Glenn E. Singleton is the Founder and CEO of Courageous Conversation, an agency that guides leadership development in education, government, corporation, law enforcement, and community organizing. Glenn unveils the personal encounters and revelations that have shaped his life's work in the form of his pivotal Courageous Conversation protocol. He outlines the four foundational agreements vital for maintaining engagement and managing discomfort as we confront the complex realities of race in our everyday conversations. The episode closes with his experiences of systemic change, from the corridors of school districts to the boardrooms of multinational corporations. Join us for this compelling narrative that not only informs but also empowers us to take part in the courageous conversations that are crucial for a thriving, diverse society.
Learn more about Glenn Singleton and Courageous Conversation®.
Glenn E. Singleton is the Founder and CEO of Courageous Conversation, an agency that guides leadership development in education, government, corporation, law enforcement, and community organizing. Glenn unveils the personal encounters and revelations that have shaped his life's work in the form of his pivotal Courageous Conversation protocol. He outlines the four foundational agreements vital for maintaining engagement and managing discomfort as we confront the complex realities of race in our everyday conversations. The episode closes with his experiences of systemic change, from the corridors of school districts to the boardrooms of multinational corporations. Join us for this compelling narrative that not only informs but also empowers us to take part in the courageous conversations that are crucial for a thriving, diverse society.
Learn more about Glenn Singleton and Courageous Conversation®.
This notion of woke being appropriated right as a problem okay, as it relates to taking a look at what's going on in society and paying attention to when harm is on the way, so it's the perfect word for people who don't want the society to advance.
Speaker 2:In this episode, I was privileged and honored to have a conversation with Mr Glenn Singleton. Glenn is the founder and CEO of Courageous Conversation, an agency that guides leadership development in education, government corporations, law enforcement and community organizing. Glenn is the award-winning author of Courageous Conversations About Race, a field guide for achieving equity in schools, and the follow-up, more Courageous Conversations About Race. He has consulted with executives at companies including Amazon, google, procter and Gamble, as well as with agencies such as the New York Department of Education, the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and much, much more. Mr Singleton has devoted over 30 years of his life to this work and in our conversation we touched on a wide range of topics and ideas from his own personal narrative how he got into the work, what he relies on for advice and guidance.
Speaker 2:I hope that you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and are as inspired by Mr Singleton's work as I am. Welcome to the Superintendent's Hangout, where we discuss topics in education, charter schools, life in general, and not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, dr Sharedda. Come on in and hang out. Welcome, mr Singleton. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on today and to have a conversation.
Speaker 1:It's my pleasure. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2:I thought we could start where I start with all the folks who we have conversations with on this podcast, which is with personal narrative. History matters. I know in your work you talk about everything's based in the personal narrative and where we come from. So if you could share with us your own personal narrative and how that led to initiating the courageous conversation, protocol and approach, et cetera.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate you starting there, david, not only because it is the way in which we fashioned this courageous conversation in schools and institutions around the world, but I also believe that everything takes shape from there. So it won't make sense 45 minutes from now, when we're into the conversations of school change and things like that, if the listeners don't understand that my own education experience is a primary driver of the work that I do right now. I grew up in Baltimore. A quick study of Baltimore indicates that it's one of the few cities where I'm more likely to see people who look like me African American people, very specifically in the day-to-day movements about my life. So, all the way through sixth grade, every teacher with the exception of one because of an interesting experiment in busing that happened in Baltimore City but all of my teachers, all of the principals, all of the authorities in my life, the clergy, the people who ran the rec center all of those people looked like me. They were a part of my community as African American people in the United States.
Speaker 1:In fifth grade, because of the struggles of moving white children into predominantly black schools in Baltimore, baltimore is one of these few what we were affectionately known as chocolate cities. It's a city disproportionately black close to 70% of the people in the city were black and so I grew up with a very different perspective on what the world looked like, because the world was my community and the only thing that would interrupt that was TV, where I would see these different images of people who were not black, who were going about their lives as the Partridge family and the Brady Bunch and all of those folks, a little house on the prairie I could just name hundreds of shows that really showed an image that didn't reflect what I was growing up around. And so this one teacher who comes in in fifth grade her name is Fran Finnegan, and because they couldn't mix the children, they decided to mix the teachers, and so we got in this fifth grade year we had a good number of white teachers that came to Hilton Elementary School and unfortunately, for so many reasons that I understand better now, all of those teachers, with the exception of the two teachers that I experienced, mrs Finnegan and Mrs Schwartz, were not able to stay. They didn't have a very long tenure at parks, I mean at Hilton Elementary School.
Speaker 1:And so that was my first real engagement with race up close, because when you are amongst people who share your own racial identity, your own racial experience and all of those things, race doesn't really take on a big conscious dynamic, unlike when I went to seventh grade and I tested into the private school system in Baltimore and winded up at a progressive institution, park school that was opened in 1912 and was really open to students who were not allowed to attend other private schools in Baltimore. So this population was predominantly Jewish, and so I went from seventh grade through 12th grade in a school system where in most cases in the classroom I was the only black student and sometimes I would go a whole day without seeing another black student. We had no teachers of color, so it was really a contrasting experience and that's how I started to learn about race. I didn't understand race or racism until seventh grade and therefore that personal experience is what brought me into this understanding.
Speaker 1:Later, through University of Pennsylvania, I was already used to being one of the few, if not the only, in the class. My first career in advertising in New York same thing. So my life has really been a life of this contrast, of a fundamental foundation in my schooling, in an all black experience, which I credit for learning to read and developing a curiosity for learning and so forth, and then going into these advanced levels through graduate school at Stanford, where I was one of three black students in the entire program, the master's program that I was in.
Speaker 2:So thank you for sharing that because, as you say, it really all does. Everything starts with our personal story. I think if we start too late in it, we miss the kernel, the central element. So you went to college and grad school, and at what point? And then you go into the advertising world, but at what point do you start to segue into the work that you do today with nonprofit and for-profit entities all around the US and also internationally? Like, what's that pivot point? Maybe it wasn't just one, it was multiple that brought you into the work that you're doing.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think I'm called into this work very early in life. I talk about it in courageous conversations about race in the first edition I wrote in 2005,. That passion is a key to how we're driven about our personal and professional pursuits in life. And so because the schooling experience and onto the professional experience in advertising, I became director of admission at the University of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1:As I left advertising the very first school I visited in Wellesley, massachusetts, they called back to the university to really test to see if I was truly the representative, because I just didn't have the image that they would expect would come from the Ivy League to make a decision about who got to attend the University of Pennsylvania from Wellesley High School. And unfortunately this wasn't a standalone experience. I was often challenged in terms of the authority. So these incidences continue to occur throughout my life. I remember being back at the university and I was a communications major and really fascinated by media and the impact of media on black children, specifically the impact of media on me on Saturday mornings when I would watch all of that TV and there were these very typical commercials of heavily sugared cereals and things like that, and so I was fascinated by how advertising could influence and specifically, if it could influence you towards these unhealthy outcomes. What might it do if we used advertising to influence towards healthier outcomes? And so that kind of sat in the back of my head even though I was admissions director.
Speaker 1:When I got to Stanford I had actually thought that I was stepping out of admissions for a minute to step back into higher education, and my goal, my dream, was to be on a university campus as a college president at some point.
Speaker 1:I did do my teaching at the university level because I do believe that that's the way you believe, that that's a fascinating group of people to work with at a really important point in time in our lives.
Speaker 1:But I really needed to get more into this racial disparity aspect and because race was such a profound influencing factor in my life and because I was growing to see a racial disparity as an admissions director and as a university professor who was coming into the classes what kind of preparation they had, as I was noticing and remembering about the impact of racially charged messaging and advertising and being in an advertising agency where very few people had the experience that I had. So how was that actually going to be a part of the understanding of how we improve advertising or how we improve higher education. And so, rather than being in higher education or advertising media, I decided in 1992 that I was just going to strike out into the world and try to have a conversation about this impact of race on achievement, on outcomes and things like that, and that's when I formed the company.
Speaker 2:So if you could, for the benefit of our listeners, kind of talk through the courageous conversation protocol and the central elements, the four agreements, the conditions under which this really vital work. I kind of see it as the laying, the Cultivating the field, so to speak, to allow them, the seeds of this time's challenging work to take place. Could you lay that out for our listeners?
Speaker 1:Sure, sure. So you know, I was in these classes from seventh grade on through graduate school, in these work experiences, be it advertising, be it admission, be it teaching, educational leadership, and one could look and say, well, the subject matter was, you know, you're in a calculus class or an economics class or whatever, but always for me it seemed that I was not only in that subject matter course, but a skill and a capacity that I was being tested on was my ability to navigate interracially, particularly in conversation, towards an outcome, and so what I paid attention to was why it was, I believe, that I was able to get from point A to point B, to point Z, when so many who shared my experience were not, and many of these people, it seemed, were a lot smarter than me in the subject matter. Okay, so there were better mathematicians or scientists or in foreign language or whatever. But being able to engage in a multi-racial experience, a study group, in a meeting of colleagues in a department, you know, all of those kinds of interactions were where I was seeing many people who looked like me specifically fall apart, and I was also seeing, when I wasn't exercising my best, that white people in the conversation would also suffer a kind of stress that led to us not getting at the whatever the goal or the outcome was that we were trying to achieve. And so I believe that the focus on how to have the conversation became as important as whatever it was that we were trying to achieve.
Speaker 1:And that's when I developed courageous conversation and recognizing that it needed to be a protocol for talking about race that was as simple as possible, that was as inclusive as possible, right, and had a action driven, real sort of activism component to it. And so the first thing was that I recognize that how we show up is half of the game here, right, and half of our success, and so showing up with a higher level of racial consciousness about race in our own lives is the best thing that you can do, because you can always learn about what's going on in the surrounding or the new context, or I can learn, david, from you about how race played out in your life by asking you some questions that helped me to understand race in my life, right. So what were some of these pivotal moments? What was the first time that you realized that race mattered? When did you discover of late that race is still a operating factor that we're not post-racial or we haven't transcended race, and that became an exercise called the racial autobiography right, where I'm having people do what schooling required that I do because I was so new to the environment. People didn't understand me, they didn't understand the experiences that I had had leading up to getting to an all white school right. So I often see that in the workplace as well, when we hire in new folks who don't have a tradition, for example in advertising.
Speaker 1:These people of color come into an environment where their experiences are virtually unknown, and so it's important for people to take some time and pay attention to what those experiences are. And as we talk about those milestones, what is your racial timeline, if you will, the events that dot your life that had heavy racial meaning, and whether you took the time to make sense of them or not. Part of our work is to give you that time, give you that permission and give you some support. So the compass allows you to put the understanding of the moment into four different parts of your being. You're thinking, you're feeling, you're acting and you're believing right, and so by doing that, I just take a circumstance, like you know, the insurrection that happened right down the block here in Washington DC and I checked myself to see what feelings are coming up for you, glenn, what beliefs have surfaced about what's going on here, what are your thoughts? Thoughts are like the data that you're capturing, the other experiences from the past that you're connecting it to, and what do you want to? How do you want to act on this? Do you want to go down and be a part of the protest? Do you want to watch it on TV? Do you want to post something on social media? That's the compass right, and teaching people to explore all four of those dimensions as a part of being in the conversation. That's the work that we do in courageous conversation.
Speaker 1:The agreements are the structure of the conversation, the parameters, if you will. So you know, agreeing that we're going to stay engaged in the conversation, regardless of how much stress or turmoil it causes. For a second agreement would be that we're going to experience discomfort, because race is that discomforting subject. It has so much taboo connected to it, so much unknown, such a history of problems that oftentimes people are, you know, they just get stressed out even thinking about having a conversation about race. And so if we normalize the fact that we get uncomfortable with it, and we'll stay in that discomfort together. We'll stay engaged, and what we're going to share, what I'm going to share with you, david, over this time, is just my racial truth, recognizing that that truth might not be shared by you. And truths can coexist. Multiple truths can coexist. We look over to the Middle East right now, you know, and it can be true that there is a genocide going on and it can be true that people of Israel are fearful of another Holocaust situation occurring. Those two truths can sit together right, and as long as we don't have to make one right, one wrong, then we can continue to progress right. So it can be true that teachers come to school and work very hard every day to deliver for their students and it can be true that, unconsciously, they perpetuate racism. Right. And so those two truths we get to work on both of those, we get to reward for all of the wonderful things that are happening and we get to hold a mirror to and insist on transformation in the areas where we need to improve.
Speaker 1:The final part of the protocol, the compass, the agreements, then the conditions, and the conditions are like the roadmap through the conversation, so it gives us those waypoints that we want. The first part of it, the first tier, which is called engaging the conversation, is about the personal narrative and isolating race in the personal narrative, not making race more important than anything else, but making sure that we don't lose sight of race as we've been in sort of socialized to in our society. The second tier of the conversation is about the multiple perspectives, and that's the example that I just gave about, you know, the Middle East or what can be happening in a school where two truths can walk together. We don't have to pick one over the other. And then the third tier. So the first tier is engaging, the second tier is sustaining through the multiple perspectives. The third tier is deepening the conversation and therefore race is no longer simply a conversation of one's skin color or some physical traits, but race is a conversation about power and the assignment of power, in this case based on skin color.
Speaker 2:One of the things I think that speaks to me most powerfully is, as you say, the ability for multiple truths to coexist.
Speaker 2:That's something that I feel is not readily available societally, on social media, politically, where everything is zero-sum game and so polarized that and in a minute I'm going to ask you about DEI and about DEI and about you know these movements to ban and embrace and there's not that opening to have multiple perspectives at the same time. That's something that really speaks to me about this protocol and I appreciate that. And the other thing is the expectation and the acceptance of non-closure. I think too often we societally, and maybe in education and in business and whatever arena we're in, we think we're going to engage a facilitator and we're going to you know, contract and set aside time and work on something, and then that project's going to come to some sort of a conclusion and a checkmark. And I think in your writing and your speaking, and you're really clear about the fact that this is a journey piece, it's not, oh, we're here and there's closure. These are lives and there's not closure.
Speaker 1:Right, right, yeah, you got a few pieces in this, and all of those are so important. The first part of it. You know, it's fascinating to me, david, that these young white men hundreds of years ago, I believe got it right and came up with some values that are just the right values, these understandings of democracy. You know, when you get statements like, you know, one Nation and Eplurbus Unum, and things like that, it is this reality that these young men recognize the importance of coming together, the importance of solidarity, the importance of recognizing that this is one human experience that we're having. We're all a part of the same species. Right, there is no distinction here. And they were able to make that statement because the kind of rich diversity that we experienced today was not present in their purview, right, and so we wanted to, rather than change the ideals that they professed, have those ideals apply to a society that they never envisioned. And here we are, okay.
Speaker 1:And so what I'm noticing over the past, you know, really, since I would say around 2009, 10, 11, the society has really began to put a premium on division and conflict, and it seems that people have built skills and capacities and desires to be in conflict and therefore, if there is the possibility of not being in conflict, it makes folks radically uncomfortable. I'm not about conflict, okay. I am about solidarity, and so I believe at the heart of this solidarity is recognizing that oftentimes two truths that seem like they're way different can sit together and can be different truths, but people can get along with them, right. And so I'm trying to help people to find the place where we come together, right, and I'm trying to use the principles that folks have really embraced over time, these principles of democracy, okay, this ability for people to speak what is true for them and to evidence that truth in real experiences, to really be careful and caring about their fellow human being, right, and the welfare and the feelings of that person. Because when that happens, when we leave this particular conversation and we both feel good about it, we get to go out and be more productive in the society and give more good to the society.
Speaker 1:You're going to have a meeting after, I'm going to have a meeting after, and if this goes well, then we get to carry that good feeling, that warmth, into the next meeting and it becomes something generative in that way, versus if we're in conflict, right, and so teaching people how to live in conversation, searching for understanding that part that I can connect to you on right, and building from that, not hiding the difference, because the beauty of humanity is the diverse perspective, the diverse walks of life, all of those things that make it interesting. That's why we don't eat the same food every single night, we don't listen to the same song over and over again, we don't wear the exact same color every single day, right? And so there's a hunger for that diversity. Diversity is synonymous with humanity and therefore, when you get to now, a society that has become anti-diversity, anti-ability for people to actually give their all by being supported as to the degree that the society can support us, which means that people who have way too much to do all they can can actually not have so much so that other people can have more to do better, right?
Speaker 1:So at the marketplace, then we've got more people coming with more ideas, which then allows the society to blossom and bloom, and then this inclusion piece, right? So a society that becomes anti-diversity, anti-equity, anti-inclusion. At the end of that game, nobody is there, right? And so you just sort of play it out and you realize that, in an exclusive way, eventually you have very few to none versus in an inclusive way. You have more and I don't know why that does that now, but it's pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 2:It's pretty, yeah, and I'm not sure what triggered it, but AI must be liking that.
Speaker 1:It agrees with me. Ai is on the side of DEI. This idea of woke, again, this is a fascinating conversation, because woke has always been a sort of term in the black community. Stay woke was a safety term. It was a term to pay attention when harm was around the corner right. And so this notion of woke being appropriated as a problem, as it relates to taking a look at what's going on in society and paying attention to when harm is on the way. So it's the perfect word for people who don't want the society to advance.
Speaker 2:We could go a whole bunch of different directions from there. Something that struck me in your writing, and if you could elaborate on this, is the difference between non-racist and anti-racist, what the differences are and why you differentiate there.
Speaker 1:With the exception of a few, most people are going to espouse that they are non-racist and it goes by I'm not racist. That's the non-racist standpoint. You want a society of people who, on the conscious level, do what they can to not perpetuate racism? Okay, but there's a kind of passivity there, right? Because in the frame where I'm stepping in and I'm pledging to be non-racist, if the frame already has racism about, okay, for one individual or a collective of individuals to simply be non-racist, it just means that we don't accelerate, we don't escalate the racism that is a part of the system already that we have inherited from generations coming forward, okay. So it requires that we do more than we're non-racist, and anti-racist means that we actually address the racism that's in place, and the first step of anti-racism is that we don't perpetuate racism further, right, so I've got to pay attention to how it is that I would perpetuate racism. Okay, in conscious and unconscious ways, in ways that I am active and passive, right. But I've also got to take on the challenge of the racism that in the society that I've already inherited. And it means, too, that I've got to help other people who are not on their peas and queues about racism to be aware of how they are playing into the system and how they might change it.
Speaker 1:I love how Beverly Tatum described it in one of my favorite books that I taught for a long time while the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria, and she wrote it as a description of like a moving sidewalk. Okay, and so if the moving sidewalk is already in an experience of racism and you step on that moving sidewalk and you do nothing, it's going to take you gradually into racism, further into racism. But if you are anti-racist, what you're actually doing first is you turn yourself around because you're not going to go in the direction of racism. So as soon as you do that now I'm embellishing what Beverly Tatum wrote. Okay. But as soon as I turn around on a moving sidewalk, I'm facing people and that's the first bit of discomfort. So I'm uncomfortable because I'm going backwards now and people are uncomfortable because they're not used to being faced. All right, it even becomes more of an impact if I were to begin walking away from racism.
Speaker 1:So, walking the opposite direction of the moving sidewalk, I'm going to bump into people, and the first people I bump into are the people who are closest to me. Usually those are friends and family, right. And so you've got to have those conversations inside your friends and family because you want them walking with you too. Because as we walk into strangers, as we walk into, you know, big organizations and so forth, whole schools and districts, you're going to want to have more than just you trying to take on all that's there, right. And so this whole friends, family, colleagues that have now turned around we refuse to just be sort of casually moved into racism. As non-racist people, we're going to be anti-racist and we're going to get off this moving sidewalk.
Speaker 2:So is that kind of the general philosophy or approach that you use in your work when you because USA Today recently identified four or five of the top entities in the United States doing this work and congratulations to you and your team, courageous conversations on that list of you know really recognized for your excellence in this area? But you're working with small entities and also huge ones, right, you have districts, school districts of thousands of employees and tens of thousands of students. Where's the entry point for this work to really be able to facilitate systemic change, right? I mean, you and your team can only do so much, and so how does that really? I'm just fascinated by this kind of idea, of ideas kind of percolating throughout an organization, and it's very compelling. As you talk about that moving sidewalk, I'm envisioning 5,000 people moving this way unconsciously and a few turning around. And at what point does the tipping point come? Right, where enough people have turned around.
Speaker 1:Well, superintendent, first of all, I'm thanking you for calling out the recognition in the USA Today, and that was unexpected, but I think it's also illustrative right when in the field we have yet to be recognized by all the others that are part of this work. When they saw this same, you know, number one spot, courageous conversation in my name, and I think that that's part of a problem. We don't advocate enough for what we believe in, whereas the opposition, the anti-DEI folks, seized on it right away and used it as a marker. Right, go at these guys. Right, these are the ones. If you knock them off, then you know everybody else is going to kind of be affected by it.
Speaker 1:But to your question, and school districts are, you know, have been the first part of our work and will always be the center of our work, because we're trying to grow up a new society, but this includes our multinational corporations that we work with. School systems like New York City Department of Education, you know this is 1.1 million children, right? So these are vast systems, as you've said, and it's important first and foremost that we meet each system where they are Okay, and this is also the personal philosophy when I sit down with a person, a friend or colleague or client, and I'm trying to assess where you are because I want to start there, okay, and the growth and the movement is not about some absolute endpoint. It's about how much you can grow from where you are, how much can that system expand and move from where they are. So we've got to get a realistic point of where we start, okay, and that assessment's important. The next part of it is really some discussion and decisions about where you are and where you can be. Okay, and this is about the resources of a system. This is about the passion of the educators, this is about the time allocated for practice and it's about the spirit of persistence, what we're going to hold on to and what we're going to keep doing regardless, because we're going to get push back.
Speaker 1:A lot of folks are going to be resistant because they don't understand. Resistant because they feel that it's too hard, resistant because they're ideologically opposed. So resistance is calculated into this work that we're doing, otherwise it would have been done Right. And so, as we meet you where you are and we begin this process of having each person personalize the issue, before I figure out what you're going to do in your classroom, or what you're going to do as a superintendent, or what that person's going to do as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I am actually going to ask you what are you going to do with your life? Because if you're not willing to do it with your family and with your friends, then you're not going to come in and do it at work, right. And if you even do it at work, just because this time has been cordoned off for professional learning and development, it's only going to go that far, and then, as soon as we wrap up the training as it is, that's going to wrap up the experience, and so we've got to build a capacity for people to actually operate in a new way of being, and that new way of being is ultimately professional, but it's also first personal, right, and this is always personal first.
Speaker 1:We also want to build the capacity in the system. So, going in with the idea that we're going to count our days down until we're not here, okay, we're not trying to move in and stay with you forever, okay, if that's necessary, then we've got to think about the structure and think about who needs to be in the system that carries this work forward, and we scale that person up a whole lot, but we also want to build the capacity of everyday folks to be able to hold protocol and staff meetings, to be able to take it into the department meetings on the corporate side, to hold the employee resource groups in a way of positive and productive engagement, and so that's building a capacity and certifying people to actually be practitioners and facilitators of courageous conversation Right, and we do that Right. So part of the success that we've experienced is because, a we have a belief that it's about the individual and the person first, okay To then it's systemic, so it's got to get from the personal through the professional to the organizational, and it's policies, it's practices as well as programs that all need to come under the microscope to determine, through a racial equity lens in our case, if this is the way we really think we should be situated and organized right now, and so I believe that that's been it. Persistence for us has been it. So we've been attacked along the way by, you know, so many different movements. We celebrate the small victories along the way.
Speaker 1:We hold up our partners, the clients that are doing the great work. We always make it about their work versus what we're doing with them and we use as many mechanisms as possible to bring the audiences together. So oftentimes, school systems are operating in a vacuum around the challenge of achieving equity, whereas the corporation sitting right in the community and the government system right there in the hospital system. They all have the same challenges. They have the racial disparity as well.
Speaker 1:Why aren't we working together and that's the kind of work that we've been about bringing all of those forces together, even if for one time at our national summit, so that they can see the work that's happening in advertising? We have our advertisers create assets that schools use. If you look at America erased right now, go to YouTube and just look up America erased and you'll see the video that the film that was created from our advertising partner. Since 2014, we've been working with Wyden and Kennedy advertising. They do all of the amazing work for Nike. We supported their work in the Colin Kaepernick ad for Nike in the 30th year of Just Do it. We work with the agency that just ran the remarkable ad over or created the remarkable ad for the NFL that was filmed over in Ghana, which is my second home, and so these are ways that we start to bring together people, because we're so much stronger and it's so much more exciting when we're working in community.
Speaker 2:And you've also worked extensively internationally, and so that was intriguing to me too. Why New Zealand? And then what are some of the lessons that have been learned going both ways?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you asked a question upfront, which was when did I make a decision to start doing this work? And it's never been that way. I am a firm believer that there are forces bigger than us, and so in some days I want to go bigger than the force that I think about. But I just use the ancestral force, the wisdom of my ancestors, and sometimes I hear my grandmother talking to me and helping me to make decisions along the way. And it's not only just family in my ancestral council, it's people like my Phi Beta Sigma fraternity brother, john Lewis, you know, or Kwame Nkrumah, the liberating president of Ghana, right? And these folks are telling me yeah, this sounds good. No, this is not what you want to do, right.
Speaker 1:And so I find myself in Australia, because a young guy over there was running the DEI programming at the University of Western Australia and he was using courageous conversation. And it came up online and one of my staff members saw it and you know, there's one school of thought that says you police all of this stuff and it's proprietary and you give them a cease and desist and all of that. I've never been that way, because the idea is that more people would be using courageous conversation, not fewer. But I am one who wants to steward integrity around it and I want it to be done with fidelity. So I call up Malcolm and I said Malcolm, I noticed that you know I'm Glenn Singleton and I'm the creator of courageous conversation. I know that you're using it over there. Congratulations, I'm excited, tell me about it. He tells me all about it and I'm like, oh okay, well, you know we should talk because there's some ways that I think you can improve that delivery, and there are a couple of things that I think that you got a little bit shaky here. He says, well, why don't you come over for a conference that we're doing? I'll have you as a keynoter, and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:So I wound up in Perth, and in Perth it's for all of the higher ed people in all of Australia and New Zealand. So there's a New Zealand team there from Unitech, a technology university, and they were just the most intriguing people. And the question that they asked was you know, how do indigenous people in the United States respond to courageous conversation? I didn't have an answer and I said well, I can do two things now. I can go back to the United States and build that audience of American Indian indigenous folks and or I can come to New Zealand and we can start it there with the Maori people. We'll just make that the first place and we'll figure it out. That's how we did it, and so we wound it up in New Zealand.
Speaker 1:First time landing, I was brought to the Marae, which is the house I was engaged in a poufiri it's called which is the welcome to country, and it shattered me. I felt welcomed in New Zealand Alteroa in a way that I had never felt welcomed in the United States and from that moment on I just felt a connection, a kinship. So we continued working. To this day, we're working in Australia and New Zealand.
Speaker 1:Some of our most important work in the healthcare space is in Northeastern Australia, up in Brisbane and areas like that, queensland and we've worked with some government branches in New Zealand the department which is equivalent to the Department of Education in the United States, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Business so we've been quite busy down there. So I decided to open an office in 2017, I believe is when we started and a foundation there as well. So the organization in New Zealand and the South Pacific models what we have in North America. North America satisfies Europe and Canada and Africa and the South Pacific handles New Zealand and Australia. Looking to explore and move out a bit more, maybe in the Middle East, because the director down there is a gentleman of Lebanese descent.
Speaker 2:So you've got multiple time zones, to say the least, to your meetings.
Speaker 1:Trying to have a staff meeting is like the most impossible thing in the world.
Speaker 2:I am very conscious of your time and I could go on and on with questions, some of which have popped up for me in the course of this.
Speaker 2:I did wanna ask you about something that I noticed in some of your writing and has been very timely for me. As we talk about student chronic absenteeism and the gaps, we actually don't tend to talk about the gaps between different groups of students in California. We just talk about chronic absenteeism. And then something that you wrote about I think you wrote or spoke about this socioeconomic piece, where we often key on the socioeconomic levels and we don't talk about the social or the socio, which I think if and I don't wanna misquote you, but I think that was the connection to race I mean, if you look at chronic absenteeism rates, I can tell you at Albert Einstein academies in our schools, it's an exact reflection of the same racial achievement gaps that we have.
Speaker 2:So I don't really know what my question is. Maybe it's just a gratitude that you brought that up and it's something I'm reflecting on. But terminology matters, and that's one of the things that I wrestle with as a leader that I think I need to get better at is actually calling out what the terms mean when we talk about them, because we tend to just skim over the socio part. That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's actually what my introduction, because my work started as we had in our pre-call David. I am so grateful to San Diego for embracing the work as the initial space, and this work started at the San Diego County Office of Education with Dr Elena Hershowitz who was running the California School Leadership Academy at the time. We went into Sweetwater and Chula Vista and Lemon Grove and La Mesa, spring Valley and so all the way up to the north San D'Aguido and Pauway and Oceanside. So I've worked in all of these districts and I would say that the first point always and this has to do with that second tier of the protocol two truths, okay, two things can be right at the same time. You can have economic disparity and racial disparity, and if you choose to only look at one, it is a values decision, right, and that decision is typically based in the comfort and the insight, the intelligence of the person who's making the choice. And so if we go to school and we have all of these courses in economics and we're taught from day one that economic theory is what will help us to understand the ways of equalizing society, okay, because those economists weren't studying race in and of themselves, they weren't looking at the fact that there was no racial diversity in people who were making the decisions about policy, and so when I look at that same data, I see that poor kids are outperformed by middle income and wealthy kids. And I was using SAT data because that data was so familiar to me, because I was an admissions director, so that's the data that I used all the time, but I also took the SAT. So I'm in a school now where many white children have higher economic means and are taking test prep courses and things like that that are unknown to me. But I also am in a school where there's multi-generation onto college. So there's all kinds of legacy factors and things like that that are built in.
Speaker 1:These are not economic variables anymore, these are social variables when, once parents chose to go to school could be based on how much they had to pay for school, but they could have gotten scholarships and financial aid. So it could be based on also what community they wanted to be in. Did they want to be in a liberal arts school or a larger state school? Those are social factors, and so these social factors matter. And a social factor is race. Race, in fact, is socially constructed, which means it's made up, so it is a key social factor.
Speaker 1:And when I looked at that same data, what I was struck by and this was matching my practice. Now I'm in school districts like Chapel Hill and Berkeley and Ann Arbor and Amherst. These are high performing university districts and I'm noticing that the black children who are middle income are outperformed by black children in low income neighboring districts so Chapel Hill and Durham, for example, north Carolina. So why wouldn't these middle class black children be outperforming All of the lower income white children, right? And they would not be outperformed by the lower income black children who are high performing in Durham, right? And so I'm asking this question as a race question and trying to understand why, in the same economic band, there is racial disparity and not only that, but the higher income black children are outperformed by the lower income white children.
Speaker 1:This is a race piece here and that's what I held on to. And, as Brett Edmund says, if you need more than one example of a school, that's got it right. If you need more than one example, then you're working with some other kind of resistance inside, right, because I should be able to look at that data. See that issue, look at it in health care see that issue and say we've got to examine race as well as economics and unfortunately so much of our system and I think the pendulum is trying to swing back that way where we want to talk about economics, we want to talk about poverty, we want to talk about those things and we want to exclude the conversation of race. So everything becomes about economics versus it's about race and economics.
Speaker 2:I had a professor in my doctoral program say, and he said it tongue in cheek, and he told us it was tongue in cheek. But he said why are all the smart kids, why do all the smart kids in San Diego County live within two miles of the beach? Right, so that's an economics piece, but the social piece didn't even enter into the conversation and no one talked about it and we moved on. There you go, and that's it. There you go. You've been incredibly generous with your time and I really want to honor the commitment that we made at the start of this. Is there any final word that you have as we, before we close out Anything that you didn't mention? Maybe where folks can find you? I'm going to be giving out copies of your book to listeners, certainly within our Albert Einstein Academy's community. I've been inspired by your work and continue to be, and it just makes me think and reflect. So I appreciate that. But is there anything you'd like to end today with?
Speaker 1:I want to thank you first of all for the invitation to have this conversation with you today. I also want to thank you for the work that you're doing and the persistence around that, because I think, now more than ever, it's important that we double down. The ways of democracy is slipping from our hands right now, and if we are to become divided by these issues of race and class and gender and sexual orientation and all of those things, then we miss the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that this is a beautiful experiment in democracy here and we have all the players that we need and many more who want to be on the bench ready to go in when we are tired. And I'm saying that this is the time for us to open our arms and open our minds. And so if that space is not diversified, when you're making a decision that's a policy decision, a program decision or a practice in the classroom decision, then don't make the decision. Go get the diversity, because that decision that you make without diversity is not going to serve all people.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Superintendent's Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Bacallel for editing and production assistance and to Tina Reister for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day. Thanks and have a great day.