Below is a transcript of episode five of By Every Measure, Radio Milwaukee’s new podcast exploring systemic racism in various sectors of Milwaukee, looking closely at how those systems were formed and how they can – and need – to be changed.

Tarik Moody:

Before we begin this episode of By Every Measure, talking about systemic racism and education, I want to share a personal story with you. When I was in second grade, living in Charleston, South Carolina, I had an incident, I guess you’d call it my first incident, with racism, that I remember. I was handing my paper in to the teacher who was an older white lady. And right when I handed the paper in to her, right under her breath, I hear her say the N word to me. And that stuck with me. I didn’t even tell my parents till later in life, till probably my college days that I told them that.

But it was kind of traumatic for me and doing this podcast brought up that memory again. But thinking about that, I’m thinking about all the instance that students and kids that look like me had to deal with in schools, going beyond just being called the N word. Being handcuffed by police, being expelled for minor incidents. That is also traumatic and that occurs across the country.

Tarik Moody:

And in this episode, we’re talking about systemic racism in education. Not just outcomes or test scores, we’re talking about bias among teachers, the school-to-prison pipeline, how Black students are treated differently than white students when it comes to discipline; and we also are going to look at how schools are funded. All of this was studied more than 50 years ago in the Kerner Commission, which we have talked about in other episodes in this podcast.

George Wallace:

And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

Tarik Moody:

In the Kerner Commission, they recognized the disparity between Black and white students in America over 50 years ago. And they made several recommendations, which alas, were never followed.

Tarik Moody:

A little more than a decade before the Kerner Commission, there was Brown vs Board of Education. You probably learned about this in school. A 1954, US Supreme Court decision that rules segregation unconstitutional and in violation of the 14th amendment.

Tarik Moody:

It’s easy to think that was years ago. I wasn’t even born. Right? But it wasn’t really that long ago. Remember Ruby Bridges? She was a young Black girl who became the face of school integration and had to be walked into school by federal marshals. Now she’s only 66 years old, younger than my parents. But back then, she was in the national spotlight as a child, dealing with hatred.

Tarik Moody:

This is what white Americans were saying about school integrations.

Speaker 3:

Segregations for both races is best. Segregation has and is working in the South, which contains two thirds-

Tarik Moody:

There were protests all over the country over busing programs meant to integrate schools into the 1970s, in places like Boston. Here’s some archive audio from WBZ-TV to give you a sense of how intense these protests were.

Speaker 4:

[crosstalk 00:03:19] They were throwing eggs at the window and trying to hit people with them.

Speaker 5:

And when we was in school, they was throwing glass at Black people and little kids.

Tarik Moody:

So the audio you just heard was from the 1970s. But the issue of bias and prejudice in schools persist today. Black children are five times as likely as white children to attend schools that are highly segregated by race. And that is according to the Economic Policy Institute in a 2017 report. While segregation is technically illegal, the truth is it’s still happening all over the country, including right here in Milwaukee and cities like it.

Tarik Moody:

That’s where we’ll start with Reggie Jackson.

Tarik Moody:

Why is it, if someone says, “Well, you’re separate but equal, what’s the problem?” Right? What does segregation really do to a Black community and Black students?

Reggie Jackson:

I was a teacher for eight years; and you’re separate, but you’re certainly not going to be equal, in any respects. They were building brand new schools on the south side for white families and didn’t build many at all on the north side. It took a great deal of pressure. It took boycotts by students to put pressure on Milwaukee Public Schools to build those.

Reggie Jackson:

But the most important impact that segregation policies have is that the way we fund schools is based on property taxes. So as we created these segregated, all white spaces in certain parts of Milwaukee and in the suburban communities, what you find is that the property taxes, because of the value of the home, increased. The whiter the neighborhood got, the higher the property values got. The less white a neighborhood got, the lower the property values went. And so what you end up having is a very unbalanced system where our suburban school district’s funding is significantly higher than within the city.

Tarik Moody:

That’s why when you go to the suburbs, you’ll see much nicer and newer school facilities compared to the schools in Black neighborhoods, which in Milwaukee is the central city. More tax base and more funding.

Reggie Jackson:

And man, I’ll tell you, Tarik, when I go out to the suburbs that you don’t go to schools; you go to campuses. Right? You go to the campus of the schools and they’re so different. So different than the schools in the city of Milwaukee. We have a lot of really old school buildings in Milwaukee and you know this as well as I do, Tarik, that if you go to a school that looks really good and modern and has wonderful facilities, it makes you kind of feel good about yourself. Like, “Man, I’m going to get a really good education here.”

Reggie Jackson:

But then you go to one of the schools in Milwaukee, that’s maybe an old raggedy building where the air conditioner doesn’t really work that well when it’s hot; the heat doesn’t work that well when it’s cold; the windows don’t close properly so there’s a lot of cold air blowing into the building. Two of the schools I worked at, those were major issues that they couldn’t figure out how to fix the window so we wouldn’t be cold in the classrooms. So we literally had to sit in the classrooms with jackets.

Reggie Jackson:

So it makes a big difference for the students as well as the staff, and the parents recognize it, too. That’s why so many Black parents, Hispanic parents are always trying to get their kids out to the suburban school districts.

Tarik Moody:

Let’s talk about discipline, like a lot of studies about how Black students, especially Black girls, young women are disciplined unequally and basically, this also kind of leads into the school-to-prison pipeline. So talk to me about how discipline in schools is treated between the races.

Reggie Jackson:

Yeah. Yeah. There are huge disparities across the country in disciplinary outcomes for particularly between Black and white students. Black kids are much more likely to be suspended and expelled from schools than their white peers for participating in the same type of age appropriate behavior. But the other side is because of unconscious bias and even some conscious bias by white teachers, because the majority of teachers in the country are white; most of them are white females. When you have Black students, particularly Black boys, they’re much more likely to be sent to the principal’s office, written up, suspended, eventually expelled.

Tarik Moody:

There was a national study about this in 2016 done by the US Department of Education office for Civil Rights, that showed Black boys were more than three times more likely to be suspended one or more times compared to white boys, basically 18% versus 5%.

Reggie Jackson:

Black girls, on the other hand, the difference between how they’re treated is that they are treated in a less nurturing way. There’s a big study done called Black Girls Interrupted several years ago; and what it showed was that there’s this general assumption that Black girls are older than what their age is, that they assume that they know more about sex than they do, that they’re less in need of nurturing than their white peers. And so if people assume you’re less in need of nurturing and emotional support, then they’re going to be less likely to do that for you.

Tarik Moody:

So, as you can see, these differences in discipline are well observed, studied, and analyzed; and bias starts early, as early as preschool. Yale University Child Study Center did a study on this back in 2016 and found even more proof of bias and education at a very early age. Here’s how study went.

Reggie Jackson:

And these are young children. Had them sit at a table and had some toys and things on the table and have them play. And he asked the group of educators, he used Black and white educators, a little bit of everybody. And he said, “I want you to watch the video of these children. And I want you to look for signs that are precursors to their misbehaving. So look for those little signs that they’re about to do something they’re not supposed to do.” Right?

Reggie Jackson:

And so the teachers sat and they watched this video, but what the teachers didn’t know was, number one, that these young children were actually trained actors. They did nothing. There was no misbehavior at all in the videos. I mean, they were trained to do everything the right way. But what the other thing was, the surprising thing was that the computer screen the teachers are looking at, they actually had a device on it that track their eye movement.

Reggie Jackson:

So it saw exactly where the eyes were looking. So you had a little Black boy, a little Black girl, a little white boy, and a little white girl. And when they looked through the data for all of these teachers, they found very consistently that a majority of the time, the teachers’ eyes were on that little Black boy. And so it showed that bias that’s there.

Reggie Jackson:

The bias was across every race of teachers that they tested. It wasn’t just the white teachers that had this bias. The Black teachers did as well. So these are things that are kind of built into this into our unconscious minds where we have different expectations for Black kids than we do for white kids.

Tarik Moody:

So no matter what, if you’re a Black student, you’re more likely to be disciplined at school more often and more harshly. And it’s not just being called to the principal’s office. Schools are calling the police. In fact, nationwide Black boys are, again, three times as likely to be arrested at school as their white male peers and Black girls are one and a half times as likely as white boys to be arrested. According to that same government study, there’s a police presence in many Black schools.

Reggie Jackson:

Yeah. That’s a big problem. Part of what the challenge is with schools calling police. So the reason that we have police in schools, people kind of forget this is that back in the early ’90s, there were a multitude of school shootings around the country. Almost every several months, there was another big school shooting and this lasted really through the late ’90s, early 2000s, there were several high profile school shootings.

Reggie Jackson:

Now, what’s interesting about those school shootings that no one really talks about, Tarik, is that they were always white kids that was shooting up their schools. But you put in metal detectors where the Black kids are and the Hispanic kids are. No Black kids are running into the school with a gun and having a list of kids they want to kill.

Reggie Jackson:

So because of those school shootings, there was this, “Oh, we got to do something. We got to protect the students. We got to protect the staff. We got to put police in the schools. We’ve got to have zero tolerance policies.”

Tarik Moody:

What is known as zero tolerance policies were developed in the ’90s after government passed the gun-free schools act back in 1994. The policy requires students to be expelled for bringing a gun to school. However, schools started using idea of broken window policies, a popular concept that if you crack down on minor violations, serious crimes would be prevented. And you start seeing students being expelled for minor incidents like smoking cigarettes, swearing, or even such a minor incident as cutting in line during lunch.

Reggie Jackson:

Now you begin to have way more police contact. The students are having the police called on them on a pretty regular basis. I even saw this in schools that I worked in. Police are called when students are misbehaving. Now, instead of calling the parents and having the parents come up to the school and then getting their kids straight, “Oh, well, we’ll get a call the police.”

Reggie Jackson:

And we all know that the police are accustomed to dealing with adults. They’re not accustomed to dealing with children. They don’t understand, like many teachers, what normal behaviors for different age groups are; and they’ll come and they’ll put kids in handcuffs. And studies have shown that if you are expelled from school, if you are suspended multiple times from school, if you have any contact with the police while you’re in school, you are much, much more likely to end up going to prison at a later time of your life. Multiple studies have shown that any police contact as a student, you’re much more likely to go to prison.

Tarik Moody:

Besides being exposed to the criminal justice system at a very young age, Black and Brown students that have contact with police face stress, trauma, and anxiety that creates mental health problems and hurts their educational performance. The school-to-prison pipeline starts way earlier than you might think. Reggie shares this story from Florida back in 2017. You might’ve seen it in the news where police were called on a very young Black girl.

Reggie Jackson:

The six year old Black girl was… She did some stuff in class, I guess she struck one of the teachers, but it’s a six year old. So, I mean, you can’t cause a whole lot of harm when you’re six year old. But anyway, she struck one of the teachers and they called the police on this little girl. Right? And so, there’s the police body cam video of this incident. So the police come into the school.

Speaker 7:

Okay. She’s going to have to come with us now.

Speaker 8:

Okay, Kaia, you got to go with them, baby girl.

Speaker 7:

Stand up. Stand up. Come here. Come over here.

Kaia:

What are those for?

Reggie Jackson:

And this little girl is in the office and the officers come in and they’re talking to her and they literally make her stand up and they put the plastic cuffs on her, and they literally take this little girl out to the police car and put her in the police car and take her to the police station. And the whole time she’s begging and pleading and and crying.

Kaia:

I don’t want to go to the police car.

Speaker 10:

You don’t want to?

Kaia:

No, please.

Speaker 10:

You have to.

Kaia:

No, please. [inaudible 00:15:09]

Reggie Jackson:

I mean, she’s begging and crying. I mean, this is a really difficult video to watch. It’s so sad. But the worst part of the video is when they come back in, when the officers come, comes back in and he’s talking to the administrators at the school and then the people who call the cops and they’re, like, “Was that really necessary?” And the officer’s, like, “Yeah.” And then he starts to brag about how many kids, over the course of his life, he has arrested in schools.

Speaker 7:

The youngest I’ve ever arrested was seven.

Speaker 8:

That young? Seven is the youngest?

Speaker 7:

Seven is the youngest. She’s eight, isn’t she?

Speaker 8:

She’s six.

Speaker 7:

She’s six? Now she has broken the record. She broke the record.

Kaia:

Please. Please. Please.

Reggie Jackson:

I mean, this guy’s going on and on. It’s, like, dude, really? And of course he gets suspended from his job because he didn’t follow the protocol. You’re not allowed to arrest a student under the age of 12 without express permission from your superiors at the police station. So, if your Sergeant or Lieutenant, whoever says, “Yeah, go ahead and arrest that six year old,” you can do it; but you can’t do it without them telling you.

Tarik Moody:

Like Reggie said, that audio is tough to take. But beyond having police in schools, there’s also another issue. Something that generally isn’t in the classroom. There’s been a lot of studies and memes and stuff about you kind of brought a little bit of having a teacher that looks like you, a Black teacher, a Brown teacher, that students of that same race will do better in school. Right?

Tarik Moody:

There was a question. I see a lot of questions. Like, “When’s the first time you had a Black teacher?” I didn’t have a Black teacher till I went to Howard University.

Reggie Jackson:

Wow.

Tarik Moody:

So, can you talk to me about the data and about that? And why is the case of having a teacher, a Black teacher of Black students is better for the Black student?

Reggie Jackson:

I think it’s about the culture. When you are from the same culture as the students are, you are going to be a automatically culturally responsive teacher. This is one of these things in education. What you hear a lot, of talk about culturally responsive engagement of students. Right? And what that literally means is that white parents need to get to know a little bit more about the cultures of Black kids and Hispanic kids and Asian American kids, Native American kids, because they don’t know enough about those cultures to communicate really well and interact with those students in a really, really positive way.

Reggie Jackson:

Whereas if you are from their culture, you listen, you know; from your personal experience, you know how to communicate better. And there is a level of respect. I’ve seen this myself. I’ve seen Black kids be completely disrespectful to white teachers, and then leave that class and go to the next class with a Black teacher and be like the little angels in the classroom. Right?

Reggie Jackson:

So there is a dynamic of white teachers who are, they showed their fear. Right? And listen, kids are like little psychologists, Tarik. They know who they can take advantage of. They recognize it, man. And if they can take advantage of you, they will take advantage of you. Because that’s what kids do. Right?

Reggie Jackson:

And so what you have is you have a majority of the teachers are white. Most of those are white females. So this is what you have. You go to any college. It has a school of education. And you go into those classrooms where people are going to school to become teachers. And a lot of these young white women want to go to the school to become a teacher. And they go to these what they call urban schools, which I hate the term urban, which is just a code word for Black or Latino school. Right?

Reggie Jackson:

They go into these schools and they come in with a white savior complex, thinking that they’re going to save these little kids; they need somebody to save them. They don’t; they just need somebody to teach them. And then as soon as the Black kids disrespect them, they don’t know how to handle it. They’re, like, “Oh my goodness.”

Reggie Jackson:

I’ve literally seen young white teachers leave classrooms in tears, crying, like the first or second day of school. I had a teacher that I worked with, Tarik, at one of the schools I worked at. And this woman literally, as we were having the meetings leading up to classes starting over the summer. It was a couple of weeks where we’re doing professional development and stuff. She was very outspoken about how, “I know I can work with these types of kids,” and blah, blah, blah. She’s just going on and on about how she’s going to be super teacher. Right? And, “I have all of the skills necessary to communicate and culturally responsive,” blah, blah, blah, she’s going on and on like she was going to be the greatest.

Reggie Jackson:

She’s going to be teacher of the year her first day in school. Right? She didn’t even last a week. She quit after like four days. And you know why she quit? Because the kids saw through her right away. They’re, like, “You’re the fakest such and such,” and so and so; and they were calling all kinds of names because she was fake and they realized she was fake and they called her out on it and she didn’t know how to handle it, so she quit, literally four days into the school year.

Reggie Jackson:

And you also have some Black teachers that are just as bad as the white ones when it comes to being horrible to Black kids and calling them out of their name and stuff like that. So it’s very problematic. And I think when it comes to having teachers who look like you, people complain, “Well, why these Black people told me they need to have more teachers that look like the Black kids and Hispanic parents are saying the same thing?”

Reggie Jackson:

But guess what. White people don’t have to say that because most of their teachers’ going to be, they’re going to be white so they don’t have to complain that we need more white teachers. Have you ever heard anybody say, “We need more white teachers in the school”? You’ve never heard anybody say that. Right? Because you just know that most of the teachers’ going to be white.

Reggie Jackson:

So if it was the other way around, if we went out to some suburban school district and 70% of the teachers were teachers of color, I can guarantee you some white parents will have some issues with that. They’d be up in arms like, “Well, I can’t believe this. They have all these Black teachers and these Spanish speaking teachers. I don’t know if they’re going to be as good,” but we complain about it and there’s something wrong; but white people, they’re all good.

Tarik Moody:

Coming up on the second part of By Every Measure, we’re exploring solutions, including two programs that are actively working to increase representation in the classroom. Danae Davis, executive director of Milwaukee Succeeds, joins us next as she shares her ideas on how to dismantle systemic racism in education.

Speaker 11:

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Tarik Moody:

And we’re back, on By Every Measure. In every episode, we’re talking to local leaders who are working on solutions, and each of the systems we have discussed on this podcast; and these solutions aren’t just limited to Milwaukee. Some of them could be scaled to other cities across the country that face similar issues as Milwaukee. We hope that by talking about them in this podcast, we can get the word out across the country.

Tarik Moody:

Now I would like to introduce you to Danae Davis, who runs a nonprofit organization called Milwaukee Succeeds. It’s focused on equity in K-12 education, specifically convening other entities to work better together to improve educational outcomes for students throughout their lives.

Danae Davis:

It’s part of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and it is one 70 communities who are part of a national network called StriveTogether, our space or universe is early childhood through young adults. And because of the huge disparities that are based on race, ethnicity, and income, our primary centered focus is around racial equity.

Tarik Moody:

When Danae talks about students in Milwaukee, she often calls them her babies. It’s such a human way to say it; to show that these kids in our city right now, they’re our future, all of them. So I want to talk about, let’s start off with discipline because it seems like it’s ingrained from teachers, the principals to policies, to treat especially youth of color differently when it comes to discipline issues. And I think that affects, down the line, graduation, college, careers, everything; it affects longterm of their whole life.

Danae Davis:

So, Tarik, you are bringing up something that’s really near and dear to me in so far as, honestly, the examples go all the way back to kindergarten. I think the solution is two things. One is, we don’t need police practices to be a part of the solution in our schools, whether they are childcare centers or K-12 elementary, middle or high school. That is not what we need.

Danae Davis:

What we need are social workers and psychologists and nurses and better programs that engage parents in a partnership with how do we teach better development practices with our children and our babies. But the bottom line is we have to understand that they are babies and children and young people. We’ve got to start there and not act as though they are adults because they’re not.

Danae Davis:

So I would say that one solution is we don’t need to institute police practices as a means of addressing issues around that typically are represented in disciplinary and expulsion.

Tarik Moody:

Let’s go inside the schools. Another thing I’ve read in articles is about diverse teachers, representation matters, and teachers that if a Black student has a Black teacher, they’re likely to perform better, go to college, do all the things, like be more successful.

Danae Davis:

Yes. And let me just say yes. And I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story. So, as I mentioned, the role of Milwaukee Succeeds, one of the programs that we have, that we brought to Milwaukee, very proud to, it’s something called Leading Men Fellows.

Danae Davis:

And the Leading Men Fellows program, basically was a cohort of 10 young men who are fresh out of high school, so between ages of 18 and 21, let’s say. Predominantly African American, some Latinx, and they’re trained in the summer; and then they’re placed as sort of [inaudible 00:26:10] in early childcare centers, basically supporting the reading capability and literacy of three, four or five year olds. These young men, they didn’t have teaching on their radar in terms of what they want to do when they grow up.

Danae Davis:

They didn’t have good impressions about teachers. They had way too many teachers who verbalize their displeasure with their jobs. In other words, they didn’t really want to teach these kids and they didn’t see anybody who looked like them in a classroom. There, they saw in their engagement with these babies, such progress based on the responsiveness of A, these young men looking like them; and B, because these men came from a place of love and nurturing and caring.

Danae Davis:

And these kids would be able to write their names. They’d be able to spell. They just were like sponges in their ability to read because of those two factors. Now I know that’s an anecdotal experience, but I’ll tell you, it is absolutely truly reflective of why we need to support the teacher pipeline and growing Black and Brown.

Tarik Moody:

Danae mentions another local organization that is laser focused on that, City Forward Collective, which is working to create a pipeline to increase the number of Black and Brown teachers in Milwaukee. Something that’s clearly needed here and across the country.

Tarik Moody:

But even if we have better representation in classroom, there are still many other problems that need to be solved with access. That takes us to our next topic. COVID-19, and how that ties back to education with e-learning and the digital divide.

Tarik Moody:

I’ve seen, for example, the Oakland public school decided to go big. Right? Like, let’s do, $13 million. Give every kid, every single kid computer, wifi, and corporations got involved in a big way. Twitter CEO gave $12 million of their $13 million goal. Is this what we need? Corporations to step up in this area? Because at the end of the day, this benefits them. If you get parents digital literate, you get people with wifi, not just hotspots. You give people real computers and all that. Not only helps the kids learn, but that also helps the workforce.

Danae Davis:

Exactly. Right. I love your analogy. And I think that it can’t be small. So, Milwaukee’s tendency is to… Small, itself. So whatever the solution is, we’ll just give you a chunk of what’s needed and then wonder why it doesn’t work. You know what I mean? So in this case, and I applaud the Milwaukee Public Schools Foundation. I know City Forward Collective is doing a similar fundraising effort for charter and choice schools, but who’s not running into being part of the solution are the internet providers themselves.

Danae Davis:

So whether it’s Oakland or Chicago is another model where, even [Dane 00:29:24] County for that matter, where the providers are at the table and figuring out how to reduce the costs associated to a family’s access to wifi, high speed internet, without penalizing you because you didn’t pay a bill. You know what I mean? Which is, to my knowledge, is in discussions, but the sense of urgency, I’m not feeling on the part of Spectrum and AT&T for example, or Charter. So, I think that leadership in Milwaukee needs to insist that these providers be a part of the solution.

Tarik Moody:

Finally, as you know, I went to HBCU, Howard University.

Danae Davis:

Yes. You lucky person. My son didn’t go. He went to Tennessee State.

Tarik Moody:

The role of HBCU, I feel like I got something that I probably would’ve never got going to a PWI, a predominantly white institution, like UW Madison, or Georgia Tech, where I’m from, Atlanta. If I had some of that experience at the K-12 level, from Howard, I might be different. Right? Even more wealth, more whatever. Right?

Danae Davis:

You definitely would be more wealthy, but you wouldn’t be more brilliant because you already are brilliant.

Tarik Moody:

Oh, thanks. But yeah, I was thinking about that. I’ve seen Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ ex wife gave forty million dollars to Howard, all this stuff. The HBCUs, one, because there’s none in the Midwest, do you think they have a role or should they have a role or should they get more funding to play a role in the K to 12 realm for Black students or even the Latino institutions as well?

Danae Davis:

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. What is gained, as you know, being an alum of Howard, is that’s where your foundation comes from. Your knowledge and belief and your support in a foundational way is born out of your HBCU experience. And every HBCU graduate that we all know wears that probably. Somehow or another. You know what I mean? When they tell you they went to college, you’d say, “Oh, I know that.” You know what I mean?

Danae Davis:

So I think that that’s the evidence of why that would be very helpful in our K-12 system in Milwaukee, what you’ve just said. But again, we are probably going to be more successful if we figure out, grow our own type of pipelines in the meantime. And whether grow our own means that they go to an HBCU to get their degrees, and then come back here, we’ve got to do multiple facets.

Danae Davis:

Until we change the reputation of this city to one in which Black people are known to not only survive, but thrive to not be able to demonstrate that with enough people, it’s going to continue to impede our ability to change the racial demographics within our K-12 school system.

Tarik Moody:

So here’s a recap of some of the solutions we talked about in this episode of By Every Measure. First shutting the valve of the school-to-prison pipeline. One way to do that is reduce or eliminate a contact students have with police; only calling the police, only when absolutely, I mean, absolutely necessary.

Tarik Moody:

Think bold in terms of closing the digital divide. Get companies, corporations, and internet service providers at the table to remove the barriers to e-learning access for all students especially now during this pandemic. This next one is very important.

Tarik Moody:

Fund organizations like City Forward Collective and the program Danae mentioned, Leading Men Fellows. Both are actively involved in recruiting Black and Brown teachers and helping schools move toward better representation in the classroom. We’ll provide more information about these efforts and our discussion guide for this episode.

Tarik Moody:

And finally, thinking big. These are big ideas which can’t be attacked with patchwork action. Funding public schools in a way we do now, based on property taxes, has gotten us exactly to where we are today.

Tarik Moody:

We will close out with one more thought from Reggie that ties everything up and helps show why thinking bigger is long overdue.

Reggie Jackson:

Imagine if we still built cars the way we built cars in 1920. Would you want to drive a car that was built the same way they built cars in 1920 with no seatbelts? Right? We would never, we would never build cars in that same way again. Right? But when it comes to education, we basically still teach in the same way we did a hundred years ago, 150 years ago. The model hasn’t changed.

Tarik Moody:

Coming up on the next episode of By Every Measure, we’re talking about the most precious resource anyone has. Their health. It’s no surprise that Black people face a much worse outlook when it comes to their health by lots of different metrics. Preventable death, infant mortality, and higher rates of certain illnesses.

Tarik Moody:

But we also face bias in the healthcare system itself. These disparities are literally life and death. We’ll break it down next time on By Every Measure.

Speaker 14:

By Every Measure is hosted by Tarik Moody and Reggie Jackson. Executive produced and edited by Nate Imig, with additional production support from 88Nine program director, Jordan Lee; marketing director, Sarah McClanahan; marketing coordinator, Erin Bagatta; web editor, Evan Rytlewski; audio producer, Salam Fatayer; executive director, Kevin Sucher; content marketing manager, Amelinda Burich; community engagement manager, Maddy Riordon; and imaging manager, Kenny Perez. Handcrafted sonic inspiration from The License Lab; and our sincere thanks to our members for making all Radio Milwaukee content possible.