Línea Abierta; 6603; Dropout Crisis: The Macarturo Take (Second Hour)

Here's a new video of the video of the video. A new video of the video of the video. I hope you enjoyed the video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Bye! Thank you very much for being here today. We have a marvelous presentation for you today. My name is Marcos Gutierrez, Dr. Marcos Gutierrez, and I will be doing the English portion of this. As you heard earlier, we did the Spanish portion of this, and so now it is everybody's exchanging the panels.

We have new guests, and of course, the audience has been moving around. Excellent. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening to this amazing program, and obviously we'd like to have everybody please sit down. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for continuing now in English. We had stated at the very beginning, we're going to do the first hour in Spanish, which we already did, and the second hour in English, and then the third one will be in LIEFE. Otherwise, known as everybody will be participating by Lim Wooly, and of course, we would like for you to participate, everybody that's here, and so please start thinking about your questions or your comments that you'll be making concerning this particular issue. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening to this amazing program. Of course, we have thousands of people listening, and I'm so happy to be part of this. Today, we have with us a marvelous group of thinkers, artists, educators, scientists, writers, all recipients of the MacArthur Award, the Genius Award.

These Markarturos in Markarturos meet in various cities, and the meeting this time is in Fresno, California, which is where Hugo Morales is from, and he's also a recipient. RAVIO, Belingue, and Denshin, California, taking this opportunity to discuss a particular topic that you all heard in Spanish first, which concerns everybody, obviously, school dropouts. We as Latinos are California's majority, and we'll continue to be so. Our children are dropping out of school in record numbers. In Fresno, in particular, I understand that it's a large percentage of dropouts, and a large percentage of those that dropout that are Latinos end up either in the judicial system and or in jail. Our discussion today hopes to address the issue of dropouts, so that at least we can start thinking about the ramifications of doing absolutely nothing. We are a strong majority. Without an education, what will be our future is a good question.

We should all know that without an education, a country, of course, becomes a failed state. With that said, let me introduce our guest, as you may or may not have noticed, of course you did. The panel has changed. We have Otros Macharduros, first of all, Dr. Joan Abramson, President of the Jefferson Institute, bringing creative thinking to practical problems. Once worked as Assistant Chief of Staff to George H.W. Bush, worked for the United Nations Human Rights Commission, as a doctor of degree from Harvard, and has two sons. And she received her MacArthur Prize in 1985, and said, you know what, the name of the name of Malia Mesabanes, MacArthur Prize 1992, psychologist, curator and artist, PhD in clinical psychology from the right institute in Berkeley, regional committee chair for the exhibition Chicano Art, resistance and affirmation author of ceremony of spirit, nature

and memory and contemporary Latino art, recognized for her art exhibitions, which raised the spirits to life of important women in the American continent. In the name of Sandra Cisneros, writer, MacArthur 1995, the house on Mango Street, women hallowing creek through other and other stories. She of course puts our existence in print and enables us to recognize who we are. She's also a national endowment for the arts fellow, established and important entities like the Macondo Foundation, the Alfredo Cisneros del Morale Foundation, Para Loste Canos, Etambien Estakikun Sothros, the name of Mr. John Hesseran, I hope I pronounced that properly.

Yes, that's Arun, perfecto, MacArthur, Mino Centodo, I say 1996, I am bilingual, so if I take off and Spanish, please somebody, slap me. Senator, director of multimedia artist based in New York received degrees from both Philadelphia College of Art and Yale University and has held very important positions in broadcasting CBS and the Dick Cavitt Show. He has written, directed and designed over 25 art pieces presentations. His use of the arts communicate with us on a different dimension, and if you have seen his work, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The Yermo Gomespania, writer, performance artist, transporter of issues through artistic energy, master of imagery that transports us sometimes unwillingly to places we've never been before, recipient of many awards including the MacArthur Award which brings them to Fresno.

I think I've introduced everybody and I thank you all for being here. I had asked earlier, obviously we were listening to the Spanish part, and we would like to get some of the impressions and some of the very important issues that were brought up in Spanish, of course, now we don't want to be accused of just speaking to the choir and that's why we're doing it bilingual and I really appreciate the bloody obelingo and taking this on. And I had asked Amalia Messa, Baines to please start with her and give us some of the highlights that she heard, some of the important points that were made and then we'll take it somewhere else a little bit later. I'd like to ask you. Do I need to be near the mic? Yes, please. Thank you very much. All right. I'd like to begin by saying what a curculean effort it would be to try to synthesize such a rich and complex group of people in discourse. The first panel was made up of a wide range of people from so many different backgrounds. The MacArthur Toodles that gave insight from both the personal, the collective, the systemic and the institutional to talk about what is this crisis and education.

And, you know, I'm just going to give very, very light highlights, but some of the things that people talked about were from their own experience in their family, their experiences immigrating from different countries and Venezuela from Puerto Rico from Mexico. But I think one of the sort of recurrent themes had to do with the economy and the idea of the moment that we're involved in was very eloquent in talking about the economy, the mobility of migrant life and the effect that has on even getting children to schools. So when we're talking about this and not just the highlights of the previous panel, but what we'll talk about, I think it's really makes sense to look at the multiple points of view. There is no single one answer to this issue. So the people that talked in the first panel, for example, Pippon talked very much about the systemic issues of the second class, as a class issue, particularly from his experience in Puerto Rico and what art might offer us as a vehicle for moving through some of those

class obstacles. Ruth had rich and fantastic stories of her own experience and her importance of friends and role models in helping develop the sense of the potential for the future. Carlos was very, very pithy and right on about the politics of the systems of education. From the whole experience of his own family, his own education come here at seven years of age from Venezuela to the observing when he moves into California, the kind of absence of science and math for his own children, and then the experience of moving from one district to another and what happens to the schooling. And we'll talk about that later in terms of tax base and the privatization of public education. But I think that his, his sort of interrogation of the dismantling of California's public school system is really very, very accurate. We also talked about the cultural issues of motivation and at the very end they had to

give a little capsule and that's a lot to ask because he's just your powerful questions and issues. But, but some of them had to do in like Ruth gave, I think, very important message about the future of bilingualism, biculturalism is giving us the power to connect with various narratives and various ways of living that the richness of multiple languages and where that rests in the future of this country and particularly for our families. In some sense, the notion of the global economies and the power of the majority were also there and I think that one talked about can you assume the consciousness of a majority because we have for many years moved forward as a physical and demographic majority without having the concurrent possibilities of power in the system. So can we in the future assume the consciousness of a majority? In the best sense of the word, not in a dominating or despotic way has been done to us

in the past but in a way that gives us power. And then some of the other things that I think Bob DeMar and others talked about was being able to prepare to organize for the future and to look at the things that we face in the future is not solely our own issues but having this network of connections to people and other laboring fields, to people from other ethnic and racial and class backgrounds. What is the way that we face that future? So I think that in its first, in the first panel, we really got the door open onto the complexity and multiple fronts that I think we need to be able to talk about here when we talk about our perspectives on the issue of education and I say this for myself. I spent 20 years in San Francisco Unified School District, both as a classroom teacher, a demonstration teacher, finally a staff development specialist that ended up going to far west laboratories to do research and then eventually ended up starting a social justice

based art department in a CSU. So I've been in this system for over 45 years and I worked on the dropout in the 1980s in San Francisco and did public television around the South. I have a lot of thoughts about it but I'm going to wait and hand it back to Marcus and then we'll just move on. Thank you. That was Malia Mesa, Vein's Ladies and Gentlemen and you are listening to Radio Belingway through Etun California, B.S. in San Francisco, November, and Vietnam and Sacramento. Dr. Joan Abramson, your thoughts of what you heard today and what you think is important that we should address as we go into English. I think everyone knows there's a true serious problem, really an unprecedented problem. For many years we've heard about dropout rates. We know that not all kids take to school. We know that there are different peer pressures, that there's different ways of falling through the cracks in a big system and yet what's happening now is something that I never

would have predicted. This huge, huge leap in the number of students that are not finishing school and I wanted to bring up a study that was done at Harvard in March of 2005 where it was discovered that nearly half of the Latino and African American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002, which was the year study, failed to complete their education and as bad as that is in Los Angeles in the public school district, only 39 percent of Latinos graduated from high school and that's outrageous when you think about a system that is supposed to be paying attention to children and taking them through their education, it's something that can't last and as bad as that is, statewide, it's 60 percent

of Latinos graduated in 2002 compared with 78 percent of whites and 84 percent of Asians. And you know, you say to yourself, what's wrong with this picture and all since that time we've heard so many things about school reform and every president who comes in is going to change the system and what's happened, I believe it's worse than it was then. I see a lot more alienated teachers than then. I think the expectations of people are lower for the public school system and Amalia said she was there for what was it 20 years and San Francisco Unified School District well, I was there for a long time because I went to elementary junior high and high school and the San Francisco Unified School District, there were 3,000 kids over 3,000 in my high school and yet I got a fantastic education.

That was the year I graduated was the last year at the California Peak in its education system. I went straight to Yale University in the first class of women from never paid a dime from my education and I was every bit as well qualified as the people who had studied private school all their lives on the East Coast, gone to Exeter, all of that. And now I do have two boys. I believe in public education more than I can say, I believe in it as much as I believe in free air and free water and free radio. And because I worked full time, I really did not feel that I could have my children in the public school system without being there all the time. You know, it was, you feel like, my God, they have one childhood and an odd thing is that I'm actually involved with the parochial schools also in Los Angeles and the St. Anne School,

which was about to close, I'm head of the St. Anne Support Council where we've raised money to keep that school alive because it is the school for the, it was for the children of migrant farm workers in the old days. And now it's the school for general technicians, kids and people who work in the auto shops in Santa Monica and can't afford to live there in the district, but they want to bring their kids there. So it's, I'm going to go on forever, but what I want to say is I think we need a new commitment to this issue and we need a new initiative. We can't expect it to happen on its own. And I think it is the future of our state and not just one group. And that maybe some sort of buddy system or something so that people don't get lost. I want to just to give one example, which is a recent study showed that the main predictor

of whether someone's going to complete their college education is whether at least one teacher knows that student by name, that was the chief predictor. And I just have a feeling it might be something similar in the school system. Wow. But it's a very interesting comments, ladies and gentlemen, you are listening to a group of MacArthur recipients, a think tank, if you will, but on the radio and the next guest we have is Sandra Cisneros and I'm sure that she listened if she was very, she was taking some notes and I know that she has a lot of things to say and so we'd like to hear from you. I'm so honored to be able to speak because I was that little girl in the classroom that the teacher didn't know her name. I was the one that not only the teacher didn't know her name, but the kids sitting next to me didn't know my name either because I never talked. I was the quietest little girl, the one who maybe couldn't make eye contact when the photographer took picture.

You always see that little girl like this or like that with her shoulders hunched once a disappear and her shoulder blades. I never spoke in school. We moved a lot because my father kept taking us to Mexico every summer. We thought that was good for us and it was except we never came back in September. We were always in different schools and we never started with everybody else and made me more and more and more and more shy publicly and I can't believe that I'm here with these beautiful minds and that I got an award for having a beautiful mind when I had season D's in public school and Catholic school in middle school years rather. I was in the school with 44 students, three different grades. Teacher was overwhelmed. When she called on me, I didn't know where we were not because I was stupid, but because I was staring at the little boy in front of me, his shirt was wrinkled. I thought about him for a long time. I wondered why didn't his mama iron his shirt?

Maybe she was busy with the babies. Maybe he had to get up in the dark and put cornflakes in a tin cup and feed them. Maybe he didn't have time to get a clean shirt and mama was too busy to notice and he came to school with the clothes he slept in and I thought and thought about where he lived and his house and his brothers and his responsibility. That's when Teacher would call on me. And I would wake up and not know where we were. So of course my report card was full of season D's and I only had one B and it was a B minus for behavior and no one knew my name. I didn't have very many friends. I was very quiet in that classroom and I believed I was not very smart so I never raised my hand because if I thought of it, it couldn't be right. But fortunately there is poetic justice and the pipes burst that winter in Chicago and we had no water in our fourth floor flat and we had to carry glass gallons, empty gallons

of milk with water to our bathroom and pour into our toilet and drink water that we borrowed from the neighbor and carrying it in February in Chicago. My mother and father said this is it we have to move and they somehow borrowed money from I don't know who relatives anybody and we bought our first house a little bungalow in a changing neighborhood on the different side of town and we changed schools. And somehow in that new school we had teachers that were happy and this makes the big difference if a teacher isn't happy and nurturing her own spirit how can she nurture others if she's unhappy and frustrated that unhappiness is contagious just like that happiness is contagious and we had a teacher who was so happy that when she came up to me and pulled my paper from my desk I thought it was like the other school that she was going to make me stand up and hit me with a stick or point out what a bad student I was.

I was in middle school the first time in my life that a teacher picked up my paper, put it up to and showed it to the class said look what our new student Sandra has created this beautiful drawing a drawing I never got a great for art in the other school even though that was my gift and at first I thought she was mistaken maybe she made a mistake and thought I was a good student maybe she thought because I had little glasses blue glasses with cat eye that we bought at the Sears maybe she thought I was smart and I felt sorry for her so I started raising my hand and trying to answer the questions because I liked her and she loved us I could feel that love and I'm convinced if you love a plant or a child or a little Animalita whatever you pour love and see impresale wonito it's always going to come out good and that changed my life and I'm very grateful for the pipes that burst thank you thank you thank you thank you for those words now ladies and gentlemen

we move on to is in your hissus but don't John hissus run thank you actually I wanted to relate to something that that gentlemen is talking about which is about the all these dropout rates and the call the idea of going to college I've been teaching in my whole bunch of colleges over the years and whenever I get to the class I always look around and it's basically the same people same type of people not to categorize people that I had last year which means very very few people of color and some of these schools are very very good schools they have scholarships they have and so my immediate question always is well where is everybody else I you know why is it really very sweet very intelligent kids all from the suburbs I don't I don't I don't recognize I go out on the street I feel

like I'm in a different world what is going on in here and it's always been a constant battle of me saying where where are these people where are the Latinos especially the Latinos where are they and we have to find some well that we don't know where they are they can afford the school it's always the same kind of excuses that I get same in I work in theater and many times you'll go to a theater or you'll be touring or working on a piece and they will send you interns same all the interns are all the same I'm going to where how can we be living in New York or Seattle where we wherever we are and have only basically white interns I'm sorry to say the word but they're all we have to say where is and they go well we can't find anybody or they're not interested I see there has to be somebody around that you can find and that is your job to go find them they're not you know they have to be somewhere so this is always I'm always kind of a thorn in

the side of schools and institutions always saying at least on my level with what I can do I can try to bring other people into the mix because I also say my students in the class these wonderful white kids who are very liberal very open to things how are they everyone to learn to be around the rest of the world if they're only among themselves and I think this is a kind of also another problem that the people that are in the schools that maybe aren't dropping out the rest of the community is not going to be familiar with other types of people and that's going to reflect on what's going to happen later on so it is this strange I do find there's this strange kind of marginalization going on also I think in the artists arts community I'm sorry to say that they tend to try to either let's say out of generosity whatever you want to call it to try to marginalize

monies and institutions and it's basically they keep sending people into this corner and people into that corner and everybody ends up being kind of segregated I have been since I'm part of the Latino community I'm part of the gay community I'm part half Jewish so I'm partially connected with that and the more I go to these different corners I keep going well where is the rest of the community even the gay community in some way seems to be the most diverse because we come in all colors so in a way that is kind of inspiring but I still do find I go to some events that are let's say supported by institutions and monies but I never see very rarely do I see the rest of the world there and I'm point the rest of the world should be there this is a Latino playwright or some kind of a hip

hop festival or something when I go out people say oh yes we love all this people they're just great and all that stuff then when it comes time to actually be there and really support they are there nowhere to be found so I this has always bothered me and I continually but I actually see it starting this idea kind of starting in the schools and it does worry me when I when I go to teaching colleges I for 30 years now I continually it's the same people coming back up and up and up again and now I know I'm probably teaching some of the kids I originally taught they're descendants so anyway so that's what I'm going to say oh that's possible and there's a gentleman if you just tuned in you're listening to conversation between Los Makar Turos they have called themselves that their recipients of the Makar Turo award a very prestigious award and we heard the first hour when Mr. Samuel Roscoe in Spanish this is the second one we are speaking in English and we are

at the Chicano Youth Center in Fresno California I have heard tax based education I have heard I haven't heard a lot about teachers union although I have in the sense that some teachers just don't care I haven't heard a lot about whether we are going through this by design and I would love to hear speak on that is it now that we are becoming a majority all of a sudden there is no funds for our children to educate themselves be it elementary be it college be it university be it artistic be it whatever and I would like to I would like to go in that direction please but I will see you guys already grabbing the mic and everybody is grabbing the mic and I love it because because is it by design that we are in this situation is it is somebody keep me not trying to keep our kids away from

being educated and if so and if we say it are we over reacting and if we find that it may have some truth to it what do we need to do about it we pay taxes are we to split up our taxes and say we will educate our children with our money thank you very much so I would like to get into that a little bit later but first we have a gift from it's a New York again more Gomez Pena who is going to read us a letter and then we shall be back to the conversation concerning the questions that I was asking in the needle well hopefully what I'm about to say is connected to the practicum and it's just raised I just feel that to our complexity to this discussion we need to begin to talk about the culture of violence we simply cannot understand the crisis of education in our communities if

we don't fully understand this pervasive culture of violence that afflicts our communities on both sides of the border and I want to participate in this extremely important discussion in the best way I know as an artist with my artistic voice so I have prepared two interventions and I wish to share the first one right now and the second one later on I feel that violence begins in our homeland violence begins in Mexico and currently violence is mostly generated by the crime cartels so I wrote a letter to a crime cartel boss señor echis echis echis lord of the heavens and the beaches the highways and the trailers

I have never met you face-to-face and I truly hope I never do despite the fact you don't know me your actions affect my daily existence in profound ways I am one of the hundreds of thousands of post-national Mexicans who's umbilical court to my homeland has been set here by you I don't look forward to my increasingly less frequent visits to Mexico because people like you have made it a terrifying place a war zone I have lost my country of origin to violence and fear to the violence you helped create and the fear you continue to perpetrate I haven't had the opportunity to cry for Mexico I haven't had the time to cry for the 45,000 quote unquote documented cases of people killed by organized crime in the past three years

Mexicans killed by other Mexicans like you not to mention the thousands more who have simply vanished in the Arizona desert lost in the bi-national sex trade or buried in some mass grave it all happened so fast the delusional war declared by President Calderon against your kind your internal cartel wars fighting for the control of strategic territories and the collateral civilian casualties then there were the wholesale kidnappings and the bantones your exemplary assassinations including the now world-known beginnings and new relations followed by the bombings and assaults to police stations, territories, restaurants and nightclubs and the abominable massacres of migrants and teenagers that resembled those by the Colombian and Central American death squads of the past it is happening so fast relentlessly in less than a decade Mexico became one of

the most violent countries on earth with monthly murderous statistics hired on those who died and the Afghan wars we are now the country with the largest number of murder journalists and students violence is now our master narrative daily headline and cultural landscape violence is now the main reason why our bisonos migrate to the US unfortunately I speak from first-hand experience my family and friends have been touched by your violence what are my closest causes was stabbed 22 times by a cicadio a hired assassin who spent less than two months in jail for his crime my 89-year-old mother has been robbed twice at goal point all the relatives and friends of mine having kidnapped beaten and robbed by cops on

your payroll seal the cops and being gangsters and people I knew were killed in crossfire simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time meaning anywhere anytime and this didn't happen in Baghdad or can the hare it took place in Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Pijuana, Juarez, Peracruz, Morelia and many other cities I learned to love while traveling in my ex-country as a young man today these places are all part of the international travel alert websites that want to give you to the destruction of Mexico's tourism I haven't been able to fully grasp much less digest what exactly went wrong and who is to blame for this madness President Calderon for forcing us all into a war we were not prepared to win the likes of you who carry out the

violence the politicians military men and policemen who protect you the US drug consumers and distributors who created the man the legal mercenaries who sell you the hectic weapons the global media of sensationalizes your cruelty and perpetrates your fear campaign everyone seems to play a major role in this TV movie that has real consequences Senor three plate akes I do understand the problem of inequality and poverty they men's ever growing distance between poor and rich and why can face with a future of joblessness and despair people are left with too equally dramatic options to migrate north to a country that hates them or to join you and work for you to aspire to be like you when you have no job access to education and decent housing for your loved ones

it seems much easier to join organized crime that remain unemployed or sub-employed working against all odds for almost nothing on the day of this apprehension a young hipman told a journalist friend of mine hey what's the difference between dying from starvation or dying from a bullet in your heart and then maybe later on I would like to discuss violence on this side of the border in our communities here in California the yet more gummy spenia is one of the macarturos and that's what you're listening to for those of you that have just tuned in and of course it would be great to also address the issue of why it is important to educate our children because when they don't

have an education they're more very very likely to join some of these games that we're talking about and about the MacArthur Foundation the MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and the effective institutions committed to building a more just fervent and peaceful world in addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows the foundation works to defend human rights advanced global conservation and security make cities better places and understand how technology is affecting children in society we have heard a lot I did see some excitement and reaction when I mentioned is this by the tax-based education which had been mentioned before and also is this by design is somebody trying to keep our children from being educated and why and I would love to go back to the same if we can order that we started going to my last message if we could please. I'm going to say this without trying to sound too paranoid but in 1989 David Haysboutista and Hoedhead

Chapa wrote a very critical article called the re-Hispanic of I believe it was California and they posed several scenarios and they had to do with an aging white population you know developing a tax-based and an emerging very young Latino family base and they went from like you know optimum to like disastrous scenarios and they really in some way posed kind of what we're facing now is young people dropping out of school unemployment eventually violence and inequity and and then the sort of gated communities that locked themselves up at night so that they don't deal with the dissatisfied sort of working classes and I want to say that having been in the school system varies versions of the school for almost 40 years through Proposition 13 through the sunsetting the bilingual bills to the development of you know dropout rates to the idea of how we

prepare families to work effectively in schools I've seen one repetitive theme and that really has to do with the idea that it that is somewhat systemic you know we tend to end up thinking well our families not trying hard enough is language the the only obstacle but I think systemically what we've seen over time has been the diminishing of public education across the state so since we are within the context of that it can only be worse for us when the monies go you know go away the other part of it has to do with the onset of this testing mania no school left behind the absence of good bilingual education and the immigration of so many families for Spanish as the first language means without that bilingual education there isn't a way to prepare them to enter in therefore they are testing poorly therefore they're getting more and more rigid testing

preparation and less and less of an education so the idea that there is a whole learner has been lost in all of this and when I say the whole learner I mean that there is a way to learn that is not solely academic there is a saying among teachers that is students will work hard in a subject they hate for a teacher they love and conversely a student will refuse to work in a subject they love for a teacher they hate so this idea that that Sandra brought up of the teacher that cares for you remembers your name and then that goes back to the larger systemic issue of how our teachers prepared the credentialing system crashed years ago and we had waiver teachers just flooding inner city schools rural schools we look at the idea of the learner as an individual that comes in sort of tabarasa but they don't we learned long ago the teacher is the person who

has the sort of lecture the book the film but it's the learner that comes in predisposed with rich knowledge from their own experience we fail to see that and constantly there's very little match between our learners their culture their history their family and what we teach and how we teach so the failure of teaching is not the failure of the teacher it's the failure of the system that does not train that teacher that that floods critical communities with really unprepared teachers so this idea that we are in a larger failure of epic educational proportions and that we have this global loss of status we we used to be so high on the rank of education in the world and we are no longer and California used to be near the top in the states and it's near the bottom now

I think last year Mississippi was higher than us so without new immigration policy they were talking about the dream act in the previous panel without a hope for the future without protection for the rights of young people how can they go into an educational system that is failing itself its own majority what will it do with us so that failure um it early childhood education if you look at what has been happening in nutrition in the schools when you look at the cutbacks it's systemic and is it purposeful is it as uh well the more talked about by human design I would say in some sense it is by human design because people are making choices and prioritizing and when we got rid of the kind of tax base after Jarvis can then what happened is the poorest communities got the poorest schools and the richest communities from their tax base got the richest school then we saw the privatization where we saw in schools districts where

they could not afford the arts communities of families of a certain amount of substantive not necessarily well but resource came together to pay for art teachers to pay for music teachers to pay for trips to Europe to pay for the things that our children do not yet so I don't know if you want to call a human design but I think ultimately we have to look at not just the individual and families role in education and how parents can be supported to participate and see that pathway but we have to look at the broader systems that prevent our students from actualizing their ability and talent you know sometimes in the xenophobic world of anti-immigration they fail to really see that the people coming in who crossed that border I talked about that earlier who crawled to the tunnel both through the deserts they're the fittest of the fit they bring with them a drive and motivation that if we can maximize that statistic show us if in the first three years of

immigration the student does not succeed in school or begin to see opportunity that's the beginning of the end of the dropping that that's it we have three years from when they get here to make them feel they can be something that means role models more Latino teachers better preparation and education a stronger tax base a real examination of legislative processes that that create things like no child left behind a whole communities were left behind so sorry to get rabbit but it seems to me that what I think was said earlier I think it was Pippon if we're going to be a community that is a majority then we must demand what a majority's have demanded in the past we must act as though it is our right to have public education and we must absolutely must find a way to support relevant immigration policy that protects our children and our families

because health is at the base of all of it if you're not fit and well and you haven't slept well because you're in a room with seven other people then when you go to school you don't learn well and then I let the last one I just want to leave it because you know I have that 50 minutes of the mic training you know give her the mics they're having 50 minutes you might not get it again this is a this is a good pair group but I'm sorry I'm straight that way so the last thing I want to be with and if I don't get the chance to talk in it is the role of the arts this idea of the whole of the whole learner we come from traditions of expressiveness whether it's art curivos whether it's art textiles whether it is you know every day life the beauty of our home alters the way that we are in the casino whatever it is we have an expressive life and it is filled with richness and knowledge and that expressive life is the key to learning if you had to go to a job every day where you were stupid and you failed every day every day every day how soon

would it be before you quit pretty soon so we cannot expect students to go to school when they are below grade level when their English is not their first language when they are struggling day after day after day if there is in some other reason for them to be there and the arts the expressiveness of theater performance of dance of athletics of recreation that the clubs those are the ways they belong music they belong they succeed they achieve and they can hold out until the time that they gain enough academic ability so I think we have to think of not just our systemic issues and our legislative ones and our academic ones but the inspirational and really deep ones of our own treasured culture ladies and gentlemen we're listening to Amalia messa veins yeah they lost Makaradoodos you're listening to a three-hour special programming in various parts of the nation and the first hour was in Spanish the second one is in English and we have about 10 minutes

for that second one the third hour we will be taking bilingual comments and questions from our audience and comments from our folks Dr. John Abramson please I know that you had some comments to make yes but we need more than 10 minutes I know we've powered it up fast but we could possibly extend a little bit quicker so we can all be through and then we'll use let's say 50 minutes for the last part of the program first I'd like to see about this question of is this on purpose that in certain respect I think it is and in another I think it's not I think that there's an element that's conscious there's a kind of structural violence issue that's underneath and it's very hard to tease it all out because I mean there's so once you start thinking like that there is so much on purpose but it really makes you so mad you can't do anything so what I'm going to do what I think is that what used to be and why California schools were so

successful for so many people was that everybody went to public school and I remember once my parents saying to me god you're not doing so great math and you hate math I was phobic about math I hated math I didn't even want to be in the room with a book a math book and hated the teacher but so my parents were like well you know if you really want we could we could take you out of public school and put you into private school so you get more attention this kind of thing and I was like no way I am not going to a private school because I thought the only kids who went to private school but the kids who needed extra help you know I mean that's really in San Francisco the way it was if you are a good student you go to public school and you

grow into whoever you're going to be so I didn't want and also because I went to public school is the reason that I'm comfortable in every single neighborhood of San Francisco and with all kinds of people who speak all kinds of languages because my friends were from everywhere and after school we jump on the bus and we go all over town and we get to know the town and that was like my favorite thing to do so you don't think it's by political design well here I do think that most people don't care about what you call other people's children and that has been a tradition in America I don't know if it's by design or whether it's just like oh my god there's only so much time in the day but I feel terrible that I didn't put my kids in public school because I'm part of the problem because I really do believe that we have to change

our culture so everybody expects to go to public school and it's not it's just like why are we drinking bottled water for you know all water should be healthy or it shouldn't be in our taps right so there's a kind of structural violence that comes when you abandon something so important and essential to the private sector so then the structural part of course is how you hear people saying well what are you are you a socialist you want you want us to take care of education you want us to take care of public transportation which I also believe in you you want us to take care of you name it that's in the public health you think that that's our responsibility right of David universal health care well frankly I do think that it is our responsibility and also the most affordable option but we have a culture that has made it easy for people to hide behind this so I'm just going to go very quickly through the points I don't want to give up here one is I think

that another element that happens with Latino kids is the issue of language and it used to be in Mali and I were talking about it earlier that the bilingual system of education in California which was piloted in San Francisco was fantastic it really stayed in the art because kids would come with no English at home or anywhere and it was proven that if you put that child where you're teaching subjects in their language so they're comfortable and they're not behind but then they could transition into learning English and being in an all-English classroom without sacrificing their confidence and their ability to learn but then that model was tested it succeeded and it was abandoned so when we talk about bilingual education now we're not really talking about it people say oh it doesn't

work or that's a problem okay I got to hear Sandra I'm very quickly I kept thinking about silence equals death the phrase from the gay community to borrow that especially when it comes to border states states that were part of history that were appropriated through the treaty of Guadalupe Idalgo and the Gaston Purchase these states you know guaranteed the rights of those citizens that became American citizens it guaranteed them the rights to their language and their culture and we're not teaching that because that's too problematic that's something that we've forgotten about if we included that as part of American studies we wouldn't need to have Mexican American studies but even that has been removed as you know in Tucson and my book among other books has been banned right now thanks to creativity of my colleague Tony Diaz there's a libro traffic on the traveling caravan from Houston to Tucson to protest this but I think it's a

wonderful idea to take these wet books and smuggle them into Tucson but we need to do more I would like to invite the governor to some breakfast tacos because I think you know if we don't sit down and talk to each other she's probably never read any of these books and doesn't know about the treaty of Guadalupe Valgo and Gaston Purchase I bet and could not pass any of the classes in Mexican American studies so I would like to take her to breakfast because that's how you start progress I mean the second thing I want to say silence equals death when it comes to girls and their fertility I taught high school dropouts for three years girls cannot control their destiny if they can't control their bodies and we don't talk about that in our culture lots of times because of religion so I would like to invite the new archbishop that just came to Fresno to have some breakfast tacos with me because I know together he believes in many things that I believe in and he believes that girls need an education and we can't talk about it after they've had the babies

we need to do something you know we need to give them education about their body so they don't feel ashamed it doesn't mean that everybody's gonna be out there having affairs but I'm gonna tell you I lost my virginity very late in life I was 20 years old I was looking for anybody to fall in love with me for I would have had kids by now coming out of the bazoo if I hadn't gone to a school with only girls but I really wanted to fall in love and that's all girls want there's not that they want to have babies they just want to fall in love and in love and no one can fall them for that ladies and gentlemen wow what a what a what a panel how about a nice hand for this wonderful panel what I like to do with the permission of Radia Belingue is take a little break and then come back to listen to Mr. John Hesse who groans words and then we'll take some comments and please do come up with some questions and some comments which are

coming up from the audience and then we will try to get to the last part of the gift that Mr. Guillermo Gomez-Bania has for us today I would imagine that we have about a minute would you say about a minute and I'd like to mention ladies and gentlemen some of our panelists today Los Makarutros I already described a little bit of what Los MacArthur price is Amalia Messa-Banes weapon Osorio John Hesse-Run John Abramson it's in your Belamark Velazquez Ruben Martinez Maria Barrella Camilo Jose Bergara Carlos Bustamante Ruth Behar I hope I got that one right or it's Behar Guillermo Gomez-Bania Sandra Cisneros it's in your Hugo Morales we're gonna take a break and then we're gonna come back ladies and gentlemen and do our last third hour I'd like to have a cava yero it's somewhere to come up here and take the lead once again and then I'll go over there to the

mic and get people to ask questions and it'll be bilingual so La Poyna Cisneros Bono or any English Vanessa Lina Abierta is a program of the noticias de alo alcomentario por rocido por radio bilingué infrés no yoclan california. Ponao spicio paracial de la fombación de california endowment, la por por asio para la fusión publica, the Ford Foundation, the Evlingan Walter has junior fund and the James Irvine Foundation. Estebro vera masa distribuía través de la serviceo esta télica de la radio publica Electros estaros meniros la neo esreta distatale galifornia n director of tzwillicao en

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