[Music]
[Applause]
this summer after repeated requests from
my parents I finally cleaned out some
boxes that were sitting in my room and I
ran across this gem from first grade now
I do remember loving cereal and I’m
still a big fan to this day however I
don’t remember articulating that first
sentence I like to write words I thought
about how at the mirror age of six I
instructed my teacher to specifically
fill in that blank with that phrase and
it struck me because it’s true I’ve
always had a special affinity towards
words I have been moved by the words of
Rupa car I have found identity and the
poetry of Khalil Gibran
I have found solace in the lyrics of
Lauryn Hill and I have found myself and
my own writing whether I’ve been reading
or writing literacy has gifted me the
vocabulary I need to understand myself
and my world but literacy has an even
more fundamental purpose and is the
single most powerful tool you and I
possess outside of good health without
it couldn’t do much I wouldn’t be
standing here today I wouldn’t be able
to fill out job applications I wouldn’t
be able to write emails I wouldn’t be
able to read my prescriptions I wouldn’t
be able to pay that parking ticket from
last month it is everything to our
dignity and it is everything to our
daily lives yet in this country today we
are dealing with a massive literacy
crisis and this is not a crisis that
just popped out of the blue this is a
very deliberate theft think about it
this way if we consider many crimes in
this country many of them involve taking
something away from someone robbery is
the theft of something physical assault
as a theft of dignity murder is a theft
of life there it is a stuff that has
happening in our country for centuries
yet has never been prosecuted before the
last time we measured it in 2003 we
found that 32 million Americans have
been robbed of this that is one out of
every seven adults and I argued that
this theft is no accident if we take a
better look at who exactly is
functionally illiterate in our country
we see that although blacks and Latinos
make up 24% of our population they
comprise 59% of those considered
functionally illiterate there’s
something much bigger happening than
just saying there’s a bunch of people in
our country who cannot read and that’s
why I’m here today we do have a literacy
crisis but more importantly we have a
literacy theft and let’s just cut to the
chase here literacy is about power and
we know that people of country people of
color in our country have continuously
been denied the opportunities they need
to secure power I’m not the first to
articulate this but I want to argue that
literacy must be a fundamental right in
our country that it should be a crime
for no America for him an American to
not have the access to resources and the
opportunities they need to secure power
I want to talk more about this theft by
delving deep into one American city I
had the great privilege of being a
teacher in Detroit Michigan I was
teaching middle school and high school
math and although every teacher will say
this my kids were truly the greatest I
love teaching and I miss it every single
day but there were some things that made
teaching and learning incredibly
difficult at her school first and
foremost I had no curriculum whatsoever
this means I spent my waking hours
making up every warm-up test worksheet
homework quiz projects or frantically
doing Google searches for those
materials then one day I figured out
that if I paid about four hundred
dollars online I would be able to get an
entire set of curriculum and I had a
tiny savings account at the time so at
the time I just spent the bullet and
went ahead and bought the curriculum but
no teacher should ever be
objected to that especially considering
what they get paid today the second
thing that was happening is a lot of my
kids were learning English as a Second
Language a lot of my students were
arriving from the war in Yemen and some
of them couldn’t write their first name
in English and so some days instead of
doing math they were working on the
alphabet we had one ESL teacher for the
entire building and although she was
phenomenal she literally had hundreds of
kids on her caseload that combined with
that lack of curriculum there was just
no way that my kids were going to become
fully literate and you can forget about
any chance of them becoming bilingual
the other challenge was the result of
this happening over years and years I
had kids who were in school for at least
a decade and still couldn’t write an
entire paragraph yet these kids would
come to me and say miss I’m interested
in a career in law or education or art
or graphic design or engineering or
medicine they had dreams and they had
more grit than anyone I knew but what
they fundamentally did not have were the
very basic opportunities to become
literate and when I’m talking about
those opportunities
I really am talking about the very basic
things I’m not talking about that they
don’t have enough AP classes I’m saying
that in the wealthiest most powerful
nation on the planet we have kids that
walk into classrooms that look like this
where they start their days by picking
up a rodent feces off the floor where
classrooms are home to mice and puddles
of water water that have accumulated
from ceilings where teachers are buying
toilet paper with their own money where
classrooms are unbearably hot or cold
that you find thermometers and costumes
that read 90 degrees like this one they
are so exhausted from the heat that we
have reports of kids who are vomiting in
school and even if they manage to ignore
all of this
the reality is that the things that they
need to read books are virtually
non-existent we know that sometimes we
find three kids huddled over one book in
class and that they’re learning history
from a book printed in 1991 when Bill
Clinton was president now this is
unconscionable and we know that teachers
are humans too
these conditions are unsustainable
they’re going to flee in Detroit today
we have a massive teacher shortage is so
bad that at one school last year the
highest performing eighth grader
ended up teaching his own math class I
could go on and on but the question for
me and for you is this would we ever
allow this to happen to our own kids the
answer is obvious so how do we allow
this to happen to other people’s kids we
allow this because we allow these
systems structurally racist systems to
continue to exist it is critical to
understand what legal scholars like
Michelle Alexander and a holiday June
have repeatedly made clear to us that
racism never disappears it just conforms
to the norms of our times and the system
in operation Detroit today is very
complicated with an equally complex
history so if you remember one thing
about Detroit’s educational system it’s
this that democracy has largely been
decimated in that city in 1999 the state
of Michigan took over Detroit schools
and has been largely running them since
then this means that Detroiters have had
no publicly elected school board no-wake
to control how money has been spent and
very little voice and how their kids are
being educated now this system of state
takeover mind you is the exact same
system that was used in Flint which
still doesn’t have clean water as I
speak the state takeover has been
disastrous for our schools which is
exactly why exactly one year ago
some detroit sued the state of michigan
claiming that the right to literacy has
been denied the state responded with
this that literacy is important but
there’s a lot of other things going on
that poverty is getting in the way that
these kids are traumatized that their
parents are involved enough and my
favorite that they have intellectual
limitations this argument is deeply
offensive
it suggests that poor kids or kids just
going through stuff don’t deserve the
opportunities they need to become
literate that these are throwaway kids
that they don’t need literacy because we
don’t need them participating in our
democracy or in our society that these
factors are too much to handle and while
we shouldn’t expect schools to single
handedly fix poverty we also shouldn’t
be throwing our hands up in there and
saying i guess they just won’t read we
would be livid if someone talked about
our own kids that way and the thing is
we know what it takes to get a kid to
read this is a solvable crisis when i
was doing my masters and language and
literacy last year at harvard i learned
that we know a lot about reading the
research and the practices they’re
largely there but this willingness to
ensure that all kids despite their
circumstances this willingness to make
sure that they get what they need to be
able to read it’s just not there but
because this is a crisis and not just
some freak national accident there are
some things we can do about it first
we must change those systems the
literacy lawsuit in detroit is a massive
step forward in ensuring this
fundamental right to literacy in our
country this case needs to go all the
way to the supreme court and you can
support it and follow it at this website
detroit access to literacy org second we
have to change public opinion we have to
make it enormous ly clear to ourselves
and
everyone around us that yes indeed we
live in a racist society that literacy
is tied to power and that power has been
carefully engineered in this country and
that people of color have been largely
excluded from access to power so if we
want to understand literacy we have to
understand our history with power and
our current relationship with it third
we have to hold ourselves and everyone
around us accountable what I see a lot
in education is this generous spirit to
give schools free stuff to sponsor them
to support our teachers that is all well
and good and if you have the means to do
it please do however this is an
accountability issue it’s one thing to
say man this is so awful that you’re
going through this let me help you out
let me put a bandaid on it let me give
you this box of beautiful books and it’s
a whole other thing to say hold up what
the hell is going on how is it possible
that in the United States of America we
have kids and schools that look like
this who is in control here how are
schools being funded what exactly are my
votes doing what people I vote in what
are they voting on – it takes a massive
amount of Education to answer these
questions and they may vary from state
to state and district to district but
hopefully those questions can start
leading us to action but we have to be
careful here we must not fall into the
trap of thinking that Detroiters need us
to be their saviors the reality is
Detroiters have been fighting for a very
long time
they’ve been organizing they’ve been
voting they’ve been advocating and
they’ve won some pretty decisive
victories as a result – effective to be
most effective in this we must partner
with communities like Detroit and truly
deeply understand these systems at work
and understand maybe what our role may
be and dismantling them it may require
that we go home and talk to our families
and make sure that they’re just as
educated about as we are about this it
may require that we go to every rally
and proton
so make sure there’s strengths and
numbers and it may require that we
simply pass the mic over and make sure
that their voices are heard I want to
close by sharing what a student in
Detroit told me last month he said that
he knows all of this is happening
because it was in the blueprints of our
country and I couldn’t agree more but
the thing about a blueprint is that I
can change and together we can change
the way power is accessed in our country
by changing the way literacy is accessed
in our country and in the words of w eb
Du Bois the burden belongs to the nation
and the hands of none of us are clean if
we bend not our energy to writing these
great bonds thank you
[Applause]
[Applause]
this summer after repeated requests from
my parents I finally cleaned out some
boxes that were sitting in my room and I
ran across this gem from first grade now
I do remember loving cereal and I’m
still a big fan to this day however I
don’t remember articulating that first
sentence I like to write words I thought
about how at the mirror age of six I
instructed my teacher to specifically
fill in that blank with that phrase and
it struck me because it’s true I’ve
always had a special affinity towards
words I have been moved by the words of
Rupa car I have found identity and the
poetry of Khalil Gibran
I have found solace in the lyrics of
Lauryn Hill and I have found myself and
my own writing whether I’ve been reading
or writing literacy has gifted me the
vocabulary I need to understand myself
and my world but literacy has an even
more fundamental purpose and is the
single most powerful tool you and I
possess outside of good health without
it couldn’t do much I wouldn’t be
standing here today I wouldn’t be able
to fill out job applications I wouldn’t
be able to write emails I wouldn’t be
able to read my prescriptions I wouldn’t
be able to pay that parking ticket from
last month it is everything to our
dignity and it is everything to our
daily lives yet in this country today we
are dealing with a massive literacy
crisis and this is not a crisis that
just popped out of the blue this is a
very deliberate theft think about it
this way if we consider many crimes in
this country many of them involve taking
something away from someone robbery is
the theft of something physical assault
as a theft of dignity murder is a theft
of life there it is a stuff that has
happening in our country for centuries
yet has never been prosecuted before the
last time we measured it in 2003 we
found that 32 million Americans have
been robbed of this that is one out of
every seven adults and I argued that
this theft is no accident if we take a
better look at who exactly is
functionally illiterate in our country
we see that although blacks and Latinos
make up 24% of our population they
comprise 59% of those considered
functionally illiterate there’s
something much bigger happening than
just saying there’s a bunch of people in
our country who cannot read and that’s
why I’m here today we do have a literacy
crisis but more importantly we have a
literacy theft and let’s just cut to the
chase here literacy is about power and
we know that people of country people of
color in our country have continuously
been denied the opportunities they need
to secure power I’m not the first to
articulate this but I want to argue that
literacy must be a fundamental right in
our country that it should be a crime
for no America for him an American to
not have the access to resources and the
opportunities they need to secure power
I want to talk more about this theft by
delving deep into one American city I
had the great privilege of being a
teacher in Detroit Michigan I was
teaching middle school and high school
math and although every teacher will say
this my kids were truly the greatest I
love teaching and I miss it every single
day but there were some things that made
teaching and learning incredibly
difficult at her school first and
foremost I had no curriculum whatsoever
this means I spent my waking hours
making up every warm-up test worksheet
homework quiz projects or frantically
doing Google searches for those
materials then one day I figured out
that if I paid about four hundred
dollars online I would be able to get an
entire set of curriculum and I had a
tiny savings account at the time so at
the time I just spent the bullet and
went ahead and bought the curriculum but
no teacher should ever be
objected to that especially considering
what they get paid today the second
thing that was happening is a lot of my
kids were learning English as a Second
Language a lot of my students were
arriving from the war in Yemen and some
of them couldn’t write their first name
in English and so some days instead of
doing math they were working on the
alphabet we had one ESL teacher for the
entire building and although she was
phenomenal she literally had hundreds of
kids on her caseload that combined with
that lack of curriculum there was just
no way that my kids were going to become
fully literate and you can forget about
any chance of them becoming bilingual
the other challenge was the result of
this happening over years and years I
had kids who were in school for at least
a decade and still couldn’t write an
entire paragraph yet these kids would
come to me and say miss I’m interested
in a career in law or education or art
or graphic design or engineering or
medicine they had dreams and they had
more grit than anyone I knew but what
they fundamentally did not have were the
very basic opportunities to become
literate and when I’m talking about
those opportunities
I really am talking about the very basic
things I’m not talking about that they
don’t have enough AP classes I’m saying
that in the wealthiest most powerful
nation on the planet we have kids that
walk into classrooms that look like this
where they start their days by picking
up a rodent feces off the floor where
classrooms are home to mice and puddles
of water water that have accumulated
from ceilings where teachers are buying
toilet paper with their own money where
classrooms are unbearably hot or cold
that you find thermometers and costumes
that read 90 degrees like this one they
are so exhausted from the heat that we
have reports of kids who are vomiting in
school and even if they manage to ignore
all of this
the reality is that the things that they
need to read books are virtually
non-existent we know that sometimes we
find three kids huddled over one book in
class and that they’re learning history
from a book printed in 1991 when Bill
Clinton was president now this is
unconscionable and we know that teachers
are humans too
these conditions are unsustainable
they’re going to flee in Detroit today
we have a massive teacher shortage is so
bad that at one school last year the
highest performing eighth grader
ended up teaching his own math class I
could go on and on but the question for
me and for you is this would we ever
allow this to happen to our own kids the
answer is obvious so how do we allow
this to happen to other people’s kids we
allow this because we allow these
systems structurally racist systems to
continue to exist it is critical to
understand what legal scholars like
Michelle Alexander and a holiday June
have repeatedly made clear to us that
racism never disappears it just conforms
to the norms of our times and the system
in operation Detroit today is very
complicated with an equally complex
history so if you remember one thing
about Detroit’s educational system it’s
this that democracy has largely been
decimated in that city in 1999 the state
of Michigan took over Detroit schools
and has been largely running them since
then this means that Detroiters have had
no publicly elected school board no-wake
to control how money has been spent and
very little voice and how their kids are
being educated now this system of state
takeover mind you is the exact same
system that was used in Flint which
still doesn’t have clean water as I
speak the state takeover has been
disastrous for our schools which is
exactly why exactly one year ago
some detroit sued the state of michigan
claiming that the right to literacy has
been denied the state responded with
this that literacy is important but
there’s a lot of other things going on
that poverty is getting in the way that
these kids are traumatized that their
parents are involved enough and my
favorite that they have intellectual
limitations this argument is deeply
offensive
it suggests that poor kids or kids just
going through stuff don’t deserve the
opportunities they need to become
literate that these are throwaway kids
that they don’t need literacy because we
don’t need them participating in our
democracy or in our society that these
factors are too much to handle and while
we shouldn’t expect schools to single
handedly fix poverty we also shouldn’t
be throwing our hands up in there and
saying i guess they just won’t read we
would be livid if someone talked about
our own kids that way and the thing is
we know what it takes to get a kid to
read this is a solvable crisis when i
was doing my masters and language and
literacy last year at harvard i learned
that we know a lot about reading the
research and the practices they’re
largely there but this willingness to
ensure that all kids despite their
circumstances this willingness to make
sure that they get what they need to be
able to read it’s just not there but
because this is a crisis and not just
some freak national accident there are
some things we can do about it first
we must change those systems the
literacy lawsuit in detroit is a massive
step forward in ensuring this
fundamental right to literacy in our
country this case needs to go all the
way to the supreme court and you can
support it and follow it at this website
detroit access to literacy org second we
have to change public opinion we have to
make it enormous ly clear to ourselves
and
everyone around us that yes indeed we
live in a racist society that literacy
is tied to power and that power has been
carefully engineered in this country and
that people of color have been largely
excluded from access to power so if we
want to understand literacy we have to
understand our history with power and
our current relationship with it third
we have to hold ourselves and everyone
around us accountable what I see a lot
in education is this generous spirit to
give schools free stuff to sponsor them
to support our teachers that is all well
and good and if you have the means to do
it please do however this is an
accountability issue it’s one thing to
say man this is so awful that you’re
going through this let me help you out
let me put a bandaid on it let me give
you this box of beautiful books and it’s
a whole other thing to say hold up what
the hell is going on how is it possible
that in the United States of America we
have kids and schools that look like
this who is in control here how are
schools being funded what exactly are my
votes doing what people I vote in what
are they voting on – it takes a massive
amount of Education to answer these
questions and they may vary from state
to state and district to district but
hopefully those questions can start
leading us to action but we have to be
careful here we must not fall into the
trap of thinking that Detroiters need us
to be their saviors the reality is
Detroiters have been fighting for a very
long time
they’ve been organizing they’ve been
voting they’ve been advocating and
they’ve won some pretty decisive
victories as a result – effective to be
most effective in this we must partner
with communities like Detroit and truly
deeply understand these systems at work
and understand maybe what our role may
be and dismantling them it may require
that we go home and talk to our families
and make sure that they’re just as
educated about as we are about this it
may require that we go to every rally
and proton
so make sure there’s strengths and
numbers and it may require that we
simply pass the mic over and make sure
that their voices are heard I want to
close by sharing what a student in
Detroit told me last month he said that
he knows all of this is happening
because it was in the blueprints of our
country and I couldn’t agree more but
the thing about a blueprint is that I
can change and together we can change
the way power is accessed in our country
by changing the way literacy is accessed
in our country and in the words of w eb
Du Bois the burden belongs to the nation
and the hands of none of us are clean if
we bend not our energy to writing these
great bonds thank you
[Applause]
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