ok great thank you all again for being here tonight as you can just tell we have a great panel for you and i just want to say as part of education lab equity has been one of the major themes we've explored in part of our coverage when it comes to school discipline swells gifted education access to rigorous courses and also school finance and also the make up of the teaching force we recently wrote about a report from the university of washington that found that even as the diversity of our student body and washington state is increasingly getting more diverse the teaching force is getting less diverse i think they pegged it now it is ninety percent of the sixty thousand teachers in washington state are white  so that's one of the issues will address tonight along with many others so let's get started and i thought i'd start by asking each of our panelists to say a little bit about what communities they identify with as well as when they were in a move to the u s when it was three from malaysia and in my school i went to roosevelt high school in seattle and did not in my experience really have very many teachers just teachers of color  here actually my great grandfather came here all my mom's side from armenia during the genocide he actually left armenia i was out of the country during the genocide that our our government doesn't acknowledge one of the few in the world that doesn't acknowledge it and then he came here to escape that well my dad's side is black and survived a different kind of genocide and that struggle really informs a lot of my perspective and as a as a student i went to garfield high school and you know that perspective was missing from a lot of my classes and i had very few teachers of color add one teacher paula thompson that i really connected with a wonderful teacher here in the seattle public schools that was in one of our progressive education programs the middle college that got pushed out  and shut down and it's really a shame good evening again my name's joy williamson lot identify as a black says gender woman and i'm not from seattle i'm a transplant i'm from a suburb of chicago and growing up i had two black female teachers in my grade school years and that's because my they taught the school there were two different classrooms and my parents specifically requested for me to be in those classrooms and that might have been the last time i had a teacher of color until i got to college but i just want to say one of the things that i got out with the biggest impact that i had with a teacher when i went to i got my master's in doctoral degrees in and it's because i met a black male professor who was a historian of education who changed the course of my life and he is that experience with him he is the reason that i am the historian of education that i am today and so i just use that as an example of i never had to i wrote i write about black people and i've never had to explain why i thought that was important or valid or that i could be ject in his presence in a way that i had had to do in other contexts may consider now i grew up in southern california from the i e e e and i of course had lots of teachers that look like me so i'm white and i'm also part of the l g beauty community i however though had zero teachers ever growing up that were l g b t i now know that i had three teachers in high school that know that were all lesbian two of them that were actually married to each other i but at no point did i ever have a gay teacher growing up ever and certainly never had a more s female and i went to both private and public education in new york city so i had no teachers of color and a bunch of  nine and corn in the library and you know you know who you are i have few teachers who later on came out bit more about history as i was just talking about in us and all our panelists know there's a big mismatch in our state today and in the nation today with you know a much higher percentage of white teachers when there's a much again when the student population is growing ever more diverse but it wasn't always that way and a joyous historian education thought you could tell us a little bit more about why that is well as i'm hoping all of you know it was illegal for black and white children to go to school in the south right remember that from history class and so that necessitated black teachers for those schools these were problem talking particular about public schools public k through twelve and so there was a huge teaching force black teaching force in the south there were black teacher professional organizations there were all kinds of other kinds of professional development and systems and things in place that bound black teachers together to work towards different things to improve the quality of the curriculum their own professional development many of them were highly educated they had master's degrees which wasn't a requirement but white places wouldn't hire so they end up at black schools and there were i think what the the what people usually think of when they think about segregated education in the south for blacks is that it was necessarily substandard and that is not accurate it is not an accurate depiction of the way black educational history was there were increased some schools struggled but there were other schools that had to do even in the late nineteenth century that's like a hundred ninety nine i think around in there where there was a school in washington d c there's a person in the audience here who's got a family member who had gone there your mother had gone to dunbar high school in washington d c and students there had to black students there had black teachers who had master's degrees they outperformed local white students on standardized tests they were performing incredibly well so then the brown versus board of education decision happens and nothing turns on a dime mississippi didn't the segregated schools until one nine hundred seventy they said that was with all deliberate speed fifty four to one hundred seventy or fifty five one hundred seventy and what happens is that all of those black teachers all of those black superintendents all of those black princip tauriel staff and all these everybody is as fired and so it's not that these black teachers found new jobs in these now quote unquote the segregated schools they were out of work and the teaching force has never recovered so if that's the south but in the north black teachers weren't being hired either except in these local black community and so you have just because another thing i don't want you to leave leave you with is that racism only black teachers but the point is that now the teaching force looks to a particular way but it's that it's been if not part of some grand conspiracy somewhat intentional in the way that it's happened but i think people just assume that black people are attracted to teaching they were but i think for a lot of kids a lot of kids of color not just black kids now probably the thought of aspiring to be a teacher makes no sense because they see their teachers as i see kids in the audience nobody they want to aspire to be like and so why would you want to become  that it's with another reason that i think that again this is kind of attention now is semi intentional it's consequential so that my point is that there's a history as well as a present that helps to keep the number of teachers of color  what are some of the i think the think about that agree disagree and on i just want to add on real quick i appreciate you sharing that history and one of the things that i'm most inspired by is mamie till emmett till's mom who was a teacher in chicago a black woman who transformed the united states by having an open casket for her son who was lynched in the south but what people don't usually know about mamie till is as a teacher in chicago she didn't just do that one watershed moment that showed people the brutality of this country against black children but she also was a teacher that fought against the discrimination of black teachers in chicago so they used to give teachers an oral exam and if they had a black dialect that was a way that they kept them from having a full time job and instead they would give them substitute jobs and they would be on part time salary without benefits n many different ways and just to say about what's happening to the black teaching force that has historically been a place for at least some upward mobility for black communities that have face intense amount of institutional racism but those those teaching corps are being destroyed and actually if you haven't read the story in mother jones they came out a few months ago about the disappearance of black teachers you should check that out it shows that we've lost twenty six thousand black teachers in the last eight years in the united states so it's not just that we are recruiting more teachers into a diverse  teaching or is that we're actually wiping them off the map by the tens of thousands and why and how is this happening well i believe that the whole debate around education reform we have the richest people the world has ever known using their wealth to implement reforms that have nothing to do with actually improving education so we get we get all this talk about more high stakes  testing the agenda by the richest people in the world is put more high stakes tests bring in common common core state standards and privatized education with charter schools and those very reforms have a large role to play in pushing out black teachers all over the country so in new orleans where they move to all one hundred percent charter school right now you push out the union that was protecting a lot of those black teaching jobs and you bring in teach for america and that actually has brought in a whole lot more white teachers and the similar process has played out in chicago and philadelphia and i think we have to actually stand against the corporate education reform agenda for an equ anybody else want to add to that no ok so while we're on the topic of teachers you know i i think many of you agree that it's important that we have a more diverse teaching force and i was wondering if i could again ask to share some of your own personal experiences to help us understand why that's so important or why you think that's so important if you think it's so if you think it's important you would like to stop it i think i primed you guys for this  you know when when i went to school i have just a little bit of context my parents migrated to this country my dad migrated because of the civil war and outside of the world and my mom was sent here to help the family back home so her job was to come here get a job and send money back home and for my parents they wanted to instill the values of the latino culture in in me while i was growing up and but at the same time i grew up in america where you know you going to go to college you know it's just it's just a very different  mindset and i didn't have someone in school to help me navigate how to have both of those conversations at the same time i didn't have someone in school to help me navigate how to how to really explain to my parents what the s a t was or the p s a t was or or why a p classes were really important or the culture of going to college because because i did go to a private school but what people would call the privileged poor because my parents both worked twenty hour days to send me to private school they had bought a house in a really really crappy neighborhood in new york and my one option to go to public school was to go to the fifth lowest performing school in new york state so to go to that and then have this aspiration from the people that my mom was working for  housekeeper that you know i have to go to college and that's just the way it is i didn't have anybody in as a teacher as a mentor as an adult to really help me navigate how to have that conversation and also how to navigate being latina in america i had to explain to my friends what i can see and you know was and like why i had such a huge dress and like you know and the birthday cake was eight feet tall and i you know d j and i might add she and all that other so i didn't understand what was all of this and they thought i was getting married it was just really weird you know but at the same time i also had to explain to them like  i can't go out till two or three in the morning on a tuesday because i had i had a curfew and you know this was college like i still had a still go home i'm forty two years old i got my fianc's in the audience will tell you i  home my mother is like you'll be home by ten clue i'm getting married is like okkar early because you're in my house you know but i didn't i didn't have anybody that looked like me and could explain to my parents like why what education was in this country and no one explained to my parents that in this country parents are engaged and parents are assumed to be engaged and if you're a parent in this country and you're not engaged you're a bad parent and no one explained that to my mom who was working to how to how she would clean two houses from seven am to one pm take a nap from one thirty to two thirty and then do the graveyard shift from three to eleven pm at the hospital and then come home and sleep from eleven thirty to six and be up to get my dad to go to work like to her that was as engaged as she could be to the educational system that i was going to my mom was a bad mom because she couldn't go to a p t a meeting right and not having someone and i'm getting emotional not having someone that could explain that to me so that i could explain it to my parents was a betrayal of the educational system because i was my mom was doing the best that she could to send me to private school and to the people as a private school my mom was think i mean as our country is incredibly diverse i don't see how you could argue that the teaching force shouldn't be equally diverse i don't know if you're a white person in the audience we don't understand what it's like to go through education and necessarily meve or see someone at the front of the room who speaks who acts who has the same manners as your parents and what that means for a young person to meve or have a centrally their parent up at the front of the classroom for them incredibly difficult  i mean i guess if you're in the audience and you want to like hide behind your whiteness and you want to be like oh but it's not that important that people you know it should just be great teachers is what matters ok think of it if we must hide behind whiteness think of it is if you're only if you're getting ninety percent of your teachers are coming from one color you're not getting the best in the brightest because you're going to really deep down that color to have to hire that ninety  percent it bothers you that oh but we shouldn't have to talk about that good then just look at the data of like picking at the top from all columns but i can speak from as a person what it would have been like for me to have a teacher in the front of the classroom who i mean it would have changed my life for me to know that it's ok to be a feminine that i have a future in the world that i exist that there is space for me that i'm valued that not just that i'm valued but that i also can succeed kids need to see that i can be a wonderful teacher to all my students but i am i still don't look like all of my students and they need to see people in their buildings that look like them that act like them that sound  like some of the things i'm talking about in my own educational experiences was especially when i was in elementary school and was learning english teacher wanted to put me in special education and my father had to challenge that and educational outcomes and i ended up you know doing really well in college especially in math which is what they were also concerned about and i'm a math teacher now but one of the things that i missed besides just having like i really wanted to do was call and i also really wanted critical educators of color specifically specifically in math that could show me ways to use math to challenge injustices because the only thing i really learned about was like cookies like how many cookies do you got  and i really don't care i'm sorry but i really want to see like how can you use that to challenge you know the water poisoning that happens and that's still happening in flint how can you use you know  exponential questions to look at how we are you know with mass incarceration or what is happening with what just the deportations is happening in this country and there's ways that you can do math to do that and that was never really shown to me and also or even recognizing like the contribution of my people like indians we did a lot with math we really did but y'all don't know that so i just think i wanted i wanted educators of color and i want to educate those of color that were critically using my education to teach new ways to challenge the injustices that are faced by my community so i have a very vivid memory of being in third grade and i went out to my parent teacher conference in the hallway the table was set up and we had a little kid chairs and i was comfortable in mine but my mom and my teacher were squeezed into their and i was very very nervous about this meeting because only a couple days earlier i had clocked climbed up the vent in the room there was like this huge event and you could get like halfway up it and i hid up there so that i could let kids in during lunch and we could play in the room and i was on the good luck and so i was really nervous about this this meeting and thankfully the teacher didn't raise that there she raised the bigger issue which was that i was dramatically behind in reading and she brought out my standardized test scores and put them on the table and those images seared into my memory i knew from that moment in third grade until about halfway through college that i wasn't intelligent i had the proof for you i could prove it to you because i could show you my scores and tell you that i wasn't very valuable intellectually at all and i had a lot of and you know i didn't want to take any advanced classes i garfield it was it was really school was humiliating and a constant struggle i had almost no teachers of color any time i made a mistake in class i assume that it spoke for everyone that looked like me and it was an incredible burden to bear and it wasn't until about halfway through college that i found that you could actually understand race and that it was it was created out a certain point in order to hold people down and that we could actually challenge and there was actually there was purpose to education to help us fix some of these problems that that i began to change and to see a value in education and what i've tried to do is give that to students and when i see them organizing after my michael brown was killed ferguson the black student union garfield led a mass walkout precincts and demanded justice right after donald trump was elected this year students in the black student union and many of the other student groups led a mass walkout garfield an all over the city's students led walkouts and over ten thousand students and what i see those kind of actions i know that  my work as a teacher of color as a black educator can be very powerful and important to helping to transform public education think about this i guess in a couple ways one is i resonate with exactly what you were talking about like so having being able to see yourself reflected back is incredibly powerful because for kids teachers are besides their parents like the only authority f years they interact with the most and i know i used to say to my i still say to many of my students i said i suspect that i'm the first person of color you've ever had to interact with in a position of authority and for a lot of their like you right but it's i think for four it's important for students of color it's important for all of our students right to see different ways of what authority what leadership looks like so that's one of the ways i think about it another way that i think about it is i now that i work at a college of education and i have children i care very deeply about the kind of education future teachers see when they're learning and about the professional development they will get after because i don't believe that you can learn everything you need to learn whether it's about your subject matter or anything else in that five quarters or whatever it is and for me i'm more interested in that the social justice curricula you know to take a class on social justice usually i mean might but probably not but i don't want teachers who are equipped to talk about racism sexism homophobia colonialism imperialism so when things come up in their classrooms when when a student says something to another student that you know is way off the teacher doesn't say oh i don't really feel comfortable about talking about this and they allow it to happen you know because they're afraid  you i totally believe that more teachers of color are necessary one because they diversify teacher education programs and force those all the rest of the people to talk differently in the teacher ed programs then they're going to force their staffs to talk differently in a way that they might have they're not going to let things continue to go down the way that it's been going down you know and trying to honors for all that's incredibly important getting people on board with that these there are all kinds of allies and so diversifying the teaching force is just one mechanism to instill my point it's instilling more and more change throughout the system and then eventually into the principal ranks that's another place  well thank you does a great segue to the next question which was as we were preparing for this panel you know we talked about the fact that yes given there's it's very important to diversify the teacher workforce but education so white is about a lot more than that it's about the curriculum it's about policies it's about finance what about those things what changes would you like to see in those areas because it's not just about who's at the front of the classroom she around you  so the thing about finance which is super sexy thing about finance is that we we as a as a people we as a individual we as a nation we as a state we prioritize we fund what we prioritize right so i prioritize having a home so i pay my rent all now it's a mortgage so now i pay more  but for me having a roof over my head is a priority having food having gas for my car those are those are things that are really really important to me but also then you know we have these little what i call luxuries which i really miss are cities and my job which is you know panels like this professional development thing there are things that we all prioritize in our life the state does not prioritize educating black and brown because it does not fund educating black and brown the state the state pays almost three times the amount of money to incarcerate black and brown children than it does to educate black and brown children it the state the educational system the office of the superintendent of public instruction they have allowed a system that that perpetuates kicking three and four year olds out of element out of preschool force for behaviors and actions that are developmentally on target for their age so we're kicking kids out for laughing too loud for being rambunctious and for just being kids but we're kicking out black and brown care we're not kicking out white care and we're doing that more and more throughout the k through twelve system and we know that the state has to pay for educators and we need to value the cost of an educator paying forty five thousand dollars a year for one teacher in seattle is ridiculous like we need to pay  we just need to pay more and that just needs to happen but and i'm just going do that so here we are but the reality is that the way that this state fund education they knowingly perpetuate inequity and they work on the assumption that the school board the business office and the human resources office of your local school district is going to put the money in the right places to educate the kids that are in the opportunity and achievement gap and that's a huge assumption because we know that most of those people are white and we know that most of those people probably don't live in the same neighborhood as their schools so we're we're assuming that people who don't live in the same neighborhoods as their kids that they work with are going to prioritize educating those kids to get them out of the opportunity an achievement gap and that's a huge assumption that we're working on and it's a seat legislature that's like yeah that's what they're going to do we have hundreds of years of proof that they don't do that plus we have the most regressive tax system in in the country time is going really fast i just got the five minute warning that we got to move so i want you guys each have a chance to say something quickly on this subject and then we'll have like a quick lightning round round one one one thing you think would be important to improve schools or anybody else school disagreeables could do today to to better support students of color but if you want to add on to that anything about the bigger issues of curriculum or school policies just make it fast so we can get to the questions and they are just easy subject to tackle and in the school building have to stop being afraid of talking about r do one or two teachers that are part of the community to and sexism and oppression like it's not ok anymore that was not a system that we created it is a system that white people created and they have to be a part of that conversation ok this is not like i'm just remind you this is the lightning round ok i'll try to focus so on this big question i mean one of the things we tried to do to engage the entire seattle school district in the discussion about race in equity was black l we say her name to talk about violence against women as well so the sure and many hundreds of teachers will you're the one with this and so when we did that initiative we had three points that we wanted to get across with how we could advance an agenda black lives matter in our school number one was restored of justice instead of zero tolerance discipline we know the seattle public schools suspend black students up four times the rate of white students for the very same infractions we wanted to push the tracking and that's on my hope nathan will get a chance to talk more about he's had incredible leadership by garfield with the tracking so that we can get students of color in the more advanced classes right and and we also believe very deeply in the need for ethnic studies programs and  that all students should get to learn about the cultural diversity that exists in seattle in the in our country and i would add that we should add gender studies programs and learn about sexuality and women's liberation as well lightning goodness so much to say i think it would teach me as a political act and i tell my students that talk to your young people in your family  talk to people in your neighborhood about how if you want to vilify a teacher who wants to talk about race in the classroom who wants to bring up homophobia or bring up social justice yes that teacher has a political stance in the classroom as does the teacher who doesn't bring it up in the class m in the classroom is a political stance and i think we especially white people are very uncomfortable acknowledging that and i think that is a huge step especially white people in america can acknowledge is that silence is political  statement real quick i forgot to say that that three thousand teachers wore this sure in the seattle public schools and that there are many teachers of all backgrounds that are interested in having this conversation and we need to fund the professional development right and make the space by getting these high stakes tests out of the way so we can talk about what really matters in education how to power  it's clear to me that many teachers want to have this conversation but they need help and it's time we re prioritize our funding towards the things we know our kids nee for brainwashing is what they say or things like that but it is it is a political act and that silence really says a lot and then specifically with what you're choosing in terms of curriculum we need critical curriculum we need curriculum that really prioritizes and centers community and incest room indigenous knowledge and we also really also need to support teachers of color and i mean i have a community of money i've been teaching for five years now actually be leading the classroom at the end of this year which is really it was really hard but i found out that that's average most teachers of color leave after five years and that's me now but we really need to to support us and to support teachers of color better committed especially to recent social justice ok now it's your turn people with questions can line up at the microphones which i think are on both sides of the room is that correct yeah i see anybody out there there's someone coming also remind those who are watching remotely that there's the hashtag education so white and you can tweet your questions to us as well so state your name oh and i should also say please  question please don't make a statement or a very long preamble we want to get as many questions as we can i will cut you off and ask you to cut to the question so that your name and your question my name is marcia cutting and i like to raise the issue of people with visible disabilities as teachers is that if you have a question in married just would you like the panelists to address or basically like the panelists to address i mean i i have a doctorate and in twenty three years god help me of education i never saw another teacher with a visible disability  and so that you you know you want kids to not be shocked when they see someone new i mean part of it is because we live in a kind of silo communities but i think it fits under the same kind of an umbrella that for kids to say yes this she can be a leader or he can be a come from this side hello joy hello we but in the parking lot yes we did you try to act like you didn't know anything but now that we know each other where is your mom she's right over there anyway so i currently live a little bit further north than i'm assuming most of you do i live on camino island and out there it's a much more closed minded community it's not very open to  i pretty sure there's about twenty four black people there there's like twenty four of us we don't have a group email or anything anyway so i am go to a smaller school lincoln high school which has about  hundred forty students which is the same campus with another school who has i believe two to three thousand students in my smaller school we have a more tight knit community which does have more white teachers and there are no are literally no colored teachers there whatsoever and happy that you guys opened our eyes to this because i'm pretty sure not one hundred percent of us were very we didn't have a stronger focus on this as much as we should have and thank you for bringing i say that first o do you think that smaller schools are more important for the development of youth in creating a stronger community so that students feel more supported when they are growing towards their goals and aspirations i would like to think that when i think small schools  can be incredibly beneficial you saw it recently with the high line school district where they've kind of actively tried to break up the small school model that was actually showing quite a lot of improvements in students lives there's things that larger schools can do to implement small school environments within a larger comprehensive high school that's going to do it next year with academies franklin already does that with their academies so there's things that can be successful because large comprehensive high schools can be kind of daunting and you can get lost in the swarm a historical  t to that so one of the things that the segregated schools had in the south was what one scholar calls institutional caring so that these kids knew that the teachers cared about them that they lived in the same communities and the same churches their parents engagement looks different parental engagement different because parents were working but they were engaged there's different ways and with so institutional caring is one of the things that you can get not inevitable at a small school and it's not not inevitable at a big school but it has to be intentional and so i think whether it's a big school or small school in institutional caring is something that helps propel kids towards their futures and just real briefly  important thing is small classes right because then it's about the relationship with kids between each other and with the teacher and so we voted in this state to lower the class size and the state legislature said i don't care we'd rather fund boeing and you know the rest of these corporations than than actually help teachers build those relationships with kids and i was going to say something also really quickly i teach at seattle world school which is a small school that serves recent have just this community and i have made a really big difference for me to start teaching there and being in a small school where i see and know all of my students and i'm in the hallway and seeing and knowing all of them but one of the things that also is that within the district we get lost like we've been seattle world school for six years and nobody knows our name they still think rest b o c so i think that's one of the struggles and specifically like districts  a better job is supporting small schools great go ahead my name is shawn kim i hope i'm not too contentious here washington teach for america and i now teach at a charter school back home in houston texas so i say in my small town in wapato washington the stuff was ninety percent white despite the student body on the akamai in the a reservation being seventy percent latino twenty percent native american but back home in my charter school in houston we are incredibly diverse to give you a small sample size of my seventh grade team there were six black teachers one white one asian and one hispanic teacher so i guess my question might be just to push back a little bit how might so let me say successful charter schools aren't going anywhere anytime soon in places like houston how my charter schools traditional public schools private schools or hand in hand alongside each other to combat this issue that we've been talking about tonight the education is so wh so i'm going to dip my toe into this one you know having lived in various different states this state is the only one where i've seen families torn apart versus the charter versus nine charter that at the end of the day the charter school versus charter non charter school situation is an adult problem around a child centric issue right it's adults not being able to talk to each other adults focusing on what's good for kids and i say that because every child is an individual learning  and not every child is going to learn in the same exact box in which we're trying to put the math right so i was privileged that i was sent to a private school if the vitriol around charter school versus non target school had happened back then i probably would not have been sent to a private school i would have been sent to this god awful public school and i don't know where my life would be now you know i don't know where my life would be but i think i think if we we are where we're a huge nation of choice and only in the public education realm is choice a bad thing and it's we have to be able to give our parents a choice but the choice should be between a really good neighborhood school or a really good charter school or a really good private school it shouldn't be a crappy public public school to a somewhat crappy ok charter school to a private school that they can't afford like every school should be an excellent school no matter where you live you guessing there might be another response as well i mean i'll just be brief but i do think that i oppose charter schools because i think that we need i think that the democratic governance of the public system is worth fighting for to maintain and the private boards that run charter schools are outside of the public domain of the elected school board and i think that's a fundamental problem with democracy i also look at some of the recent studies that come out that show charter schools actually push out students of color at higher rates than than the public schools and that troubles me key i guess in my first year of working in the education system i've been getting paid by the education system actually but i've been working for education for a little while now and i saw my first year in seattle i just moved here and independent school and when you talk about social justice education i think we've adapted that but we've kind of like plateaued at there is in equities and like we're not really going beyond that so what do you do when you're kind of like can knowledge it and we're going to put that in our curriculum but we're not really looking at going beyond that sorry sorry i think it requires critically looking at your curriculum constantly as soon as a group of educators especially sensitive stickley it's a group of white people in the room feel that they've reached some sort of consensus or they're like ok we've mastered how to talk about race in the room  it's you have to change the curriculum in ways that you can't even imagine that you have to change the curriculum but one thing as i say as i when you hit that plateau i think you want to be using this critical education for something so like for an example in my class a few years back my students used in a fit to challenge a school board decision to move us to yet another temporary location and because of that and the work that was being done in the classrooms by writing letters in the cross cooperation we actually convince a school board from a vote by a afford a three to have our first permanent location and so you are not just studying about those inequities but you are challenging them that's how social movements  happen this is i mean it's you read it i mean that's what it's what happened here in the u s these kids that people talk about like being activists in the sixty's they were in schools where that was being fed they were being fed by that so it's exactly that there's no plateau it's this is the knowledge what are you going to do with it two minutes ok time for one more question i'm a sophomore garfield high school and i know that i'm able to go to school wearing a shirt i'm able to engage in discussions with my classmates and teachers and i can like  but how do i directly engage with the political structures like that cause these kinds of things you it's a great reminder that citizenship is more than voting you know so you might not be old enough to vote but that doesn't mean you can't be an active member of this community  i think a lot of what has to happen is getting educated about how and where change happens that's one of the things like so i work at the university of washington i haven't had students are pissed off about something and they'll demonstrate but they in the wrong place like that's not  of us i think studying this system understanding where decisions are made and then applying pressure a particular kind of pressure that looks different in different places be strategic is basically what i'm talking about and there are all kinds of ways that high school kids can participate in that and learn it is going to help you now and it will help your critical thinking skills in plotting and planning strategies as you grow into an adult i think it's amazing that this is on the radar an amazing question yeah thank you i think that was a wonderful last question sorry we couldn't get to more i think some of the panelists will be able to stay around and we'll be out in the lobby afterwards of yemen that didn't have a chance you might have a chance out there so once again please give a big round of applause to all of