Ep. 49 "Creating Disparity: Racism vs. Racial Discrimination" - Guest Paul Lott (Part 2 of 2)

Good communities make good schools. And Paul Lott wants us to start taking that seriously. No matter a child's race or socio-economic status, if his/her community lacks integrity, so will that child’s education. Not only are communities failing students, but also the form of instruction is failing kids too. Every child needs healthy person-to-person interaction throughout their education. Instruction that leans too heavily on technology is failing students too.

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Transcript

ANNOUNCER: As you know, the topic of racism in America is a hot-button issue. Paul Lott, founder of the National Society for the Advancement of Black Americans, believes that the media enhances - quite plainly perhaps even exaggerates in some cases - racism. A careful look at how life in America has changed since the Civil Rights Act provides statistics that we are compelled to examine. Such an examination will enable us to thoughtfully educate our children on these sensitive topics.. Today’s conversation with The State of Education host, Melvin Adams, yields an interesting discussion covering racism vs. racial discrimination and how our society’s belief in systematic racism impacts education. 

ADAMS: While we’re on this topic of racism, just speak honestly with us today about the race issues in America. Okay, so. You’re black, I’m white. Ironically—most people don’t know this—but I was born and raised in East Africa. 

I mean, I was a clear minority there and until I came to the states to go to college, all my friends—everybody practically that I knew—was black. [00:30]

But, there is no denying that there are times, have been times in our history—and even in some communities today where racism is very real among various ethnic populations. But, is it improving and is race really the issue that enables opportunity or lack of it in today’s society? 

LOTT: I’m going to say something that, if you give me a second to think about it, [01:00] you’re going to realize that it’s actually true. 

ADAMS: Okay. 

LOTT: Racism is and has always been irrelevant. The only thing that matters is racial discrimination. Racism is a thought and a feeling and it doesn’t matter. It only matters if you do something that hurts the race that you dislike, so Martin Luther King didn’t care about racism. The feeling—the thought can be resolved when people work together and learn to respect each other. 

ADAMS: Exactly. 

LOTT: Right? [01:30] What the early Civil Rights movement focused on was racial discrimmination, specifically legal racial discrimmination. Right? What you did to enact that racism in a society. And we can fix that with laws.  

ADAMS: Yeah.

LOTT: So we can fix racial discrimmination, but we can’t fix racism. That’s the first delineation that I make. The second delineation I make is that what people often call “racism” [02:00] is not racism. And I’ll give you a term. Droctomania. Have you ever heard this word? 

ADAMS: No. 

LOTT: Droctomania was in the DSM, the book that reports all the mental illnesses. 

ADAMS: Okay. 

LOTT: And it is a condition whereby a slave wants to escape to freedom. 

ADAMS: Okay. 

LOTT: And there was a treatment prescribed. First you have to look at the symptoms… he was melancholy for no reason [02:30] at all, not happy with his work, and not talkative with his workmates. The prescription: the medical prescription was to, quote, “beat the devil out of him.”  Right? 

So, when we look in the past, the view that one race has with another is often governed by the needs of those in power. Right?

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: During the age of enlightenment, it was taught that from evolutionary [03:00] “science”, it was absolute that blacks could not achieve working equality with whites, and that by evolution we were predetermined to be slaves and we even had a mental diagnosis to fix the problem of a slave wanting to be free. Okay?

So this idea that there were a bunch of white people hating black people 150 years ago just isn’t true. They thought it was “settled science.” There was consensus in the science that said [03:30] blacks could not do x, y, and z. Okay? 

The question was often asked, because if it wasn’t true, you have plantations with 100 blacks and 4 whites, why don’t they just rebel? And what happened was there were three rebellions in the mid 1800s leading up to the civil war, and it was Nat Turner’s rebellion, and that was one of the true impetus’ of the Civil War. 

Whites in the North said, [04:00] “Oh, blacks really don’t want to be slaves. Because these rebellions are popping up all over the place.” People don’t realize that a person sitting 100, 1000 miles away from the slave only understand slavery through the lens of media. 

ADAMS: Yeah, yeah…

LOTT: Right? They have no direct experience. And there’s not enough interaction in their lives for them to care to have an opinion. So they tend to accept the opinion of the media of their day. There was never a time when the majority [04:30] of whites hated blacks; it just didn’t happen. 

And we have to remember when we look at the racism of the past, whites had opinions based on what they were taught, blacks had opinions based on what they were taught. It was not some emotional, or natural, or guttural thing where whites and blacks didn’t like each other. 

Fredrick Douglas—Abraham Lincoln was questioned. He wanted the freedom of slaves but he questioned if slaves could take care [05:00] of themselves and work towards equality in the economy. 

In those days, it was called The People’s House, and it was opened. Frederick Douglas made it a point to visit the president on a regular basis. And it was because the president saw the intellectual ability of Fredrick Douglas, that he finally became convinced. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: But it was time for the war. And that blacks could, given time, achieve social and economic equality. So that’s kind of the history. So if we go to today, right? [05:30] You have to ask yourself… an entire population was controlled back then, science is often political, right? Just like anything, we can set conditions to get the conclusions that we want. Right?

ADAMS: Yep, exactly. 

LOTT: Well, science is a process. Science doesn’t actually say anything. Science is a process, it’s a method, it always changes. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: So when I look at modern racism, I look at [06:00]…. We create it in the stories that we tell. We create it in the narratives that we embrace. Right? You put small children together, they don’t know about it, they don’t care. Right? 

ADAMS: That’s right. 

LOTT: But at some point in time, we’re learning these things, and we learn it… look at the Floyed situation. 

ADAMS: Right. 

LOTT: There’s a narrative about black America that is out there [06:30] that blacks believe, that almost everyone believes, I’m pretty sure you believe it, but 78% of blacks aren’t poor. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: Alright? 

ADAMS: That’s true. 

LOTT: So if 78% of blacks aren’t poor, but our narrative in the media is always about the inner cities, it’s always about the kids on the street, it’s always about the high unemployment rate among blacks—what they need to say is the high unemployment rate among blacks in urban areas, right? 

They talk about the [07:00] low graduation rates of blacks in the inner city. They don’t talk about the fact that the white people that live there also have low graduation rates. So the dialogue gives us a false impression, and we all spend our time talking about something that actually isn’t real. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: You know, I look at the COVID situation in New York. I came out of that...most people came out feeling that the COVID crisis was as severe as it was in New York City when we had those daily [07:30] briefings. That set the tone for the entire pandemic. 

And what we didn’t realize was that a full third of the cases across the country were clustered there in that part of the country and that most peoples were not affected as much. See what I’m saying? 

ADAMS: Sure. 

LOTT: It’s a narrative. 

ADAMS: Sure. 

LOTT: So the reality is that we live in a post-racial society. And the reason why we know we live in a post racial society is because the media has to keep telling us we’re not. [08:00]

If you go pre-1968, back there in the time of segregation etcetera, etcetera, you know, the media didn’t have to tell people that we lived in a racism society, it was in front of us. We woke up, we looked around, you know, I went to a lunch counter, couldn’t sit down, you could. 

No one had to sell us on it. We knew it was there. In fact, we knew it so well that in the 1960s we could write laws to abolish it! Well we wrote those laws and we abolished it. And we’ve made progress, [08:30] given those numbers I showed you before about poverty, right? That’s going down for every group over the last 50 years. 

So in order to maintain a system of control over our minds, they have to tell us that no, we live in systemic racism—and their version they have to use the boogeyman rule. When your kid wakes up and there’s a boogeyman in the closet and when he stares at the shadow, the shadow moves so he knows it’s alive, but the shadow jumps around, and when you turn the light on it’s gone? He’s like, [09:00] “but it’s really there.” So you have to turn the light off… 

The way we look at things… like CRT basically says the boogeyman is real, let’s form a science around boogeyman behavior. And that’s how they pull the wool over our eyes about racism. It’s the boogeyman. You can’t touch it, you can’t isolate it, you can’t work with it, you can’t eradicate it, you can’t do anything, but it’s there because we told you it’s there. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

ADAMS: You know, it’s interesting—great conversation here. Let’s go back just a little bit to you’re talking about the people who kind of established those thoughts around racism and so forth… It’s always the people who have some kind of vested interest who create—it’s kinda like whoever sets up the terms and establishes [00:30] the definition, they control the conversation. 

LOTT: Yep. 

ADAMS: And that’s exactly the situation, historically, in everything. Okay? I mean, we talked about the racial thing. Back in the time when that was the understanding, but the reality was, it was defined that way so that there would be control by a few people who wanted certain things. 

The reality is, that happens on a daily [01:00] basis in our culture, and it touches almost everything. Unfortunately the whole idea of racism is still just out there because, you know, it’s kinda this guilt thing and all these things… 

The reality is: people like you and me, and everybody else out there—the American people are very resilient, okay? And we’re all looking for something better, we’re all working [01:30] towards something better. Some people have more opportunities than others, and so it’s not about the people, it’s not about a race, it’s about—really—the society and opportunities that people are given. 

You said very directly,  a lot of times, people’s opportunities are taken away because they are given a substitute called [02:00] welfare, or whatever, where the government is just paying them to stay put and kinda whatever…but that is not really truly helping those people. 

You know, those people need to be helped to go to other places where there are jobs and really integrate into new communities where there’s opportunity. You gotta put people where there’s opportunity and they will flourish, it’s a natural thing. 

But if you keep them in their cage, you know, [02:30] it’s just a tragedy. And I think the lesson for me and for all of us is don’t believe everything you hear.  

LOTT: And you know, instinctively, I think Americans know the truth. You know, whenever a friend of mine comes with me and wants to talk about racism I say, “When was the last time you woke up in the morning thinking about how to keep a black person down?” and they always say, “Never done that.” I say, “Aha, that means that [03:00] you’re responding to racism someone told you about.” Right?

ADAMS: Yeah, exactly. 

LOTT: And I will guarantee that 99% of….every person that wakes up in the United States is never waking up thinking how they can keep someone down based upon their physical appearance. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: We just don’t function that way, and we have to ask ourselves where is this conversation coming from? 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: The South [03:30] never fought a pro-slavery war. They fought a states’-rights war, because no one would support pro-slavery. Right? 

ADAMS: Correct. 

LOTT: They had to change the issue, even though they were fighting for slavery—only 3-5% of people had slaves—so they framed the argument in a way that appealed to the general population, knowing full-well that they didn’t really care about sates’ rights. [04:00] But they were preserving their economic base. 

ADAMS: Yeah, yeah. 

LOTT: And we do the same thing today. We talk around these [things] using euphemisms to avoid the subject. You know, we use terms like “fairness” and “equity.” Right? But, you know as a parent, fairness doesn’t have her own meeting. 

ADAMS: Yeah, life isn’t fair. 

LOTT: Fairness means something else. And so, what I say to it is this: fairness and equity are not [04:30] natural constructs. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: [They] don’t exist in nature. In nature, the rule is survival of the fittest. If you want to have more equitable outcomes in a society, you must make citizens more fit to survive. But in the end, they have to do their surviving on their own. I can’t cut off the leg of a lion to make it fair for the deer. Right? 

ADAMS: Yeah, [05:00] exactly. 

LOTT: The deer just needs ro run faster. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: Same thing. I can’t talk about an outcome in society and expect it to just happen because of my feelings, right? If you look at all the equity and fairness programs, it’s about changing someone’s feelings about another group, but it doesn’t actually do anything. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: It doesn’t get the person a job… it doesn’t result in any improvement whatsoever. It’s a distraction. And I’ve asked the question [05:30]—I’m a data person—show me the study where changing a person’s understanding about race increased their employability and ability to take care of themselves. It don’t exist. 

ADAMS: Yep, yeah. Absolutely. Well here’s one thing we know—and anybody that thinks about it will know—there’s only one human race.

LOTT: Yep. 

ADAMS: One human race. [06:00] I mean, we all bleed the same, our overall DNA… there are little, minor changes that give us different pigments and different features and whatever—those are genetically passed down, But, you know, there’s one human race and when we are not pitted against each other, we flourish very well together. 

LOTT: All progress [06:30] has been made together. The Civil War was not fought blacks against whites. Civil War was fought whites and blacks together for the same outcome. The Civil Rights movement was not a black movement. There were as many white people in the crowd—and in many cases more than black people. 

So, in reality, in this country we’re always working together. Now I  don’t agree with the Black Lives Matter movement, or the organization. But if you took a camera in the crowd, [07:00] there are whites—usually more whites—and blacks in the crowd. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: So, in our natural function, we need one another. We don’t have any animosity towards each other over race. We work together, we go to our jobs together, we engage, we interact, it’s not an issue. 

We have to be told there’s a racial problem to see a racial problem. And I think some of it is that they see disparities [07:30]—they see disparities and proportions, the powerful does—and they put those out there and the common citizen says well why is that? 

And too often we don’t have an answer for them. But the answer’s there. Minorities are doing better and approaching parody with whites, it’s been going that way for 50 years. White progress in terms of poverty elimination has been stagnant. There are historical reasons, but we fixed those in 1968 [08:00] and the data proves it. 

ADAMS: So, at the Noah Webster Educational Foundation we promote education—education that’s based on core principles and best practices. We believe that every child should have the opportunity to learn and reach their full potential. 

So we look for solutions by focusing on the roles of instruction, parental engagement, government, faith and morality, and facilities—or maybe budget appropriations [00:30]—in education. Would you take a moment to give some of your own perspective in these areas? Let’s take a second and talk about the role of instruction itself.  

LOTT: The role of instruction itself… Learning is a human-to-human activity. And so technology can’t step between that, [01:00] right? 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: You learned from your parents by mimicking. Doctors learn to have a specialty by going into a residency and watching another doctor. Instruction, person-to-person, is the only and best way to pass knowledge on from human to human. 

It’s the foundation. Technology can’t replace that and technology should never get in the way of that. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: Right? 

ADAMS: Yep. Excellent. So really, instruction boils down to mentoring, [01:30] in a sense. 

LOTT: Yep. 

ADAMS: Yeah, okay. The role of parents...

LOTT: Parents set the morality, ethics, life habits, and overall thinking discipline of the child. The child will always be a reflection of the things that their parents give them in a healthy relationship. [02:00]

You have unhealthy relationships, and that’s fine, and those are very, very small in their exceptions. But in general, when families are stable, the children feel free to focus on other things. When families are unstable, children grow up with an insecurity and an inability to focus on their education. 

So parents are ground-zero. Parents are the primary educator—period. 

ADAMS: Yeah. Yep. Period. I agree. 

LOTT: Schools are just an extension [02:30] of the parent’s effort to educate their child. And I think too many parents abdicate that role to the school system, but we understand that in successful school systems parental involvement is the number one factor. Period! 

ADAMS: That’s right. 

LOTT: It’s not technical, it’s not buildings, it’s parental involvement. 

ADAMS: What about the role of government? 

LOTT: Okay, so the role of government in a … government is necessary in education because of the scale that we need to educate… that needs to go to every citizen. So in order to create some level of consistency across the nation, there’s a necessity for that government role. 

But that government role, [00:30] in my opinion, should focus on academic subject matter and delivering core reading, literacy, and math skills. That’s the role of government in terms of that top administration. 

I don’t think that the role of … well, part of that I think the government should not be involved in is using money to control behavior and policy. There’s a reason why we have local controls [01:00] of schools. And when money comes down from higher levels and is fed down, that money is used to pull away control from those local school district, and I can’t agree with that. 

ADAMS: Yeah, yeah. So let me ask you this question as it relates here. Let’s just be honest: education in the country is largely a monopoly, okay? When 8-9 kids out of 10 [01:30] are in government schools, and all of those schools are controlled fully by government, then it becomes a monopoly. 

Would you concur that, really, government...with every other—maybe with the exception of high tech and media and things right now—government’s role has historically been to keep [02:00] monopolies at bay and to create diversity and opportunity so that there’s competition and competition almost always lowers cost and improves quality… What do you think about that in the sense of education? 

LOTT: So education is in the same category as medicine. Whenever government money is interjected [02:30] into a core system, capitalist principles don’t work. Right?

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: Medical costs increase because money comes from somebody else. And it’s injecting into the system so the system orients itself to how to get the money from that 3rd party system, right? 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: It’s not actually from the people who consume the services; [03:00] it’s from a 3rd party source of money. Look at higher education, right? Higher education gets a lot of money from government. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: It doesn’t increase the quality of the colleges, it just makes more of them who angle to get the federal money, because the criteria to get federal money is not linked to outcomes of students. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: It’s linked to processes compliant with government programs and policies, [03:30] etcetera, etcetera. So it essentially amounts that government has an outside control over private institutions in higher education. Right?

Because they say let them do this, do this, once they’re dependent on the money, I’ll take the money if you don’t do it. Right? Government using money to control private education. So when we go to government-run schools and public education, [04:00] that’s the problem we’re going to face, right? 

If we said, let’s go full competition; we’re going to introduce vouchers, what’s going to happen over time is, A) zoning boards are going to make it difficult to create enough alternative education seats for most people to take advantage of vouchers, right? So government will make a rule to limit it, okay? Limit choice. 

The second thing is that for those schools that successfully [04:30] attract voucher money, [at] some point in time, the government—even if it’s a private school—can just come back and say teach this, teach this, do this, do that or we’re gonna take the vouchers away. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: Right? Because there’s always going to be a qualification program to eliminate fraud, and those rules are going to be put in place by government. What I espouse is this: I think that we have plenty of examples of charter schools [05:00] in this country that have done wonderful work. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: I would rather see a public system of independent schools…

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: ...and have choice within that foundation. 

ADAMS: A lot of people that are in the space and really looking at what the reality is agree with you. Because it’s still [05:30] taxpayer-based, it’s not government money, it’s taxpayer money—let’s redefine the language here. 

But when the boards are controlled by local people and local boards that are not connected to the government system but have direct managerial oversight and responsibility, therefore there is accountability. The difference between a [06:00] public charter school and a public school, period, is—in fact—accountability. 

A public charter school—if they’re not performing to set standards, get shut down. A public school that’s not performing to set standards gets more money. 

LOTT: Right. I have no problem with the public owning the facility, or the government owning facilities, or making these facilities and maintaining these facilities [06:30] and making them available for charter programs. 

I don’t really support vouchers to private institutions only because those private institutions will eventually lose their independence. And then have nowhere to go. 

ADAMS: Yeah. Exactly. 

LOTT: And I think that when we look to the education of the future, consolidating government control [07:00] of public schools means that there will never be true innovation. And I’ll give you an example of this. 

The government has been focused, since 2005, on using technology to teach, right? And somebody thinks it’s a brilliant idea to give a bunch of kids computers and they can learn better, somehow, than if they have a real teacher. Okay? 

The problem with that is that science doesn’t go there [07:30] and the educators don’t care. The movie industry did a study back in the day when CGI was first coming out, and they wanted to know if a CGI character could invoke the same level of involvement as a human character on film. 

So they hooked up some monitors on people and they had a person deliver some information, they had an AI with a face deliver information, they had a cartoon face deliver information, [08:00] and whenever a person—even recorded vs. live—whenever a person was on screen, more of the brain became active. 

Whenever there was an artificial entity on screen, less of the brain lit up. Right? And if you go to early childhood development studies, the human species has survived because we’re designed to look at another human face for our learning. 

So technology—the place where it should be [08:30] focused is in assessment, right? If the thing that takes a teacher’s time away from teaching is assessment, but assessment is critical to know how the student is doing with just a lesson plan. 

There’s nothing that could stop us from having an enormous database of every math problem possible with its answers in an AI to where a teacher could immediately get results from student assessments and then use those assessments to personalize learning [09:00] for those students to be able to do it. 

We have enough AI that teachers should not be spending their time after school grading papers. Now imagine the world where we did that; where we gave a teacher back more than half of their time because we used technology to put them and keep them in the classroom with the kids. 

ADAMS: Yeah, yeah. 

ADAMS: What about the role of faith and morality? 

LOTT: You cannot have a family without a common set of rules and beliefs. You cannot have a community unless it is a network of people with common rules and beliefs, right? Every other way it’s called anarchy. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: [00:30] The secular world wants us to believe that if we just give a child freedom and choices, that they will make the best choices for themselves and everything will be roses. The reality of it is that a child’s mind is not developed enough to critically think until they’re older. 

A man does not have [his] full capability until they’re 24; [01:00] a woman till they’re around 16-18. The brain develops from the back to the front. The back of the brain is a language sensor. If we start out learning to communicate with our parents, we don’t have critical thinking skills until well into adulthood. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: It is a ridiculous idea… so faith and morality gives us operating parameters—which gives us emotional safety—to where we are [01:30] free to pick up and learn those skills, right? If we don’t have faith—if we don’t use faith—if faith isn’t part of it, then it’s too confusing. And I’ll give you an example. 

When’s the last time you jumped off of a skyscraper? … No really? 

ADAMS: Not yet. 

LOTT: Why haven’t you? 

ADAMS: Because I have faith in something that I know is not going to be very good. [02:00]

LOTT: You have no proof, but you have faith in gravity, so what you believe controls what you will and will not do and you don’t need evidence beyond that. You don’t need to go, “I wonder if gravity is real for me?” and then dive off of a building, right? 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: So our faith and our values create boundaries so that we don’t have to make a decision about everything. So, true things, right? 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT A child needs to accept that. A child should not have to decide, [02:30] in every situation, whether or not truthfulness is a merit. Right? 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: I believe that all people… I believe the human race is designed to give love and receive love, and that all of the ills of society occur when there’s a love deficit. When either you fail to recognize [the] love you’re receiving, you don’t accept the love [03:00] that you’re receiving… I think children grow up naturally accepting and giving love. 

I think we get to a certain point in our life where it’s a bit more complicated than that. Because it’s like a dance, you know. You met your wife, I love you but you don’t tell them. I love you but they don’t tell you. You dance around, you feel a level of emotional comfort, you finally confess that you form a bond, you form a family. 

So faith is critical to our very existence, [03:30] and I’ve always said this: the atheist and the man of God are both men of faith. Neither one of them can absolutely prove their position.

ADAMS: Right. 

LOTT: The atheist will tell you that science is not a belief, it’s a fact. Well, last I checked, no one goes to a biology class, reads the book, hears about experiments, redoes those experiments, reads those books, and absolutely proves everything. [04:00]

Secular science is built on faith of someone who did an experiment, and you believe they actually did it, and you believe the outcomes because you read it. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: Literally, you’re having faith in someone’s witness that’s written down in a book. How’s that different from someone who’s religious? 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: Right? They’re having faith based on what someone witnessed and wrote down in a book. It’s the same thing. 

ADAMS: Great! Role of Facilities… 

LOTT: I think that facilities could do two things: you can use facilities to add character and identity to an education process, to create a sense of community. Right? But I think that we need to figure out what to do to make facilities [00:30] as functional and as less of an expensive part of the process as we possibly can. 

These days we’ll spend billions… I mean, look at the school budget! My hometown, Wilkesberry, did a school consolidation. They signed a paper for like 68 billion dollars for consolidating the high school. They’re going to pay this off over 10 years and they’re looking at tax revenue that comes in to how much they can pay and service debt and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah… [01:00]

They never considered—and the reason why the schools cost that much is because it’s public money and people make bigger decisions over money that’s not theirs… so that’s my issue with facilities. 

I think that schools should own their facilities. I don’t think they should be privatized so much, so that if we need to move… in my world, a system of [01:30] charter schools from building to location to building etcetera, etcetera. I think that’s efficient. I think in terms of safety regulations, the zoning, you know, we don’t need to get into that thing… 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: And so I think that they should have them but that they should be as minimalist as possible. 

ADAMS: Right, right. 

LOTT: They can serve the purpose. 

ADAMS: I often say it this way: facilities are important, but they don’t educate. [02:00]

LOTT: Yeah, they don’t do anything. Yeah. 

ADAMS: They’re a shell… so it’s a facility, it’s a housing, but the actual education is a people process. Alright, great! So our primary audience is parents, educators, and legislators; do you have any final thoughts you’d like to leave with them?

LOTT: [02:30] Final thoughts [are] that we are failing our children when we fail to teach our children that communities make good schools. And we have to start there. So Communities make good schools, it’s families that make good communities. 

The end-goal of this is that you can’t build a better school before you build a better [03:00] student. We need to add to our system the process of teaching our children how to learn. 

We need to add reading rigor into our system and we need to have preschool programs that are preschool programs for parents to learn what they need to do, be it video series’, be it live webinars, [03:30] be it required training before they enter kindergarten if the kid’s going to be in kindergarten… 

We need to start working with the parents and educate them on how to parent for student progress. And we need to look at community cohesion and family cohesion as the ground-zero for education. You never, ever lift up a school system before you lift up a family. 

ADAMS: Absolutely. 

LOTT: They have been throwing money at it and trying it for decades. It doesn’t work. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LOTT: The problem isn’t the school. [04:00] 

ADAMS: Wow, Paul, thank you so much for spending time with us, you’ve given us a lot to think about, I appreciate you taking time to share with us. 

LOTT: It was fun! 

ADAMS: Yeah! Well thank you so much!