. I have three multilingual learner children in my house because their mother has well shovel things. And so they're growing up Welsh, English, bilingual, and then they also, the two older ones attend a title, one bilingual school here in Washington, D C, but I want to focus on, I think, what is the softer and more insidious version of white supremacy? That's in it, it's not the sort of big flagrant violations of
01;06;18;11 people's dignity in mass shootings. I want to talk about the systemic stuff, which is hard to see because so many of us are complicit in it, things like this, that the overwhelming majority of us teachers are white and our monolingual diverse teacher candidates are kept out of the U S teaching force through a variety of systems or pieces of our licensure systems. And so then what that means then is that it's just hard to offer more dual
01;06;44;12 language immersion. I have yet to run into, um, school district leaders who when faced with parental demand from this don't want to expand access to bilingual education or dual language immersion. They always find parental demand, and they're always interested in it, but they almost never can find enough teachers to do it rapidly. And so then again, it's what I said before, when you have this resource and it's scarce because of these systemic biases, the people who are always going to get more access so that people with power in my demographic and my cohort of urban coastal city
01;07;20;04 dwelling, highly educated, uh, white middle and upper middle class people, it is taken as an obvious thing that access to dual language immersion is something that they are fighting for their kids.
01;07;30;20 [Conor Williams]: I can tell you endless stories of people who have, have moved heaven and earth who've mortgage their house, uh, uh, and leverage themselves to the gills to by just over the line in the neighborhood. There's the dual immersion program. The, the trend line in DC just as it is in most places were dual language immersion exists is that these programs are steadily being, uh, moved from two way dual immersion, where they are roughly integrated by language enrolling, roughly equal proportions of, uh, native speakers of each language to one way immersion programs, where they serve more white, more wealthy, more English dominant
01;08;04;09 children, and very few natives because the target language I can tell you stories of, of a major us city have visited some years ago for research. One of the board members told me he was the only school board member, uh, who was a person of color. He had just lost his reelection bid because the union went after him. Uh, he was the only person of color is Latinex, uh, uh, fella. And he had been pushing so hard for the expansion of dual language immersion programs that a number of white monolingual English teachers had lost their jobs.
01;08;31;21 Every time a new DLL program opened, then they had to overhaul the staff. So the teacher's union went after him and installed a new candidate instead, a white monolingual English speaking teacher to put an end to that. There's just so many ways in which our entire education system is set up to deliver this kind of instruction to those who want it and can afford it and can actually put their muscle and their privilege and their wealth behind it. That's why it's not happening. It's, it's ranked human selfishness.
01;09;01;16 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Okay. Thank you, Conor. So, you know, I think I thank you, all of you for just your very honest and genuine response to that question. I know sometimes it can be difficult, but, um, let me just throw a question out because, um, Connor, I think, and also, uh, Gene, everyone has mentioned human capital at some point, and we have a question from Karen, which is a human capital question, but related to policy around, do you all think that it's a good idea or a possibility of
01;09;32;07 implementing a policy at the federal level that would hold higher education accountable for creating teacher preparation programs that both, uh, train them in early childhood education, along with bilingualism?
01;09;52;21 [Eugene Garcia]: Can I, can I speak to that as a previous Dean who might be held accountable in that way? I, I really think it's worth pursuing. We don't government does have requirements for, uh, receiving federal dollars and ensuring that those dollars are invested appropriately to meet certain goals. I don't see a problem saying, uh, indicating to colleges of education, to those individuals who are preparing, uh,
01;10;23;06 instructors and administrators and other early childhood personnel to essentially say, we will provide resources if you will essentially move forward in that, keep in mind, the federal government usually ties us to resources. So I can imagine that, uh, uh, and again, historically, there were grants from, uh, the department of education to colleges of education to produce more bilingual teachers. Uh, and essentially they were held
01;10;52;21 accountable. We've shaving those dollars. I don't see why we shouldn't do that, that kind of policy nationally. And that would require use of dollars that go to these, uh, institutions to produce, to achieve certain goals. One of those goals is essentially being produced more human capital, appropriately defined for this population.
01;11;17;23 [Dina Castro]: Um, just follow up on that comment in terms of, I think for, uh, for awhile of being, uh, talking about this and the idea that every teacher in the United States should be prepared to work with effectively with children, every teacher, not just those that are pursuing, you know, going and do piano certification on bilingual education, bilingual children, and you want to call them two of them was learners,
01;11;51;22 English learners, and following the science, it gets our bilingual, if they are able to understand confident and produce them with the dual languages, no matter what level of skill the hat, and just keep that piece of science here. Okay. So if we're building with children and, uh, really, you know, these kids are in every classroom is how likely is it, is that a teacher in the United States is going to go to a school or a classroom in which there
01;12;20;14 are no bilingual children. I mean, that's really what my sense is that generally do patient or teacher preparation, general education should incorporate, you know, coursework that prepare teachers to work with bilingual children. Uh, as an example, you have quickly give that, uh, we conducted a study in Texas with my students. And, um, I actually, if I'm waiting that, or, you know, the, um,
01;12;50;16 analyzing the content of degree plans for teacher preparation programs in 29 of the highest ranked universities in Texas in that location. And what we found was that the general education certification programs only me had my percent of their coursework dedicated to linguistic and cultural diversity versus about 28%. If I remember correctly and the ESL certification in 34% in the bilingual certificate page. So that is the
01;13;21;23 percentage. So, um, even most, you know, 34% for teachers of the content for preparing to be bilingual, I think we need to, we have these an example in fixes would use a state that had not been having my location program for, for a long time. So imagine what's happened in the race with the country.
01;13;45;15 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Yeah, exactly. Kelly or Conor. Do you want to jump in on this policy question?
01;13;52;04 [Conor Williams]: Yeah. I just add one small thing. I think I'd mostly agree with Gene. Um, there's no reason the feds couldn't put together competitive grants to, to expand bilingual training programs. The other thing is that it would be well within the federal government's purview to require States in exchange for all of the federal education funding they get. And you could run this through title two, or even through title one or title three, I think, to provide explanations for discrepancies in their teacher candidates and, um, teaching force, uh, demographics to say, look,
01;14;24;11 we noticed that your state has these percentages racially ethnically, et cetera, except your teaching force looks this other way. You're going to need to provide us at least some analysis of why you're seeing this very white teaching force in a state that isn't very white and that it wouldn't require the States to change necessarily, but it would instantly put them in on the back foot.
01;14;55;15 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Let me just go ahead, Kelly.
01;14;58;00 [Kelly Edyburn]: Oh, I would just add also just one quick thing that, um, uh, as someone who is trained as a school psychologist, I think there's also a need for, um, accrediting bodies. Cause I don't think the, I don't know that the federal government can hold these higher education programs to account, but, um, accrediting agencies for school psychologists for speech language pathologists who accredit these programs that are training future school, psychologists as speech, language pathologists, and these other folks who really make important decisions about kids, special education, eligibility, and other types of instruction intervention that
01;15;29;07 they get. I think these folks also need to be held accountable for creating training programs that better address the needs of DLLs, um, because they like Gene has pointed out. They are also going to encounter DLLs at every school at every level. So, yeah, exactly. Well, thank you.
01;15;44;21 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Thank you all for that.
01;15;47;22 [Eugene Garcia]: We don't need to wait for the federal government or the state government, uh, higher education institutions can do this. Uh, both Berkeley and Arizona State University, all early childhood educators, uh, we're required to essentially be prepared to serve dual language learners, early childhood educators. And it was either in Spanish or in Navajo given the two largest languages, uh, in, in there in the state. That was a decision at the college level at the faculty level, wait for the
01;16;16;22 state or the federal government to ask us to do that.
01;16;24;04 [Dina Castro]: Yes, that's fine. I just wanted to mention also that, uh, that, uh, in my department at the college of education at UNT, we, uh, we are now in the process of changing the certification, um, the teacher certification, so that we will only prepare early to sixth grade teachers with an ESL content. So, so we're not going to prepare, uh, general education teachers anymore. So every teacher in our program does
01;16;58;23 your preparation for one half on ESL component.
01;17;03;03 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: That's really good to hear. And for me, that brings up this idea of the going back to human capital and people make it happen. Uh, Allen sent sort of a similar question I also Had, but, um, is it the people, the reason, you know, Gene, you're in Arizona, Dina you're in, in Texas, you know, I don't know if in stayed some of the States that Shantel has pointed out in the report where they have more regulations around how to ensure equitable access to bilingual kids
01;17;36;01 and families. Um, is it the people, is it because the governor or the superintendent or the local principal all happened to be bilingual and understand this story? I'm going into a little bit of also like that change in the mindset, um, why is it happening in some places and not others?
01;17;58;11 [Dina Castro]: Well, that doesn't mean that it's easy. So even if you have that commitment at the local level, uh, or in the higher education, you know, uh, world is sending, you know, universities and community colleges. That doesn't mean that, you know, changing policies and creating more equitable education is easy. So you have to be creating this critical mass in the community and just as partnerships. Right? So I think
01;18;29;13 that's important giving voices to the families, it's going to have an effort that everybody who is directly in bold be advocating. So I think that that's, that's a lot of work that is sometimes beyond just the school.
01;18;52;19 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Yeah.
01;18;53;07 [Conor Williams]: So now just say some things that I hate to say, which is that where I've seen it, equity, uh, reforms related to DLLs and ELs go best are the places that have gone slowly. And I hate to say that because I'm an impatient man. I have no interest in waiting to deal with questions of equity. But for instance, it's very fashionable right now in, especially at the local level to announce large expansions of dual language immersion, even at the state level, in a few places that's easy-ish to do,
01;19;25;13 but it's hard to do that with a good equity foundation to make sure that there are seats reserved for English learning students for DLLs, the States that have gone slowly to make sure that when they push these kinds of things, they've really gotten all the buy in and they have everybody on board and they've built a firm foundation. Those are the places that have had the real success. If you just launch a bunch of new dual immersion programs, it doesn't take long before people with means take them over.
01;19;51;04 [Dina Castro]: Yeah, that's true. That is true.
01;19;55;26 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: So we've been talking a lot about data and research and policy, um, and Shantel shared a little bit about her story. I shared a little bit about mine and I would just ask you all as we're sort of coming a little bit to the end, but not quite, um, to share a Or an experience that you've had, um, in your work that keeps you up at night, good or bad, uh, that is related to all of this work that we all have done collectively together and we'll continue to do. Um, and anyone
01;20;25;29 can start,
01;20;31;06 [Conor Williams]: Uh, I'll just very briefly say that, uh, I'm haunted by there's a local public education advocate that I had a conversation with. Once personally, he didn't know who I was. I just happened to run into him socially, once he's a huge public education advocate. And he explained to me though that he had chosen a nonpublic school for his, his young children, because it was important for him to make sure that they grew up to be bilingual. And it was so critical. He knew because they had gone to a bilingual daycare, one that he had paid a lot for it. And he was just super important for him. And that's why it was okay that he was acting
01;21;04;28 that way that he had, he was spending, he literally, his career was one, uh, you know, advocacy for public ed and a lot of scorning people in private education and the like, but his actions were another.
01;21;17;04 [Conor Williams]: I don't know how to deal with that kind of hypocrisy as a insofar as that it's his personal behavior and his political actions are so different. I think that's what a lot of people in us cities and in U S States thinking about equity and language right now, do I think that's where we are now is that we haven't, we haven't really unearthed a lot of the selfishness and a lot of the biases that are driving, how people actually act. And so we, we, a lot of us say the right things. We don't actually do them.
01;21;44;29 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Yeah. Yeah. Good point.
01;21;50;07 [Eugene Garcia]: I'd like to, I'd like to put a plug in for communication with families of our dual language community. I grew up in a, uh, a migrant, uh, immigrant, not immigrant, but migrant farm worker family. And my parents didn't understood that education was important, but didn't understand how to implement that, uh, that belief into their 10 children. Uh, and so early childhood education is a bridge to our families, uh, in ways that, uh, enhance their understanding of development and
01;22;23;13 learning and broadly their participation in it as a partner. Uh, and so what, what really bothers me is that our early childhood educators are not taking advantage of the resources that exist and families and communities of dual language learners.
01;22;40;01 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Yeah. Thank you, Gene. Yeah,.
01;22;42;04 [Kelly Edyburn]: I think Dina,.
01;22;44;13 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Oh, go ahead, Kelly.
01;22;46;20 [Kelly Edyburn]: I was just going to share something that built on that. Um, I think something that sticks with me is the countless families that I've worked with, um, who in schools and in juvenile justice facilities and early childhood that have shared with me that they've been told by teachers or other school professionals, or even principals to not speak to their child in their primary language in the language that the family speaks at home. And, um, I think that every single time, that's it,
01;23;18;08 it's haunting to think about what that means and what that parent walks away from that exchange with, um, on a human level. And it also just keeps reinforcing this, um, this idea of this dominant English monolingual ideology that we have. That's so stubborn here in the U S um, but also how the lack of training for educators and school, psychologists and principals about language development actually, um, proliferates this harmful message,
01;23;46;21 um, and myths to parents.
01;23;48;24 [Kelly Edyburn]: Um, one that actually harms the process of language development itself that we know that speaking to your child in any language is so helpful and supportive and nurturing of development and needed for a kid to develop language skills. And then on top of that, how much it impacts a child's identity development and social, emotional development and their family relationships, um, and how I've seen the use of a parent and a family's language with the child and in therapy be so healing and so
01;24;18;27 affirming. And so I'm supportive of a child's development in a way that, um, it, it just shows me that it, um, like language itself can just unlock wellbeing. And I think that we need to be really critically conscious of that when we're in schools and what messages we're sending to parents about the languages they use and what languages we uplift and which ones we ignore or segregate, or, um, tell people not to speak because, uh, we understand the world through language. And so I think it's so critically important to be affirming in that way, um, especially because of how
01;24;51;24 prevalent that myth is.
01;24;54;27 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Absolutely. So making sure that we're talking with families. Dina?
01;25;00;19 [Dina Castro]: Yes. I think that's, uh, yes, it's, I will follow up. Um, Kelly had mentioned the social emotional development of children and how the support or lack of support to the two languages can create, uh, you know, I mean back a negative impact in their social, emotional development and their identity. I am, I just want to share, um, uh, something that happened recently here in Texas, I was at, at the grocery
01;25;31;05 store and then the cashier and I saw the, the, you know, the cashier had a label. It has, um, Mario was his name. And when I find someone that may be a Spanish speaker, I like to speak Spanish to that person. Of course, before I ask, do you speak Spanish in English? And he, he was being very smiley. And then turn, when I said, asked if he spoke Spanish, he turns to me in a very, I would say, decompose. He was not well. And he said, no, I
01;26;05;07 don't speak Spanish. And don't continue and say, well, maybe we are not doing well enough in Texas and not everyone has access to funding what they do. And he turns to me and say, I know Japanese, I don't want anything to do with Spanish. I don't need it.
01;26;25;27 [Dina Castro]: And, uh, to me, that coming was so painful that, you know, I can get a little emotional when I talk about it because I, I felt pain in that comment. And I would thinking immediately how much he, this child as a child, they seem to be more, this man has suffered in that, you know, because he is Latino because, and because he speaks Spanish. So this brings me the issue of racial discrimination that usually we do not talk
01;26;58;24 about racial discrimination called Latinos. And we, Latinos do not tied this fact that we are not being supported as bilingual individuals. And by cultural individuals, human beings are a hole for, we have to hide part of who we are when we are outside of your home. And I want to leave you with this thought. Are we going to continue using the Trump home language? Um, I
01;27;26;02 think that's a message that, um, that we're giving a message, definitely that language belongs to your home, not, not to the school, belongs to your home closed doors inside your home and not to your community. So we are part of this community. We all are contributing and why do we have to hide? Um, and I think that children are getting every time they go to school in time and when they make intentional decision not to speak
01;27;59;11 Spanish anymore. And I not only about bilingualism is a phenomenon in general, but certainly in languages. And so we need to be also being very open when we talk about it.
01;28;13;09 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. So we've only got about two minutes left, so I'm going to end with one final thing. It's a very specific question to all of you. It's been a really particularly challenging time for Latinos across this country over the last couple of years. On top of that, we've got all of the protests that are happening with racial injustices. We talked about systems right at the very heart of it. It's the systems that have been created in this country over the years. I myself have. Um, as I mentioned earlier, uh, Latinex child, teenager advocate in my house. And I just wonder for you
01;28;49;19 all, um, does all of this, all this next generation who are getting really loud and getting out there and being very, um, powerful and insistent on what needs to change. Um, does that give you hope And what kind of change would you like to see? And I would ask, well, to keep it to like 30 seconds, if you can, and even less, Gene, we'll start
01;29;17;26 with you,
01;29;19;10 [Eugene Garcia]: Dare I say, uh, it's very affirmative. Th there is more hope. Uh, my grandson was, uh, out there, uh, in the streets, uh, you know, a 16 year old, uh, even I didn't do that when I was 16 years old. So, uh, yes, there's definitely a different time and there's more hope,
01;29;38;13 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Absolutely Connor?
01;29;41;12 [Conor Williams]: Absolutely. I find the energy inspiring, uh, and, uh, it's been fun and sobering to try to describe it to my kids who weren't quite old enough for the streets yet. You know, I have a nine year old, who's very aware of these protests and very curious, and I'm so glad that it's also so painful. Yeah.
01;30;02;24 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Kelly?.
01;30;04;19 [Kelly Edyburn]: Yes. And so hopeful. And I'm so excited that people are waking up to the intersectionality of these issues and, and trying to actually address them with like a multipronged approach, which I'm glad that this report actually addresses as well. So, yeah.
01;30;17;21 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Awesome. Dina?
01;30;19;28 [Dina Castro]: Well, I'm very hopeful in what I would like to see happening in the foundation start hearing now is that this movement is, again, can eliminating the invisibility of Latinos. I want to see more Latinos also protesting. So that then that's, that's my, my thought, my hope.
01;30;42;24 [Yvette Sanchez Fuentes]: Awesome. So with that, I'm just going to say thank you to all of you for the conversation today. I'm going to turn it over back to Shantel, but with that as always in the words of Cesar Chavez. So thank you all. And thanks, Shantel.
01;31;00;25 [Shantel Meek]: Um, so just to wrap up, you know, last week we had a discussion on the inclusion of kids with disabilities. That's what the webinar was. Uh, we dug into that part of the report and we kind of ended in a bit of frustration on the fact that there, we also have the science there. We also have the law, but we haven't yet had the public will to make some real fundamental changes to promote inclusion. And we ended with this like profound frustration of how your freedom, your rights, all depend on public will. And here again, I think it boils down to public will. And with
01;31;33;11 historically marginalized groups, our rights always boiled down to political. But I think like we ended today, we're in an unprecedented moment in history where real systemic reform to dismantle systemic racism of which all of this is a part is on the table and let's not get it twisted, right? Like language is a tool of exclusion that is motivated by racism, racist people and racist policies alike use language to target even mentioned that kids were corporately punished for speaking Spanish at
01;32;02;27 school. My mom and her seven brothers
01;32;05;01 [Shantel Meek]: And sisters were some of those kids. So they had to police their language and they spoke only Spanish at home with my immigrant grandparents and only English at school. And if they slipped up, they knew what came. That's why it's prestigious for white children. And it's to really, you know, be bilingual and have all these kinds of enrichments on top. And it's really a top priority to remove it from our kids who bring bilingualism to build, you know, from their home. It's the reason why our laws, our education laws, our standards, our assessments, our instruction are all centered on English, right? It's a perpetuation of this white
01;32;37;28 supremacy. We pick language as the tool for exclusion, for these particular kids. And then we built entire systems of around it. And like Dina mentioned, right? Like this is not a new fight people on our panel. And countless others have been fighting this fight for a long time. In fact, before Brown V Board of Education, Mexican families spot segregation via Mexican schools. In fact, the first case in U S history to rule on desegregation was against the segregation of Mexican Americans in the Mendez V Westminster case. So this is not a new fight. The science is not
01;33;08;26 new either as we've heard. So let's really take this opportunity after the pandemic, after kind of everything that this country has been through to do better and to pivot toward equity and science, let's look at our budgets from Congress all the way down to the childcare program on the corner, and look at how we allocate our resources and invest in dual language immersion and use it as a strength to build on. Let's get higher ed together. As Gene talked about to actually prepare the workforce for the kids they're going
01;33;35;19 to work for.
01;33;36;23 [Shantel Meek]: Um, I'll repeat it one more time. One in three kids are DLLs and they live everywhere, not just in South Texas or New York city, let's get state licensing and private licensing systems like the CDA on board with this let's look at all of our systems. And if we're measuring, for example, classroom quality with the, with the class tool, let's make sure that it gives us information on how it's doing for dual language learners. Let's make sure our quality rating systems include DLLs at every level, right? It's not the pinnacle of quality to suddenly include one thing about a DLL, right? It should be at level one, it's a basic
01;34;10;14 fundamental right piece. Let's get our act together on standards, on monitoring and accountability. We list all of these things out in the report. DLI should no longer be one of many options. It should be the option. And we, if we want to succeed, as everyone's mentioned here, let's fund it, right? So thank you again to Yvette and to Linda and BPC and to our panel. I want to give an especially big shout out to Kelly for all of her work on the report and Conor and Gene as well, and to Dina for being a great thought partner. Um, this wraps up our four part series. Please go
01;34;39;26 read the report. You can find it on the link there, um, and have a great rest of your day. That's it.
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