- Long before our kids are able to talk to us in complete sentences or sing along with the nursery rhymes and other things, or play the games with us, we're sowing the seeds of language, of learning, and of literacy.

- "Forget the Alamo", if you didn't know, is a historiography, which means it's a history of the history of the Alamo.

Basically, it's about how the heroic story of the Alamo has always been told through a white lens.

- Black death at the hands of white authority is older than this country.

And police authority has strong ties to class and race.

(gentle music) - As I stand here today, I am thinking about my dad, who was just a phenomenal public speaker and everyday storyteller.

When I was little, he was a volunteer speaker for something called a youth motivational task force, which is exactly what it sounds like.

He was dispatched to different schools in our area to talk to kids, to entertain them and inspire them with tales of his path to leadership.

He always began with jokes about how his journey to management started off with bossing around his little brothers and his little sister.

Then he shared his career journey being a hospital porter with no college aspirations whatsoever, going into the army, going to college, going to law school, becoming an attorney, a civic leader, my father, and so much more.

His point was that we all start somewhere and that the kids in the audience could build on what they had learned and experienced in their everyday lives to aspire to greatness and arrive in places that they'd never imagined.

They just had to embrace their strengths and keep walking through the doors that opened for them.

Anytime my teachers asked for career day speakers or any parent participation whatsoever, my dad would show up with these giant foam board displays and those well-worn motivational stories, and I just loved it.

Hung on every word.

He could deliver a memorable line in everyday life too.

He passed away more than a decade ago, but so many of his sayings still resonate with me to this day.

Whenever I had a question about something he would say, "When in doubt, look it up."

Now, of course, I do that with my phone, just pull it outta my pocket and scroll through, type some things in and search.

But then, he had a giant Webster's dictionary on a grand podium in his office, and I remember just flipping through what felt like hundreds and hundreds of pages through thousands and thousands of words to find what I was looking for.

I'll also never forget how when I was a high school student going out with my friends, he would always, always, always stop me at the front door and say, "What's your name?"

And I would say, "Maya Renee Payne", and he would say, "That's a good name.

Keep it that way."

And that's what I'd like to talk with you about today, just the incredible power of a parent's loving words in a child's ears.

Words like my dad's, words that teach, that motivate, that inspire, words that stick with you years down the road and have an impact.

But I'd like to talk more specifically about the crucial earliest words and verbal exchanges that kids are too young to remember.

The words we speak when they're babies, the words we speak when they're toddlers, but that build their vocabulary and really lay a foundation for reading and so much more.

When working on my book "Reading For Our Lives", I wanted to understand the root causes of reading success.

What did kids need in all of these weeks and months and years before kindergarten to really be prepared to take advantage of classroom instruction and really thrive as students and as readers?

What could we give them at home that really gave them the best shot at learning, growing, and graduating?

I set out to explore how kids learn to read, the role of parents in that process, what realistic expectations we can and cannot have of our schools.

I scoured academic literature, government reports, industry reports, state learning standards, any document I could get my hand on, and then I also picked up the phone and called researchers in all kinds of fields, education, psychology, neuroscience, and all these different areas to ask, "Based on this body of knowledge that you've studied and this extensive research that you've done, what are your specific practical recommendations for parents who want to set their kids up for success?"

My research and all of those discussions revealed a big surprise.

When it comes to raising readers, parents often think that our role is to read bedtime stories and sing the alphabet song and try to get kids to sound words out.

But that's really misunderstanding our assignment, understanding how early our work begins, how impactful it is, lifelong.

So long before our kids are able to talk to us in complete sentences or sing along with the nursery rhymes and other things, or play the games with us, we're sowing the seeds of language, of learning, and of literacy through our words, our gestures.

All of these small gifts that we're giving them, this language nutrition really is what nurtures brain development for them.

24-month-olds with larger oral vocabularies display greater reading and math achievement at kindergarten entry.

And kindergarten language scores are correlated the single best indicator, many say, of school achievement across all subjects in third and fifth grade.

And longitudinal research has found that kids who don't read proficiently by third grade are four times as likely to drop out of school altogether.

So those early words, those early exchanges are so important for laying that groundwork.

All of this was news to me sort of that that urgency of talking in a really responsive back and forth and language-rich way with my infant, and I think that every parent needs to have that information.

You need to have it before you're a parent.

You certainly need to have it when you're leaving the hospital and you need to have those messages repeated in pediatrician visits and school visits, and anywhere in the community that you may go.

I didn't, as a result of not having that knowledge, it meant that I didn't fully grasp my own power to support my child from day one to boost those emergent communication skills through words and responsiveness.

Health professionals rarely talk to new parents about this.

We get more information about how to install the car seat or breastfeeding and so many other important things, but oral language development, nurturing your child's brain, and thinking about their education from day one is just as critically important for their health outcomes and their educational prospects, their job prospects, even likelihood of incarceration.

So we need to have these conversations and start making that connection between early language and literacy much, much sooner.

Yet, in one study 94% of new moms said no health professional had ever talked to them about the power of oral language for nurturing their child's brain development.

Luckily, my daughter and many other kids end up getting the language nutrition that they need despite their parents being explicitly taught or told how to deliver it.

But all parents really need to have this information because it's so critically important.

So many of the reading and literacy issues that we see with elementary school kids, the roots of those challenges are really in speech and language issues that we need to dive into much earlier in their lives.

So as a simple way to distill all of that research, all of those conversations into something that busy parents with little ones can actually remember to do and implement, I came up with the acronym TALK.

The T is for take turns.

A is for ask questions.

L is for label and point.

And K is simply for keeping the conversation going.

Even pre-verbal infants benefit from us taking turns and really viewing their coos and babbles, their eye gaze, their gestures, any vocalizations they're making, they really benefit from us treating that as dialogue and conversation and going back and forth with them, asking questions.

It's just another way of reminding us to give kids a chance to think and attempt communication of their own.

Posing questions really just create space for them to vocalize, verbalize, and develop.

Labeling and pointing at the end of a long day with little kids, many of the parents here can attest, that sometimes you run outta things to say.

So it's always a good reminder to remember that there's always something in your environment that you can give language to, that you can give a label for, a word to describe it.

You can talk about the colors and textures and all the things that are in your environment and you can point to those things to bring the child's attention in line with yours.

And then you can keep the conversation going and really strive to have as many of those back and forth exchanges as you can.

One study found that 18 to 24-month-olds who had had the most of those really rich back and forth exchanges with caregivers, when they were in middle school, had larger vocabularies, better verbal expression skills, higher IQs.

So it is really important and in a simple, easy way with no materials, any parent can give their child words that matter so much.

So taking turns, asking questions, labeling and pointing, and keeping the conversation going never grows old.

These are strategies that can age with your child.

Sooner than you think, babies turn into toddlers who point and label on their own.

And then preschoolers start asking you questions you would never expect, and taking conversations in really unexpected directions.

Parents think our work is about raising children, but in many ways it's about growing ourselves.

It's about building our capacity to love, to nurture, to teach, to provide, and to advocate.

And it all starts with how we talk with our children.

How we use our voices.

And once we've learned to raise our voices for our own children's benefit, our work can also tip into a larger mission to ensure that every child has the early experiences they need to thrive.

For me, that looks like advocating for paid parental leave so parents are able to spend quality talk time with kids in the earliest weeks of their lives.

It looks like promoting better wages, training, and support for our early childcare workers so that they too can give kids the language nutrition kids need to grow.

It looks like contributing to organizations and initiatives that support parents and spread the messages that I've shared with you this evening.

Will you join me?

Let's talk.

Thank you.

(gentle music) - So it's not like we couldn't say that we weren't expecting the question.

We knew the question was coming.

So me and my two friends, Brian Burrow and Chris Tomlinson, three white dudes coming out with a book that's taking down the most cherished myth of Texas, and that's the real reason Texas split off from Mexico.

It wasn't because Jim Bowie, William Travis, and Davy Crockett wanted freedom from the evil tyrant Santa Anna.

It was because Santa Anna wanted to abolish slavery and the Texas settlers wanted to get rich growing cotton and to get rich, they needed to enslave the workforce.

Meanwhile, the myth of the creation of Texas and the Alamo, which we call this Heroic Anglo Narrative, has for years been taught in Texas in a way that made Latinos feel like the bad guys in their own state.

Oh, and by the way, pretty much everything you've been taught about the Alamo is wrong except for this one thing, it really is in San Antonio.

Other than that, it's pretty much completely made up.

There was no line in the sand.

They didn't bravely fight to the last man.

A lot of them tried to run away.

And Davy Crockett didn't go down swinging Old Betsy.

He actually was caught and executed a few hours later.

Even then, there were survivors.

It was just not any white male survivors, and they didn't knowingly sacrifice their lives to buy Sam Houston any time.

They didn't actually buy Sam Houston any time.

And they tried to surrender twice.

Our book was called "Forget the Alamo, the Rise and Fall of an American Myth."

We knew it would make a lot of white baby boomers angry, and we were okay with that.

I mean, look at this cover.

We've got graffiti that looks like blood on the Alamo.

We knew they were gonna be angry.

But we were worried about something else.

We were worried about this question that we knew was coming.

And on June 8th, 2021, the day the book came out, we got the question from a friend of mine named Andrea Valdez, and she was moderating a conversation with me and my co-authors about the book.

Here's what she said, "I want to zero in on something that you said about the Latino experience."

She began, "As a Latina who is Mexican-American born and raised in Texas, who has read some of the scholarship you write about in your book about the Tejano historians that had some different glosses on what you call the Heroic Anglo Myth.

I just have to ask, is this something you thought about?

You are three Anglo men," she pointed out very helpfully.

"Is this something that crossed your mind as writers?"

In other words, who did we think we were?

This is at a time when male writers were getting criticized, justifiably I might add, for writing women characters badly.

A white writer came in for an understandable amount of grief for writing a Latina protagonist and getting so many details wrong.

The whole book was trashed.

Where did three white dudes get off thinking that we could accurately write about slavery and the Latino experience of racism in Texas history?

There were bigger concerns, at least for me.

"Forget the Alamo", if you didn't know, is a historiography, which means it's a history of the history of the Alamo.

Basically, it's about how the heroic story of the Alamo has always been told through a white lens in which Bowie, Travis, and Crockett are up there on this, this Texas Mount Rushmore.

And Latinos are either cast as the bad guys or sidekicks or has beens.

How could we authentically tell this history of how Latinos would go on field trips to the Alamo as little children and feel instantly classified by their white friends as Mexicans?

How could I write about the state senator in San Antonio who represents the Alamo?

He's only ever called a Texan when he goes to visit his family in Mexico, it's in Texas that they call him a Mexican.

How could we tell these stories without doing what Anglos in Texas have been doing since the very beginning, which is telling the stories of Black and Latino Texans through that white lens?

I told Andrea something about how it's not up to people of color to convince white people that racism exists.

And that Black and Latino historians and politicians and academics and activists had been saying what is in our book for generations.

But Anglo Texans had either filtered them out or shouted them down or ignored them entirely.

"We wanted," I said, "to elevate their voices and get them a fair hearing."

Now that's all fine, and it's true, but it's not the answer I really wanted to give.

So if you'll indulge me, I'd like to give the answer I wish I'd given back in June of 2021.

"Okay, white people have been messing up the story of the Alamo since 1836.

White people need to fix it."

What I should have told her is that white audiences need to hear the truth about our racist history from white people because if it's a Black or a Latino writer's name on the cover of our book, then a white reader is being told then "you are wrong".

And if it's my name on the book, what the white reader hears is "we are wrong".

They're included in it.

We have been hurting people by telling our history wrong for a long time.

We need to fix it.

It's not the job of Black and Latino people to fix racism any more than it's the job of women to detoxify masculinity, or the job of the San Francisco 49ers to fix the Dallas Cowboys.

White people screwed this up.

White people need to fix it.

And that's the answer I wish I'd given that day.

And it's the answer I'm really grateful to you that I can give now.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) - Sometimes we speak of Black joy because joy is integral to our experience, joy that is not colorblind, but rather colored by our cultural and communal realities.

But sometimes we speak of Black death because that too is part of our experience.

Not simply death, but color coded death, which is to say that that death or abuse or pain has at its heart an inability to protect ourselves from the structural racism that has been baked into the life of our republic since its founding.

Black death at the hands of white authority is older than this country.

And police authority has strong ties to class and race.

Whether we are talking about the creation of police to protect industrial business interests and suppress workers' rights, the creation of forces to control the enslaved or the enlargement of forces to control the newly freed, the tragically awful aspects of policing go all the way back to their origins.

Fast forward 100 years and policing in America still is what it is, including more deaths than any other developed nation in the world.

1000 plus killings by officers per year.

Hundreds of millions paid out in settlements across the nation annually.

When it comes to making things better many work towards structural transformation through the accumulation of substantive changes to policies and procedures.

Changes in policing include body cams, civilian oversight, more mental health training and support for officers, better reporting systems.

But we aren't yet seeing dramatic impact from these reforms.

And even as we document the annual harm to civilians, there are tolls on officers as well, including PTSD and significant job stresses.

It is not fun or easy to calmly deal with a drunk person or people experiencing the worst moments of their lives before your eyes.

To round out these challenges facing officers as atrocities by police have been made plain, public faith in policing has eroded.

This creates a feedback loop where people who went into the profession with the vision of being respected or even seen as heroic are rather disliked by so many.

For everybody's sake reforms make sense.

Following review, the academy was paused and the police were directed to overhaul the academy.

They hired a former sworn officer who just happened to be a tenured professor of criminal justice and a feminist scholar for the rebuild.

The new academy is built on a community oriented, community connected, protect and serve approach to policing.

They even asked me a vocal advocate for reform, to teach the history of race and policing to cadets.

Ahead of time I met with and shared my course plans with the police chief, the entire senior leadership, and several officers.

I wanted them to know exactly what I would be teaching and to either co-sign or tell me to take a hike.

In the end, they had a vetted scholar teaching their cadets a history that happens to objectively include too many instances of police violence against civilians.

My experience has been well supported.

The cohorts are more diverse than in the past.

They've been engaged and responsive, and we've spoken candidly about the well-founded reasons why people might like or not like the police.

Not every cadet enjoys the course, but I have been pleased to see cadets talking, even arguing after class about the content.

I want them aware.

I want them thinking.

I want them developing an awareness that will serve them as they interact with others on the job.

Even with the reforms, there's pushback.

None is greater than that that comes from the police unions.

The police union is not the police, but they are the agent that works to ensure their wages, their benefits, and their work conditions.

That could be a good thing.

But unfortunately, their approach, by their words, the words of their trainers, their consultants, their leaders, is to quote, "Accumulate power at all costs.

To embrace conflict as a necessary means for accumulating power.

To accumulate wealth for their members, even when it is well beyond that of the rest of the public."

To understand that ethical behavior is secondary to achieving goals, to encourage members to undermine the health and reputation of their city, if it will give them leverage at the negotiating table.

And when negotiations for contracts are not going well, they are willing to quote, "burn it all down and live in the ashes."

By their words the police union stance is "us against the enemy", and it is framed as war.

Now due to their hard-nosed tactics officers in several cities, quiet as it's kept, make six figure incomes.

They have great benefits.

They are armed with a staggering array of weapons.

They have pounds of defensive gear to protect them in the streets, and they have layers of bureaucratic protection to keep them from being held accountable for any wrongdoing.

In this setting where they have everything except for a good reputation with the public, they now fight for more.

And to be clear, this is not the rank and file officer, though they may benefit from some aspects of the work.

This is the union.

The victims of such unethical tactics are not just citizens, it's also everyday officers.

Many are simply not interested in the politics, not interested in the drama.

They want to have peaceful interactions, positive interactions on patrol.

But union leadership stokes fears of outside influence, encourages us against them, encourages work slowdowns, blue flus, and even chastises officers who close out calls too quickly, lest it reduce service call backlogs that support their claims of being overworked and understaffed.

Police reform is hard enough and police union efforts to serve themselves at the expense of reform and city health undermines change.

At the end of the day I have friends and family who are sworn police officers.

I have friends who call for the abolition of police.

I also have friends who are not excited that I am a vocal advocate for higher wages, professionalism, and benefits of the 90 or so police officers serving in the entity I help lead, which is the Austin School District.

But the goal isn't popularity, it's dramatic measurable improvement.

This means well-conceived ongoing reforms leading to the hope of structural transformation.

And in this day, with so much death surrounding us, it means pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (bright music)