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Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, Fond of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, May 2nd.

And I'm Chris Schmitt the CEO of the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association and Foundation.

And we're thankful that you're here today.

President Eisenhower created all day in 1957, and ever since, it has served as an annual national reminder of the vital role that the law plays in safeguarding our freedoms and ensuring justice for all.

Across the country, this week, thousands of Law Day events will take place in schools, courthouses and communities.

And Cleveland continues to lead the way with one of the largest and most impactful observations in the nation.

We are very proud to once again partner with the City Club for our Law Day forum this year to learn more about what the bar is doing in addition to this forum and how you can get involved in our defense of the rule of law.

Please visit my teammates out at the table in the lobby after the forum today, or visit Kelly Metro Bar, talk.

On March 20th, President Trump issued an executive order effectively abolishing the Department of Education.

The American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers has already filed a lawsuit to block the dismantling, alleging that the executive branch has exceeded its constitutional authority and violated the rights of both students and teachers.

As the nation watches this flurry of executive orders and legal actions unfold, what does this all mean for the nation's students and the nation's schools?

Here to discuss just that today is Derek Black, professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law.

Professor Black also serves as the Ernest Hollings chair and constitutional law and the director of USC's Constitutional Law Center.

He's one of the nation's foremost experts in education, law and policy, and routinely offers expert witness testimony in school funding, voucher and federal policy cases.

His research is routinely cited in federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court.

He is also the author of a leading education textbook, Education Law, Equity, Fairness and Reform, and other books for a wider audience.

His 2020 book, Schoolhouse Burning Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, describes a full scale assault on public education that threatens not just public education, but American democracy itself.

His latest book, What You'll Find in the Back Dangerous Learnings The South Long War on Black Literacy outlines the enduring legacy of the 19th century struggle for black literacy in the American South.

Derek Black began his career teaching at Howard University, where he founded and directed the Education Rights Center.

Prior to teaching, Professor Black was a litigator with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Muttering our conversation today, we're thankful to have Paul Rose, Dean and Professor of law at Case Western Reserve University.

Prior to joining Case Western last year, Dean Rose held the AJ Gilbert Reese Chair in contract law and served at the as the associate dean at the Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law.

If you have a question for our speaker today, you can text it to 3305415794.

Again, that's 3305415794.

And the City club staff will try to work it into the Q&A portion of this program.

Before I leave you, I want to mention that the CMA symbol will be back here at the City Club for a special forum on Tuesday, July 8th, featuring a conversation with American Bar Association President Bill Bay.

Please join us for what was sure to be a dynamic conversation about the state of the legal industry and law itself in America with a leader of the nation's largest legal association.

With no further ado.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me and welcoming Professor Black and Dean Rose.

Well, Professor Black, thank you for being here.

I'm grateful to be with you again.

I've had the pleasure of hearing you present your research before, and I'm really excited that you're joining us here for Law Day today.

So maybe we can start with just talking a little bit about dangerous learning and what inspired you to write this book?

Was there a particular moment or a particular experience that made you realize that this book had to be written now?

Not the now part, Paul.

But when I was writing Schoolhouse Burning, actually, I'd written this paragraph about the freedom and trying to learn, trying to get access to education, both in the later days of slavery and then in the early days of of the Civil War.

And I asked my assistant at the law school to read the whole book.

She's a she's great, Uncle Lewis, if you're listening.

And she said, I want to hear more about, you know, black people struggle for reading and writing.

And I said, well, this is kind of a legal history of the right to education.

So I don't know.

But that paragraph became a chapter.

But the chapters still couldn't do it justice.

And there was something really just a sort of human aspect of the desire to read, to learn, to become a citizen.

That said, I've got to come back to this.

When I started writing the book, it seemed like a passion project that was irrelevant.

By the time I got to the end of the book, it seemed like it was directly relevant to much of what's going on today.

So talk to us a little bit about the role that that literacy and education played in black freedom.

And I have a couple of parts of this question, but let me ask you just this first part.

The role of literacy in education, in black freedom, both before and after the war.

And then maybe we can we can talk about the laws role after that.

Yeah.

So so the first thing is most people assume or if you're just reading the Supreme Court reporter, that black literacy was always criminalized during slavery in the South.

That's what I thought.

I'm a scholar.

That that's what I thought.

But as I began to get into the research, I realized that's just not true.

There were black schools operating out in the open in places like Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, and Wilmington, North Carolina.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Those schools were educating people of color, educating themselves, but they were educating enslaved children as well.

So this was sort of shocking to me on one level.

But what happened then over the course of the 1820s and 1830s, where a couple of men, Denmark, V.C.

and David Walker and then Nat Turner that demonstrated the power of literacy and the South took a very different approach to literacy when they actually realized that people could use it for their freedom, that they could use it to share ideas, that they could use it to resist.

And so the South went from a place that actually had a lot of, you know, missionary societies and even some slaveholders that encouraged literacy.

Thomas Jefferson.

A lot of people were encouraged to read and write on Thomas Jefferson's plantation anywhere from a region in which this was acceptable to a region in which it was criminalized under penalty of death in some instances or so, because we're talking about this on Law Day.

Could you dig in a little bit to the role that the law played?

Yeah.

So initially there was this contest between between religious society actually and the law.

So you had a lot of people in the upstate in the mountains who said this isn't right, that actually we believe it's our obligation to share the Bible and teach people to share the Bible and learn to read and write.

And so there were a lot of contests, this sort of played out in which the mountainous areas of the South delayed the criminalization of literacy.

But then eventually, right as as the sort of, you know, beating of the drums and the paranoia continued these the right to read and write, to gather, to even gather in a place like this for black people became illegal.

And so you would have thought that was the end of the story.

It's like, okay, they've criminalized black literacy.

You know, they've they've run off the teachers, but then they actually turned on white people as well.

Right.

That actually white people lost the freedom.

They didn't lose the freedom to read.

They lost the freedom to choose what to read.

In 1835, for instance, the men of standing, as they called them, broke into the Charleston Post office, looted the newspaper from the post office and burned them in the town square.

After that, vigilance societies formed across the south to ensure that northern newspapers, particularly those that were not favorable to slavery, would no longer cross the Mason-Dixon line.

You would have thought that would have been enough.

They have criminalized black literacy.

They have vigilantes, stopped the newspapers.

But then they realized we want to fill the silence with propaganda.

And they became increasingly, increasingly paranoid.

And they began to look for enemies under every rock they could find.

And so the HBO's review, probably none of you've heard of this, but it was a it was the biggest magazine in the South at the time.

They began reviewing the school books to root out from books in the South that young people might read things that were hostile to their way of life.

You would have thought that would have meant books that talked about slavery or talked about race.

But my prime example is in the 1840s, they reviewing a geography book and DuBose Review writes a three page review and concludes by indicating it needs to be ripped from the South because it pays disproportionate attention to northern crops.

This is how far the paranoia got.

And then they said, What we really need are Southern books by Southern authors for Southern children portraying a southern way of life.

And we cannot trust Northerners to do that.

So we need more flagship institutions in the South.

Professors, if there's any hero, love this.

Don't make them teach too much.

They need ample time to write the new textbooks for the South.

We need a new propaganda machine.

So could you expand on that a little bit?

I mean, I'm curious about the effects that that position might have had just on the society more broadly.

How did that really that not narrowing of information and the limited access to to information, what effects did that have on on politics, on the society generally?

Yeah.

I mean, so one of the things that I also discovered is that there was diversity of thought even in the South prior to the end of the Civil War and in the eight and 1826, I believe it was, there was the North Carolina Manumission Society.

Now it is news to most people that a manumission society would have even been allowed to exist in the state of North Carolina in 1826.

Not only did exist, it had 1200 members signed members.

The problem was during this period of repression that went from 1200 to 8, their final meeting had eight people who showed up, I think in 1829, and they never met again.

Right.

And so the South goes through this period in which there are people who are resisting.

There are people who are disagreeing.

There are enslavers who disagree with one another about the path forward.

The Virginia General Assembly for six weeks after Nat Turner's revolt, debates the abolition of slavery in the state of Virginia.

That was news to me.

And you go, they were never going to do that.

They called for a vote to end debate three or four different times.

They did not have the votes to end debate.

People said this society will never be safe so long as there is slavery within its borders.

Now, those folks didn't carry the day, right?

They didn't get a new law in place, but there was resistance.

But what happened when that conversation end was instead of continuing the conversation, it ended and the South became more and more militarized in the years following that.

So let's connect this historical discussion to two modern challenges that we're facing now.

How does the history of the fight over black literacy and what people can read, what they're allowed to read?

How does that connect to current events?

Well, connect it in two ways.

One, on a policy level, one on an individual level.

The one part of the book we didn't talk about yet is I write in the opening lines of this book that black people's struggle for literacy is the closest thing we have to a Holy testament to the connection between humanity and literacy.

We only have that Holy Testament because of the struggle they had to go through.

That's unfortunate, but it is a holy testament and what you see is how reading and writing changes people under the worst conditions possible.

Or as I say, that even though there were people whose minds were freed without stepping foot off the plantation, they saw themselves differently.

They communicated with each other differently.

They changed their hopes and dreams as a result of that.

When I first wrote the book, I said, You know, what does that have to do with it?

We can go pick up a book and do what you want.

And now what we have are people who are once again trying to If I was being nice, I curate the books that young people are allowed to read.

If I was being less favorable, they are banning books.

But when you think about the connection between humanity and literacy and the idea that literacy is an act of becoming, becoming oneself, and I asked myself, What kind of monsters are we?

What kind of monsters are we to try to shape a child into what we want them to be by denying them ideas instead of giving them the opportunity to become who they might otherwise be.

So let's let's talk about how this is affecting higher education today.

In what ways do you see these issues of free speech echoing in higher education in our colleges and universities?

Yeah, I mean, obviously our universities are some of our universities are running for cover, some are not.

And it is difficult to decide as an administrator where to be.

What I begin by saying is there is nowhere to hide that you may think that you can hide.

Paul Weiss thought it could hide it thought, I'll get back into the courthouse if I kiss the ring.

But bullies, they don't just ask for something once they come back a second time or time.

So I'm sure they thought they were doing something that was expedient and they figured out that kissing the ring is not enough.

Right.

That the administration now wants them to give free pro bono services to its liking.

Right.

And so, you know, our universities, you know, understandably, you know, are sort of trying to balance all of these things.

But I think that to bring it particularly to the to the lawyers and the women, what has happened was that the administration issued a document, a Title six document, articulating its version of what it thought Title six requires.

It doesn't require.

I read that document along with my colleagues.

I wrote a memorandum and we wrote it for university general counsels across the country to read and said, This document is not consistent with what the Supreme Court has held.

It's not consistent with law.

So, you know, that's problem number one.

But we thought, you know, it's just a memorandum then, you know, the government issues lots of guidelines that we do with what we make.

And then about three weeks ago, the administration issued what I call a loyalty pledge.

It asked every state superintendent in the United States of America, every local superintendent in the United States of America, to sign what I call a loyalty pledge.

It wasn't loyalty to statute.

It wasn't loyalty to the Constitution.

It wasn't loyalty to the United States of America.

It was loyalty to their racial ideology.

And that's a dangerous thing, right?

No human being, no person in the United States history has ever demanded or even attempted to exercise unilateral control over every public school in this country.

And for the lawyers who may have read West Virginia versus Barnett, when the state of West Virginia tried to force every kid to pledge allegiance to the flag, the Supreme Court simply said, if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty shall dictate what is orthodox in matters of religion, opinion or politics.

And that is what the administration did two weeks ago or tried to do two weeks ago.

So institutions have resisted.

And there's a I'm going to go beyond your question because there's so many law and there is the due process part of it as well.

Right.

Columbia University thought that it could kiss the ring and get its $400 million back.

But the interesting thing that I said with this sort of demand that that Columbia change, lots of things on campus was I said, look, I don't know whether there's anti-Semitic Semitism on Columbia's campus.

And if there is I don't know whether it's an anecdotal instance.

I don't know if it's in a department.

I don't know if it stretches the whole campus.

Right.

But what I do know is that Title six has a five step process for investigating such claims, for presenting the evidence to university administrators, for giving them a chance to respond to that evidence, to giving them a chance to then come up with a remedy.

If the administration doesn't like that remedy, they give them a second chance to come up with another remedy.

And it's only at that point that you terminate funding.

I was with superintendents this morning about 100 of them, and I asked them, how many of you have been had a OCR investigation before?

I didn't tell them I was going to say this, and I think they all raised their hands.

Maybe a couple of them didn't and I said, How many of you have ever had an OCR complaint resolved in six weeks?

One hand came up and I actually, I don't know, I accused them of having paid off OCR The next closest was six months.

Six months.

And the you and the Department of Education took Columbia from step one to step six and five days, five days.

And what I've said to many people to put this in Stark context, not even segregated Southern school districts were dealt with so unilaterally and so swiftly as our universities have been dealt with.

And the first few months of this year.

So I want to think about for a moment the possibility of an echo from what we are talking about.

Before, when we were you were kind of laying out the historical context and how some of these legal changes had really had cultural impacts, wide ranging cultural impacts.

Has the culture in the classroom changed so that maybe it's not just lawmakers who are less tolerant of open discussions, but maybe even the conversations in the classroom have been muted?

Some students feel silenced.

They feel like they can't really voice their opinions.

What are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, I mean, look, you have been criticizing what might be perceived to be sort of one side of things.

But, you know, look, I think we all of us on all sides of the spectrum have been guilty of being intolerant over the last decade.

And we certainly see that in the classroom that, you know, students will use the word more progressive, whatever you think that means.

I don't want to hear someone who disagrees with them in the classroom.

I was telling someone recently about an example of my call in law class a few years ago and some some black students came to me after class one day.

And basically what they're asking for in the short story was for me to shut up and embarrass someone with whom they disagreed with.

And I said, That's not my job.

It's not my job to embarrass or shut down or make other students feel silly.

And I don't think that the students who asked me to do that were trying to be mean either.

But they didn't want to hear it.

They just didn't want to hear it.

And so I do think we have all been a little bit too intolerant.

And I think that's part of the corrosion of our society.

As I often say, particularly in our school districts, which I call families.

I hope their families, I hope they stay families.

Right.

When when when Uncle Ned says something at Thanksgiving that you don't like, you don't say Thanksgiving's overall going home.

You don't say Uncle Ned doesn't get to come next year or he gets to sit in a separate room.

Right.

He's part of maybe some families.

I don't know.

But if we're all family, right, We have to sit down, look each other across the eye and be willing to disagree.

And so and look, that's a hard thing to do with what's at stake now.

But I think what binds us, right, our our values of discourse, our values of being able to disagree, but still live together with one another.

And and so our classrooms, I mean, I have doubled down on trying to make sure our classrooms are open as they can be.

And when a student asks a question that 75% of the students think is preposterous, it's out of bounds.

I take that question as seriously any other.

It deserves an answer.

It deserves an interaction.

And so we can't give up on one another.

Maybe that's a better way of saying I'd like to generalize that.

That last part of your your response for a minute, What can folks do at the the school district level or maybe just as concerned parents, grandparents that that might want to encourage school boards to put in place policies that would be open to different viewpoints.

So what what can folks do to encourage free speech, open debate to create the right kind of conditions for a variety of opinions?

Yeah, well, look, you know, we're we're maybe we're better at that at higher education than K through 12 and K through 12.

What I suggest is, is something that makes them uneasy.

But like, you know, history and social studies do not need to be a set of boxes that we check, that we've covered particular facts that that is, first of all, that puts kids to sleep.

Second of all, it makes them hate history.

I mean, I'm a recovering history hater.

And it wasn't until my forties that I learned to love history.

And now I think it's, you know, the greatest thing in the world, I guess.

But but I think, you know, we need to have young people having open discussions about history, not learning the facts about history.

We need to inspire those conversations.

So I think what our schools need and this isn't all their fault, right?

We've got, you know, how states and blah, blah, blah, and, you know, the federal standards dictate you have to do this.

I think we actually need fewer standards that are about specific content that you cover.

And social studies and in high school and more about the skills of historical discovery, the skills of trying to understand other people.

I mean, that was the one that made me both nervous and excited about this book, was that I actually learned that, you know, I'm from the South.

I suspect you can hear it in my voice that a lot of these people like, you know, we want to put them in good box, bad box, right?

That's what we do, particularly today.

Back then.

But when I tried to understand where they were and their place in life, what I began to see was, I mean, maybe they're good, maybe they're bad.

That's not my judgment.

What I can't do there.

Some of these people are very complex, Right.

And we understand the complexity of one another.

And I think young people need to learn that early.

They need to learn the complexity of one another early.

And, you know, that's a that's a hard thing to do in the environment that we're in right now.

So as we just kind of take a step back and think about how we got here at this point today where we do have this kind of polarization, what is it about public education that you think has made it such a a lightning rod for political conflict in recent years?

Yeah, I mean, I've been working on Democratic erosion, looking at it from an international perspective.

And when you look at public education, it's actually obvious that it would be a place that we would experience democratic erosion.

But it has always been protected because it has for 200 years been a bipartisan project.

I mean, look at the votes on the No Child Left Behind Act, 90% yes in Congress during the during the Obama administration, when, you know, the president's being called a liar and we can't agree on the, you know, the color of the sky.

85% of Congress votes for the Every Student Succeeds Act.

It has always been a bipartisan project.

But I think what we have seen over the last five or ten years, that if you look at how democracy erodes, there's a couple of things you do.

One, you attack major government institutions and erode people's faith in it.

Well, guess what?

What is the largest government institution in this country?

It's not the federal government.

It's state and local schools like they are exponentially larger as institution than the federal government.

And I suspect that if you went around and you asked parents what could you do without the most the federal government or your local school district, they'd say the federal government right.

But if you erode faith in that central institution, right, then everything is up for grabs.

That's number one.

Number two, right.

If you want to control what adults think, you control the media, you control you censor the press.

That's what they do.

Right.

And authoritarian countries.

But if you want to control what the next generation without even worrying about the newspapers, you control the schools, you restrict the information, you curate the information.

Right.

And so, I mean, I could go on and on.

But when you look at the of measures and how we do this, public schools are pretty obvious.

The last one I'll give, which is you also demonize the opposition.

Right.

How many times have you heard an educator call it a groomer over the last five years?

How many times have you heard them call it a radical, a communist?

You know, we could go on and on.

That's not those words are not being lobbed to engage in debate about good policy or bad policy.

Those are being lobbed to demonize the opposition so that there is no conversation.

I'm curious just about how this might be happening in other places.

And you mentioned at the beginning of your response this last question that some of your work looks on a comparative basis what's happening internationally.

Could you talk about that for a minute?

Is this a are we experiencing it more in the U.S.?

Is this common that we're seeing this kind of erosion?

Yeah, I mean, I would say we're number two in the list right now.

So Hungary went through this when the regime took over there.

They took the education system.

They purged a lot of teachers.

They rewrote the history curriculum, they Christianized the curriculum, they took out things they didn't like.

So we saw this happening.

There are, you know, that's Hungary, you know, So but we see that happening here.

I think, though, that one of the things and this just may be my own sort of bias and having limited experience is that I think that actually our public schools are more central to American identity than they are in other countries.

And because of that central idea, that locality, they have largely been free of at least federal control for sort of high level dominant control.

And so now what we see is this this entity that actually is part of our identities, that's being wielded in a federalized way that we've never seen before.

And so, you know, in one way, in one respect, we're following Hungary's lead.

In another respect, there's something unique happening.

As I say, the stories that we tell in our schools and about our schools have always mattered.

They have always mattered to American identity.

And now those stories are changing.

So I want to go back to an issue that we've talked about a little bit, and that's that really relates to the work in your book.

We we've talked about how public schools have the central place in American civic life.

Could you talk about that a little bit more, how they're more than just sites of academic learning?

They really are civic spaces.

And then along with that, could you talk about the dangers of hollowing that out?

Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, public schools have never been perfect in this country and they will never be perfect in my lifetime.

But if you look from the beginning of the nation to the end, what you will see is that access to the ballot and our and public education have always operated hand in hand.

Why did we start public schools in the late 1700s or early 1800s?

Because we were the world's first sort of mass scale republic.

And we so we needed people to be educated to be citizens.

But who were the citizens?

White males with property.

So they were the only ones that got schools.

But as the ballot changed each time, it changed or slightly in advance of it changing, the school reflected those norms, right?

So that we are expanding access to that to expand our democracy.

And so it's really important in that respect, right And it is also common ground.

Why would government I mean, we take it for granted now, but why would government even pay for public education?

Like, why do we do that?

Because we understand it is in the common good of the overall American democracy project, right.

To create some entry path into shared values, some entry path into voting, etc., etc..

So what happens?

What happens to a democracy if its schools rather than being the common good, become CI ethnic and religious silos and voucher schools or fractured or you know what the Supreme Court was debating religious charter schools two days ago.

Right?

What happens if our public schools are no longer the common ground upon which we find the things of which we can agree and build community and identity upon and instead become locations that reflect our own, you know, demographic differences.

I think that's a very dangerous place for democracy.

So I just have one more question for you, and then we will give time for audience questions.

You you end the book with really a sense of urgency by also, I think, some some hope.

Where do you see opportunities to strengthen and really protect public education today?

Well, I feel like I'm a broken record, but these converse the conversation that we are having here happens all over the place in large cities.

Right.

Amongst people agree with one another who have, you know, representatives that represent them in the state House and in Congress.

But on this issue, on this issue of our public school system, there is there is no gap between our rural communities and our urban communities.

I mean, we sometimes fight about what should the funding formula look like with urban versus rural or special ed versus, you know, we go on and on.

But on this question of the survival of public schools that are guaranteed for you no matter where you live, actually, it's the rural communities that probably are more risk.

I mean, there's enough people in Cleveland that you'll keep public schools together here if fewer of them, they maybe longer bus rides, they may be more underfunded.

But you can do that.

But in rural communities, right, with experiencing, you know, vouchers or a religious charter school that takes 30% of the population, 40% of the math doesn't add up.

And I can tell you that rural communities know that they have been resisting.

They have been protesting their representatives who have yet to be primaried by big money out of state.

Donors have been voting against vouchers in their communities.

Right.

And so the short takeaway is, I think that this community needs to be connecting with those communities.

But this is not an issue on which they need the future.

And and stability of public education is not one on which urban and suburban communities should be disagreeing.

I don't think they do, but they haven't built those alliances and they need to build them in the state houses, not in Congress.

Listen, I tell people the federal government is not coming to save you.

They don't like to hear that the action on public education happens in the state house.

Come together with your communities across this state.

The answers will be found in the state house.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Okay.

We are about to begin the audience Q&A for our live stream radio audience or those just joining.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programing here at the City Club.

Today, we are marking the 2025 Law Day forum, which is also part of the city Club's Education, Innovation and Authors in Conversation series on the stage.

Joining us talking about public education and the assault on American democracy is Derek Black, author and professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law.

Moderating the conversation is Paul Rose, Dean and professor of law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

We welcome questions from everyone city club members, guests, students and those joining via our livestream at City Club Dawg or our live radio broadcast at 80 97w Cass, you ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speaker, please text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try our best to work it into the program.

We have our first question.

Good afternoon.

Having grown up in a rural town a long time ago now, but my question becomes how does the rural school district avoid having a reflection of the demographic, the small, all white, all Christian community?

How does the rural school district avoid falling into that silo?

Well, you raise an important point right there, which is our rural communities are often not as diverse as others, but they are religiously diverse.

I don't assume that any rural community is 100% believers or nonbelievers.

There's poor kids.

You know, there's wealthy kids.

Hopefully there are some wealthy kids in rural communities, Hi.

I just want to know from what you said, what we are going through now.

We've seen it before.

It's been happening around and inasmuch as we try to bounce back, I'm afraid this time it's it's going to take a long time for us to bounce back from all of this stuff that is happening.

I'm wondering from your experience and research, do you think we have the capacity to rise out of old legislation?

Am I talking public education?

And what can we do to strengthen the communities that we serve?

Well, I wish I could give a fantastic, uplifting answer to that.

Let me first say where the line goes or one line that we can't come back from.

If public schools become the place where only poor children go.

The public education project as we know it is over.

It will not come back.

We had what we called proper schools before in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania, and they did not work.

You cannot have one education system for poor kids and another one for other kids.

Why?

Because nobody cares about the poor kids.

It has to be community commitment.

And of course, we have certificated schools now.

I'm not saying that is all perfect, but they're, you know, suburban families, urban families.

We all have a stake in that game.

You Take out that widespread stake.

Public schools become wealthier.

And you can imagine the end of that.

On the other side of it, I'll say like, you know, for all of the excesses of power that have happened in in the federal administration regarding education over the last couple of months.

Look, I was a huge critic of what the Department of Education had come and become.

I was a huge critic of the every student succeeds Act.

And I'll say this because I try to be fair and balanced, right?

I mean, if there is one favor that the current administration has done for me, from my perspective, that it has put us in a position to build back something better, to build back something better than what was there before.

I can't tell you whether that's going to happen in two years or four years or six or ever, but we are in a position to build back from scratch, largely something better.

Now, unfortunately, a lot of people with institutional wisdom have been fired and moved on to different places.

But nonetheless, you know, it's not a bad thing for us to rethink how we run the federal role in education.

I taught in the public schools for 32 years, and currently I'm a dyslexia therapist, so I teach students.

I'm a clinician and teach students all over the United States.

Literacy.

We are in a literacy crisis in this country.

Have you done any research fact finding and how we reverse this crisis?

I mean, I'm one person and I can tell you it's it's debilitating for so many people.

And so how do we we move the needle And on a policy level and I know our governor has instituted dyslexia laws here in the state, but I don't think they've gone far enough.

We have good screening, but we don't know what the intervention plans will be.

And what my biggest problem is is that as a public school educator, I know what they offer.

But in private and Catholic and religious schools, they do not have the services needed for 20% of the population with dyslexia.

What what are your thoughts about because you talked about literacy a long time ago.

What about literacy today?

Yeah, I mean, the policy one is tricky and I'm not going to try to answer that right now, but I do have an answer that I think is important.

And I'll shout out somebody else.

There's a woman, Tracy Swinton.

Bailey wrote a book called Freedom Riders, and she has a program that's got about 20 or 30 chapters across the country.

And her real theory is that one on one relationships, one child, one adult across time and building relationships and love of reading that this is the starting point.

I think that does connect to my book, Dangerous Learning.

I said.

It's an act of becoming how do you get?

How do we put a child in a position to become something through a book?

Right?

They have to find themselves in those books.

They have to find some passion that triggers.

And so, you know, again, I hold up her program and she came to me because of this book and the title of Dangerous Learning.

But the short story on her program is that, you know, it's not mass scale program.

She's asking for retired educators, senior citizens that will donate.

I don't know if it's one or two days a week.

One child.

Same child.

Same place every week.

And they curate and they just start out.

Nobody even teaching, reading, but find out what is that child interested in, because that's the first step.

What are they interested in?

And then you begin to bring in the books that get that kid excited.

And maybe it just starts with, you know, the adult doing the reading, but it transitions to something else over time.

You know, I don't know the data on her program, but it sounds like an act of becoming for young people.

And that's certainly got to be a good thing.

Good afternoon.

The censorship laws that have come out from the Heritage Foundation and and gone to Republicans in every state that deal with making children feel uncomfortable when they're learning history.

The assumption is made that these white people are really evil and they they were, you know, masters and so forth.

But in your book, you talk about a number of white people who did good things, who were teaching the children to read an abolitionist.

So can you just educate the audience on the white people who would make the children feel proud of their ancestors as opposed to the censorship bill, to say, don't make them feel uncomfortable?

Like, I planted that question, but I appreciate, you know, so for instance, there was this this this guy who I don't know about, the proud but complex.

Right.

There was this this guy who enslaved about 100 people on the Georgia South Carolina border.

And when South Carolina said it was criminalizing literacy, he said, I don't care.

I am going to continue to share literacy.

Now, your first reaction would be, okay, there's some angle here.

You know, he's trying to teach them to be better slaves or something.

But he finishes his speech by saying, and if my sharing the written word with them brings the end of slavery, then so be it.

It must be God's will.

And there's lots of stories like that.

Maybe not as nough as we might like, but you know, the governor of Virginia, Mr. Floyd, after the Nat Turner's revolt in the fall, I've read his diary closely.

He's trying to stop the panic and the fear amongst whites of maybe this whole society's going to implode.

He's trying to stop, you know, the Turner revolt.

But in his diary, he says, I will see an end to this institution before my governorship.

Is over.

The governor of the state of Virginia says, I will see an end to this.

He did not see an end to it, but he's the one that made that debate that I told you about earlier happened in the legislature.

But, you know, again, they're complex characters are not all good or all bad.

The first thing you said, which reminded me that, you know, these people talking about, you know, need to not teach things that makes white people feel uncomfortable, reminds me of of John Calhoun on the United States Senate floor, saying that we should no longer have petitions, some of them from folks from Ohio, written.

We should no longer read petitions from from, you know, people calling for the end of slavery.

And they imposed a gag rule.

Right.

In the United States Senate and in the United States House.

And why?

Because he said it was injurious to Southern honor.

I was like really like I mean, it's like, you know, this sort of like you hurt my feelings that we're not going to talk about it in the United States.

So we see that, right?

This is like, oh, that that's not so new either.

But one of the things I talk about, I don't know if it's in this book or schoolhouse burning, which I think is an easier one to get around.

Like there's nothing about the story of black freedom that immediately you think resonates with a white, rural kid like myself.

Right.

Like, why does that story matter to him?

Because through all of this story.

Well, first of all, I love good stories.

But second of all.

Right.

I know.

I know that the reason why the constitution of the state of Tennessee guarantees, you know, a kid from a single parent family who went through 12 houses and however many years and didn't have a big trajectory.

Why did he get access to public education?

Because the freedmen brought public education to life in the South.

I may stand in relation to the story of public education different than black children, but most black children and I have shared that same heritage, that same heritage that has made possibility for me to allow me to sit here with however many people in this audience and have this conversation.

The public school did that for me.

And public education is what I called the intergenerational inheritance that America passes on to the next.

For kids like me who could have never hoped for an inheritance in a literal sense, and it is the only inheritance.

It is the only inheritance that America bequeathed to its children.

Thank you for your presentation today.

There's a few cases in front of the Supreme Court this term related to religious liberty and learning.

I think one of the more interesting ones is the Montgomery County case.

And there were oral arguments last week.

If any of you want to listen to a really good oral argument, it's hearing our Supreme Court justices read aloud from a children's book from the bench.

And so it's about release time from school.

And if people, because of religious liberty want to say, I don't want my child to read that book that features LGBTQ characters.

I want to be able to pull them out.

Can you talk a little bit about this movement of sort of the weaponization of religious liberty and infringing, especially on the teachers being able to actually do their job and access, of course, to reading?

Yeah, I mean, I think we really have to sort of break that into a few pieces.

So the Case Mahmud in Maryland is not the plaintiffs are not asking for the school to change its curriculum.

It's asking for the children to opt out and that's an important distinction to make.

And of course, Kavanaugh and others say, look, they just want to opt out.

And we could discuss whether opting out makes sense.

But it's not trying to control the school curriculum because there's a whole host of other laws that say, look, the school gets to set its curriculum.

It is government speech.

We don't sort of have to tailor it to, you know, every single person.

You know, that's part one.

I do think that the weaponization of religion is, at least as you put it, is more at play in the religious charter schools.

Right.

Because the state has said this is whether you like charters or not.

And the state has we're going to have charters.

Here's what they're going to teach.

Here's what's going to look like.

They're open to everyone.

And the free exercise clause is being used to break into the public education budget to actually say, no, no, no, it doesn't matter what the state wants, It doesn't matter how the state defines public education.

The free exercise clause is going to give us the ability, make it something else.

I think that's weaponization.

On the the children's book, though, I'll say I'm a little bit more nuanced on that.

I have to be honest.

I know and I think I'm consistent in the way that some other folks are not consistent.

And what I mean is I think there are a series of questions in which none of us hold the corner on truth.

The state has an opinion and the parent has opinion and the child has an opinion.

The educators have an opinion and maybe the educators surely have more evidence as well.

But we are fallible.

We are fallible.

And if a mistake is going to be made on some of these questions, I think that mistake ought to be made by the parents, not by the state.

But I'm consistent on that.

So that means.

Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm okay with a parent who says, regardless whether I agree or not, that, like, you know, I want to keep my child young and isolated, you know, from certain issues of sex, whatever, at least until Middle.

Do I agree?

You know, No, not necessarily.

But can I respect that stat that they want?

You know, that's what they want in their family.

Yes.

At the same time.

Right.

You know, on medical, you know, transgender youth, access to medical treatment.

Right.

The state says, oh, you know, the parents are harming the kids or they're not harming you know, maybe some parents are getting it wrong.

Maybe some kids.

You know, that's just it was they're in a tough spot and they're still too early to make a decision.

But guess what?

If someone's going to get that decision wrong, I think it's the parent.

I think it's the parent that has the right to get that answer wrong, not the state.

So at least on this on this particular issue, that's not and I'm not saying, hey, children ought to be subject to discrimination.

I think you can allow a child to be exempted from a book and still say Title six prohibits you from, you know, sexually harassing or creating a harassing environment for LGBTQ youth.

Certainly maybe exposing them earlier makes that harassment less likely.

But I think giving an exemption doesn't mean the school has given up on its values of protecting LGBTQ youth either.

And it's a tough situation.

It's a tough situation.

Hello, allies.

Our next question is a text question.

It says, How should educational organizations, colleges, public school districts, educational nonprofit responds to legal way to executive orders from an administration who doesn't appear to respect legal process or president?

Well, you know, part of the problem that institutions face is what I call sort of the first act or problem.

Whoever acts first gets the upper hand.

And so the administration acted first with Columbia.

It got the upper hand, right.

It acts first with Paul Weiss and it gets the law firm that didn't get access to it gets the upper hand.

And so when the administration to where so weeks ago asked for everyone to sign what I call the loyalty pledge, I said, do not sign, do not sign.

Or some other people had a good idea.

If you sign change, the lawyers are going to change contract, add 15 terms to it.

I mean, that's fine, right?

But do not sign as is.

And they say, Well, what do you do after that?

I go, you go to the federal courthouse and, you seek an injunction.

You do not wait for them to punish you.

First.

You get an injunction ahead of time because, you know, a lot of our institutions, when they're at when they're on the defensive they're by themselves, you know, they're being singled out for treatment.

But what we see is that at least right now, last week, there were three federal district that found some or all of the Title six guidance and what I call the loyalty pledge beyond the administration's authority.

Two of those three judges were Trump appointees.

This is not a partizan issue, but you do have to get ahead of it.

You do have to get ahead of it.

This is also a text question.

Are we in a constitutional crisis?

Well, I keep moving my goalpost on this.

You know my goalpost, when I was asked on the podcast a month or so ago was, you know, or I think the question was what would spell the end of democracy for you?

And I said, the president, the president refusing to comply with an order of the United States Supreme Court.

And, you know, we get dangerously close to this, but it hasn't yet.

But I move the goalpost a little bit seven days ago, because I've read the Times Siena poll that said only 6% of Americans believe that the president has the authority to defy the Supreme Court, which told me that the rule of law, regardless of whether it be hard within the chest of various federal executive officers, continues to be hard within the chest of Americans and our democracy will not fall when our institutions are so weak that they bend.

It will have fallen well in advance of that.

When Americans stopped believing in, stopped believing they had the right to speak freely, stopped believing they had the right to demand due process.

So in some respects, the right our democracy on our willingness to believe in it and fight for it.

And it seems to me that that's where there are lines that Americans believe cannot be crossed.

And that gives me hope.

Thank you to Derrick Black and Dean Rose for joining us at the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connelly, director of programing here.

And forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club, Dawg.

Today's form is presented in partnership with the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association as part of 2025 Law Day.

It is also part of the City Club's Education Innovation series in partnership with Nordson and the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation.

Thank you to each of these organizations for their continued support of conversations on the most important topics and innovations in education.

Today's forum is also part of the City Club's Authors and Conversation series, with support from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and Cuyahoga County Public Library and our gratitude as well to the Greater Cleveland School Superintendents Association for their programing partnership on today's forum.

The city would like to welcome students joining us from Cleveland Early College High School.

Thank you, students.

We would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, the Greater Cleveland School Superintendents Association, Honesty for Ohio Education, The Hope and Stanley the Hope and Stanley Iverson Essay Contest.

The Martha Holden Jennings Foundation Nordson and Open Doors Academy.

Thank you all for being here.

Next Friday, May 9th, we will welcome Sarah Lewis with Harvard University, where she will discuss her new book, The Unseen Truth, When Change Sight in America.

It was a finalist for the A.P.

Book Awards this year.

And then on Friday, May 16th, the Center for Community Solutions, Emily Campbell will lead a conversation with regional leadership on threats to health care access.

They will unpack the recently added trigger language to the Ohio State budget that will allow the state to discern role from Medicaid expansion.

You can get your tickets and learn more about these forums and others at City Club, dawg.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Derrick Black and Dean Rose and to our members and friends of the City club, I'm Cynthia Connolly.

As forum is now adjourned.

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