During the past decade, public confidence in education has been declining. In this episode, SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. joins us to discuss his new book that provides a compelling narrative of the value of education in transforming lives.
Chancellor King has a long history of involvement with education. After graduating from Harvard, he acquired a Master’s degree from Teacher’s College at Columbia University and taught high school social studies. He later co-founded Roxbury Preparatory Charter School and served as a co-Director for five years. Under his leadership, students in this school attained the highest scores of any urban middle school in the state and closed the racial achievement gap. After acquiring his doctoral degree from Columbia and a law degree from Yale, Dr. King served as New York State’s Education Commissioner from 2011 to 2014. He left NY for a while to work in the Obama administration as Deputy Secretary of Education from 2015 to 2016 and joined Obama’s Cabinet as Secretary of Education from 2016 to 2017. Following his work in the Obama Administration, Dr. King continued to advocate for increased educational equity and access as President and CEO of the Education Trust. He now serves as Chancellor of the State University of New York. We’re interviewing Dr. King in his role as the author of his new book and not in his role as the SUNY Chancellor.
Show Notes
- King Jr., John B. (2025). Teacher By Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives. Legacy Lit.
- Shapira, Ian (2019). “Two families – one black, one white – shared a harrowing history. Then they met.” Washington Post. October 23.
- Yeager, D. (2024). 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. Random House.
- Prep for Prep
- Oliver Scholars
- Roxbury Prep
- Expeditionary Learning Charter Schools
- English Language Arts Standards
- P-Tech Schools
- Harvard website
- University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES)
- The Schomburg
Transcript
John: During the past decade, public confidence in education has been declining. In this episode, we discuss a new book that provides a compelling narrative of the value of education in transforming lives.
[MUSIC]
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
[MUSIC]
Rebecca: Our guest today is the State University of New York Chancellor, John B. King Jr. He has a long history of involvement with education. After graduating from Harvard, Dr. King acquired a Master’s degree from Teacher’s College at Columbia University and taught high school social studies. He later co-founded Roxbury Preparatory Charter School and served as a co-Director for five years. Under his leadership, students in this school attained the highest scores of any urban middle school in the state and closed the racial achievement gap. After acquiring his doctoral degree from Columbia and a law degree from Yale, he served as New York State’s Education Commissioner from 2011 to 2014. Dr. King left NY for a while to work in the Obama administration as Deputy Secretary of Education from 2015 to 2016 and joined Obama’s Cabinet as Secretary of Education from 2016 to 2017. Following his work in the Obama Administration, Dr. King continued to advocate for increased educational equity and access as President and CEO of the Education Trust. He now serves as Chancellor of the State University of New York. We’re interviewing Dr. King in his role as the author of his new book and not in his role as the SUNY Chancellor. Welcome, Chancellor King.
Chancellor King: Thanks so much.
John: It’s great to talk to you again. Today’s teas are:… Chancellor King, are you drinking tea by any chance?
Chancellor King: No, I just have water today, unfortunately, I’m visiting SUNY Purchase, and I don’t have access to my usual supply of tea.
Rebecca: What a disappointment. [LAUGHTER]
Chancellor King: Sorry about that.
John: Next time.
Rebecca: John, I have constant comment today.
John: …which is appropriate for a podcaster, and I am drinking a pure peppermint tea today.
Rebecca: Always a good refresher at the end.
Chancellor King: I’m jealous. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: So we invited you here today to talk about your new book, Teacher by Teacher: The People who Change our Lives, which provides a powerful testimonial to the power of education to transform lives. In the introduction, you note that you are fortunate to have teachers and mentors who help guide you through critical turning points in your life. Can you talk about what led you to write this particular book?
Chancellor King: Sure, I’ve thought about it off and on over the years, and “you should write a book,” is the thing that people sometimes say to you, you know, but I hadn’t really committed to it until the Washington Post did a story about my family history, and that prompted a book agent to reach out to the journalist to ask if he wanted to do a book about our family history, and he was doing another book project and said, “No, I don’t really want to do it right now, but you should call John and see if he wants to do a book.” And that got me started on this journey, and I really saw it as an opportunity to talk about the role that teachers have played in my life, and to really take on this thing that we do in our culture, where if somebody has persevered through difficult circumstances, we make the story about them and not about the people who supported them. And I really wanted to shift that and say all the opportunities that I’ve had, the extraordinary opportunities I’ve had, all trace back to teachers who intervened at the right moment in my life. I was very, very lucky to have these amazing teachers, and I wanted to tell their story, and to tell the story of the many amazing teachers I’ve gotten to work with over my career.
John: And at a time when there’s so many public questions about the quality of education, I think this is extremely well timed. As your book illustrates, you’ve been involved with education all of your life, basically, and you note in your book that education helped to define your family and shape your family’s identity. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
Chancellor King: Sure. So on my mother’s side, my mother has a classic Nuyorican story. She was born in Ponce in Puerto Rico, came to New York City as a kid, maybe about five or so, with her brother and my grandmother, who was a single mom who decided to come to New York City to create opportunity for her kids. She went to work in a garment factory, and my mother learned English in the New York City public school, was the first in her family to go to college, went to Hunter in the CUNY system, and really got to live exactly the dream that my grandmother had, and because of my grandmother’s hard work and faith, I have the life that I have today. She made that investment, she made those sacrifices, so that my mother could go to college. My mother became a teacher and a guidance counselor, and it’s really an extraordinary story about what public higher education makes possible, what Hunter made possible in my mother’s life? My father grew up in a very segregated New York City just after the turn of the 20th century, the grandson of enslaved people, and he found a path through education, becoming a teacher and later the first black principal in Brooklyn and senior administrator in New York City Schools. And his life could have gone a lot of different directions, being born in 1908 in New York City, but school provided this path for him, and part of the reason he knew to take that path is that my grandmother, his mother, had been one of the first graduates of what is now the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, an HBCU on the eastern shore of Maryland, and she was very unique in being an African-American woman with a college degree in that early period. And that made her path possible, and that helped shape my father’s path, and so education has just been so central to my family’s whole story.
Rebecca: As I read your book, I really appreciated hearing your story, but also I think it reflects a lot of our students’ stories, and think it’s helpful to have these stories out there so that others can see themselves in the stories. One of the things that you talk about is your growing responsibility that you had to take on as your father slid into dementia. Can you talk a little bit about the role school played in your life during this period when you were taking over many of these adult roles, like paying bills, buying groceries at such a young age?
Chancellor King: So when I was little, my mom was really the main care provider in our home. My parents were very far apart in age. My father was 66 when I was born, my mother was 40, and my father was very distant, not very active with me. I don’t remember, for example, ever playing catch with my father. And so my mother was my anchor, and she passed away from a heart attack when I was eight, and there are no words to describe how devastating and painful that moment was. And then it was just me and my father, and he was distant then, but got more and more distant, and now I know it to have been Alzheimer’s, but at the time, I didn’t know why he was acting the way he was. But over the four years there was just the two of us, he got more and more erratic. Some nights he’d be sad, other nights angry, sometimes even violent, and I didn’t know why. I can remember one night, he woke me up two in the morning, told me it was time to go to school, and I was arguing with him, saying, “No, Dad, it’s not time to go to school.” And he was pulling me on the stairs. I was clinging to the banister, and I didn’t know why. Eventually he gave up and we both went back to sleep, but that was what home was like, just this incredibly unstable and scary place, but school was amazing. School was this place that was safe and consistent and nurturing. And I was very fortunate during that period to have Mr. Osterweil, who was my teacher in fourth, fifth, sixth grade, he looped with us, and then a number of teachers, but in particular Miss D, who was my seventh grade social studies teacher. And Mr. Osterweil and Ms D, really saved my life during that period. It gave me a sense of hope and purpose, and as my father got more and more sick, as you said, I had to figure out how to just keep our household going. Bills started to come, marked late, cancellation, those kinds of things, and I realized I needed to do something about that. So my father’s name is same as mine. John B. King, Sr. I’m John B. King, Jr. So I started signing checks and sending them in to try to make sure that the power stayed on. My father had stopped going to the store, but I knew where he had kept cash in the house for years, and so I snuck in and got some money there and started going to the store myself to get food in our house as a survival strategy, was just trying to figure out, like, how to keep things going with a deep sense of hopelessness about life at home, but school was the place where I could channel a sense of optimism.
John: And in this part of the book, you talk about some of the teachers that had that effect on you, of giving you that sense of optimism. And one of the things I thought of when we were reading this is that we had a reading group this semester on 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, by David Yeager, and one of the things he emphasizes is that a really effective way to motivate adolescents is to let them know that you have high expectations for them, that you believe that they’re capable of achieving those expectations, and to provide the support that they need while treating them with respect. Would it be fair to say that those teachers you mentioned, Mr. Osterweil and Miss D and some other teachers shared this approach to teaching?
Chancellor King: Oh, absolutely. When I think about Mr. Osterweil’s class, it was rigorous. We read The New York Times every day starting in the fourth grade. We learned the leader and capital of every country in the world. We did productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare, in elementary school, we did a production of Alice in Wonderland. I was the rose, a big red belt petal sticking out of my head. We went to the museum and the ballet and Mr. Osterweil was that kind of teacher who’s curious about you, you know, he’s curious about what you as an eight year old or a nine year old or a ten year old, what you think about the world. And he would have these very serious discussions with us, where he really was so interested in our take on things. And we talked about hard subjects. We were in the midst of the Cold War, he created this academically challenging, enriching, but also loving environment. You’d finish a book, he’d be there with the next, you’d finish a math problem, you’d have the next one that was a little bit harder. He was always pushing, but in a spirit of love and care, and he didn’t know what was going on for me at home. Maybe he had suspicions, but he didn’t know, but he knew to create an environment that was incredibly nurturing. And I’m still in touch with Mr. Osterweil. He’s just extraordinary human and Miss D was a different kind of teacher. She was my seventh grade social studies teacher. She was a former actress, or maybe she was still acting at the time, a huge personality, but again, sort of expected a lot of us. And at that point, my father was very sick, and I would often sit in class and worry about how he was doing, what was happening at home, how we’d be able to just keep going. But in Miss D’s class, I remember when we did a project where we had to do an Aztec newscast, and in that moment, the most important thing in the world to me was to be the best Aztec sportscaster there had ever been, and that was because of the environment she created. And so I think those points from Yeager are exactly right and are very consistent with findings about the research on retention, completion, some of the research even around how to combat stereotype threat, you know, it always comes back to that mix of high expectations and communicating the confidence that students can do it.
Rebecca: One of the things that you also talk about in your book is that you lived in Long Island with your brother after the death of your father, and then you applied and were accepted at Phillips Academy in Andover. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience there and how that affected your interest in racial and socioeconomic inequality?
Chancellor King: So when I went to live with my brother, I was 12, and he was 24. My dad had passed, and I was insistent that I wanted to go live with my brother, in part because when my dad was very sick, quite frequently, I would go spend a weekend with my brother, and it was super fun. We’d go to the movies, we’d go bowling, we’d eat out every meal. It was very exciting and fun. Turns out that it’s tough for a 24-year-old to raise a 12-year-old, and he was struggling himself with sort of who he was gonna be. And he drank a lot, and he partied a lot, and he was a little bit rudderless, and it was very unstable, and he had these different difficult relationships, and pretty quickly I realized living with him was not healthy. And so then I had to figure out what to do. And I had a friend from elementary school, from PS 276, who had gone to Groton with a scholarship through Prep for Prep or Oliver, one of those programs that helps kids from New York City go to New England boarding schools. And he was having a good experience. He told me about it, and I thought, “Okay, well, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to figure out how to get to one of these boarding schools.” So a cousin helped me with the application, and I ended up at Andover. And I could not have been more out of place. As context for folks, Andover is where George H.W. Bush went, where George W. Bush and Jeb Bush went. It is everything you imagi ne of a highly selective, very expensive, very fancy New England private school. And I was a kid from Brooklyn who hadn’t really had a stable home life since I was eight, and I just really struggled with the non-academic parts of campus life, and I really struggled with navigating the issues of race and class on campus, and it was just very clear that the campus wasn’t working very hard to create a sense of belonging for students of color like me and. And there were these multiple moments where I just felt so out of place and so conscious of the ways in which I was not… I don’t know if welcome is quite the right word… but not the priority for the institution. Students like me were not how the institution thought of itself. I describe in the book an argument in a history class with a teacher about the Rhodes Scholarship, and I was making a point about Cecil Rhodes and what he meant in the world, and the teacher was very dismissive of my argument, and it felt like this unwillingness on his part, to think about how race and history interconnect with our lives and our choices, and that was sort of emblematic of just the tension that I experienced there, and I got in a lot of trouble, I idn’t follow any of the rules, and I got kicked out. And I always say to people, “I’m the first US Secretary of Education to be kicked out of high school,” but it was not the right place for me at the time.
John: And you recovered from that, though, and you moved on to Harvard after graduating. And there you’ve described working on a number of projects in the Mission Hill community. Can you talk a little bit about some of your experiences there?
Chancellor King: Yeah, I was fortunate that after I got kicked out, I went to live with my aunty and uncle, and they really helped me get my life on track. But when I got to Harvard, I felt out of place a little bit, and also definitely imposter syndrome, like I had to write two essays for my college application, the regular essay, and “Why’d you get kicked out” essay that you have to write if you’ve been expelled from a school. And so I remember as a freshman just feeling like, is somebody gonna tap me on the shoulder and say, we made a mistake, that other essay fell under the table. We didn’t see it. You’re not supposed to be here. And so I was struggling a little bit. And when I first got there to find my place, and I went to like, a volunteer fair, and they were recruiting people to teach civics in local elementary and middle schools. And I was like, “Oh, that’ll be fun. That’ll be interesting,” because I cared about civics and government and politics. I was interested in that, and I liked the idea of community service. So I signed up to do it, and it changed my whole trajectory. I ended up teaching civics and then teaching conflict resolution in schools. I ended up running a summer camp in a public housing development in Boston, where we lived for the summer, as well as worked with the students and families. Then that turned into helping to run the after-school program, and I spent probably more of my time, frankly, in Boston than in Cambridge, doing public service work and engaging with the community. And that led me to really conclude I wanted to be an educator, because I so love doing for other kids what teachers had done for me.
Rebecca: So when you graduated Harvard, then you went to Columbia University Teachers College, you decided then to begin your first year of teaching in Puerto Rico. Can you talk about being a first-time teacher?
Chancellor King: Yeah, so it’s really hard. I always say to people that I’ve had a lot of hard, complicated jobs, but the hardest job I have ever had was first-year teaching, because you don’t have files to fall back on. You don’t have the lived experience to fall back on. You want to do a good job. Every day is just very stressful. You’re planning. It’s the first time you’re teaching each lesson, and you’re planning every night, you’re doing grading every night. And like it’s overwhelming. First-year teaching is very, very hard. I just have a special place in my heart for first-year teachers. And I was doing it in a context where I’d moved to Puerto Rico, I was teaching at a school that was a private school, largely serving the students who were children of the elite. And my theory of going to Puerto Rico was I was going to have this cultural experience. I was going to really get to know the island more. Obviously, I visited as a little kid, and I wanted to have that experience. I wanted to work on my Spanish. I underestimated how overwhelming first-year teaching would be and how all-consuming it would be. I also underestimated how difficult I would find it to teach in a school where there was so little focus on social consciousness for the students. There were certainly some students who were there on scholarship, but the vast majority of students were there because their parents had tremendous resources, and they were largely going to college in the United States when they graduated, the mainland United States, and they were being prepared to be the next generation of leaders, but without a sense of consciousness about the complicated colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, without a deep awareness of issues of race and class and how they play out in Puerto Rico, and there definitely are color line issues in Puerto Rico, but that was not discussed. And I really struggled with, as a social studies teacher who would bring into my class a lot of complicated issues of the history of slavery and abolitionist movement and the Civil War and Reconstruction and the dismantling of Reconstruction, the emergence of the KKK. You know, we were having these intense conversations about race and American history, but yet not really engaging around the issues just under the surface in life in Puerto Rico. So that was very difficult, alongside the frustrations of just navigating first-year teaching and an environment where there really wasn’t much support. I don’t recall anyone ever observing my class and giving me any feedback, and so that’s a challenge, I think, for a lot of first-year teachers, they don’t get the kind of induction support they should. And it’s true for higher ed too, frankly, right? That oftentimes higher ed faculty do not get the experience of a lot of feedback and support around pedagogy early in their career. So it was very hard, and I decided that I wanted to be in a school that had a clearer civic mission, and I wanted to reconnect with a community of friends that had stayed in Boston. And so I decided to leave Puerto Rico and teach in Boston.
John: And you mentioned that higher ed may face similar problems. I think the problem may be even worse in higher ed, because at least when you begin working in secondary ed, you’ve had some teacher training courses. People in higher ed, when they go to teach, have generally had little or no training, with the exception of a few graduate programs that provide it, and there is gradually some progress there, but I think we still have quite a ways to go in higher ed. You mentioned coming back to Boston, and one of your next roles was to work with Roxbury Prep. Could you talk a little bit about your work there and what made this institution so very successful?
Chancellor King: Yeah. So as a high school teacher, one of the things that I saw in Boston was that many of my students were coming so poorly prepared, just behind, kids coming into ninth grade with fifth grade reading skills, fifth grade math skills, and really struggling to get caught up enough to be in a position to have real choices about what to do after high school. So starting a middle school, I hoped to be able to build a stronger foundation for students. I also had been frustrated in the schools where I’d worked as a teacher about the lack of support around teaching and learning, and so I really wanted to create a school that centered excellence in teaching and learning. So, Roxbury Prep, we did a few things that I think were really important structurally: we had three and a half weeks of teacher professional development before the school year would even begin, time for folks to plan to look at student work. Now there’s tradeoffs: less summer for everybody, but we built into the fabric of the school this idea that you would work very diligently as a community of teachers on the art and science of teaching, and that was very helpful. We had a longer school day that made a huge difference for our students, just more time for students who were coming to us in middle school, quite a bit behind, but we were able to have more time for academics, but also time for enrichment activities because of our longer day, but on Fridays, we ended at the same time as the district so that we could create a couple of hours for teacher development time. And so every week, we were watching videos of instruction. We were looking at student work together. We were meeting in grade-level teams to talk about students who were struggling and what supports they needed, or meeting in departments to talk about instructional practice. And that routine of careful attention to quality teaching, I think, helped us to get really strong academic results for students. We also were very focused on culture, and building a culture, as you described about the Yeager work, building a culture of high expectations with love and that communication of belief in students. And we were very small, we really spent a lot of time on picking the right teachers to be a part of the community, and then really invested in developing people, and it was amazing. It was incredibly satisfying work. I’m still in touch with a lot of our students and the teachers who worked with me then, and as you mentioned the intro, you know, we got really outstanding academic results and sent students on to really great opportunities afterwards, and that led me to think about policy, because there were a lot of questions where I was thinking, how do we scale some of what’s working well?
Rebecca: That’s such a great transition into the next thing we wanted to ask you about, [LAUGHTER] which is, how does one transition from being in a school into policy making? So can you talk a little bit about your experiences in the New York State Education Department, some of the challenges that you faced, and maybe some of the big successes as well?
Chancellor King: Yeah, so after five years of leading Roxbury Prep, I was thinking about what’s next, and how could I kind of have a bridge to policy, and I decided to go to law school. At that point, I was working on my dissertation, and I decided to go to law school with the thought that there’s [LAUGHTER] a lot of lawyers in public policy. And I had the experience when I was first-year teacher, the summer after my first year of teaching, I interned at the US Education Department in the Secretary’s office, and I worked for the person who was the advisor to the Secretary on teaching, who had been a teacher of the year, but she was often the only teacher in the room, everybody else was lawyers, and so I had this sense that law school could be a helpful set of skills and bridge to public policy. And that ended up happening. I ran a network of schools. I became Deputy Commissioner, and then Commissioner, and as Commissioner, you really are thinking about scale, 700 school districts in New York State. We had a huge infusion of funding from the U.S. Education Department early in the Obama Administration to do work on strengthening the standards for teaching and learning, helping struggling schools in high-needs communities, turn around their performance, building better data systems. So it was a great opportunity to have those resources and to think about scale work. One frustration was we had a very ambitious agenda in the state, and the Obama Administration had a very ambitious agenda for ways to accelerate progress in schools. And I think in some ways that ambition got out ahead of the capacity building and implementing something like the Common Core became very difficult because the work was focused on changing teaching practice, but simultaneously, there were changes to the assessment. Simultaneously there were changes to how teachers were going to be evaluated. It was a lot on the system, and I think I learned a lot about the need to build buy-in on major change initiatives, and to pace the work so that the people doing the work are full partners in it. And I don’t think we did that well enough at the federal level or in New York State. And so there were a lot of good things that we created: incredible curricular materials, the expeditionary learning, English language arts curriculum, which is still to this day, generating outstanding results in many schools around the country. So that was exciting. A number of really creative new schools were launched, like the P-Tech schools that were launched around New York State, where students graduate with a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, first in line for jobs with employer partners in technology and healthcare, in advanced manufacturing, such interesting work, but the politics were very intense, and there were ways in which, if we had sequenced the work differently, I think we could have managed those politics more effectively.
John: So one of the challenges, I suspect, is that when you’re working with a four-year administration, there’s an incentive to try to get things through quickly, which can result in those types of challenges, because, you know, if you don’t get them in the next administration may not share those values and beliefs, so it’s quite understandable. Your next move was to the U.S. Department of Education, where you had some really impactful programs that you had worked on. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Chancellor King: Yeah, so it’s funny, you know, I did a lot of work with the U.S. Education Department when I was Commissioner, and got to know Arne Duncan, who is my predecessor as Secretary, really well. And Arnie called me one day, and he said, Do you want to come down to DC and be my Deputy? I’d really like you to do that. And I said to him, “Look, I love what I’m doing in New York, but I’m a huge fan of President Obama and you and the work that you’re doing, and I’m very torn. Will you promise me that you will stay to the end of the Administration, because if I’m going to move my family to DC, I want to know that I’m going to be working with you?” And he said, “Oh, absolutely, 100% I’m going to be there to the very last day, turn out the lights at the end.” And I said, “Okay, alright.” So after I ultimately decided I would do it and I came down to be his deputy. And then a few months later, he comes into my office, and he says, “I need to talk to you about something.” And he said, “Yeah, I remember when I said I was going to stay till the end. Well, actually, I’m going back to Chicago.” And it was totally understandable. It was important for his family. So an incredible outcome in that the President asked me to be Secretary, and what a privilege to serve in President Obama’s Cabinet and to be a part of such an impactful administration, and to get to work on really critical education issues. A couple of things that I’m very proud of that I did a lot of work on: one is cracking down on predatory for-profit colleges that were stealing from students, stealing their Pell grant money, their GI Bill money, providing students, often, with a substandard education. Often students would not complete, and yet they were in debt to these institutions… just really awful. And we put in place very stringent rules. We shut down some of the worst actors, built a process to cancel the debt for the students who were taken advantage of by these institutions. Now, of course, a lot of that work was undermined, to your earlier point about what happens when administrations change, a lot of that work was undermined during the first Trump administration, where they brought in to oversee higher ed policy, literally, the people who we had been investigating days earlier. That’s who they put in charge from that predatory for-profit college industry. The Biden administration then had to go back and redo some of the work that we had done in the Obama administration, and we’ll see where things go next on that front. But I was proud that we were standing up for students and protecting students. We also had an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper, which was President Obama’s initiative focused on, particularly, boys and young men of color and the challenges they face. And as part of that work, we launched an effort to address really what had been a huge public policy mistake in the mid-90s, which was in ‘94 the federal government banned access to Pell grants for folks who are incarcerated. And this is incredibly dumb public policy, because people who get any educational programming while incarcerated are substantially less likely to return to prison. And for folks who graduate with a degree while incarcerated, the recidivism rate can be in the single digit. So it’s a terrible idea to take away educational programming in prison, but it was part of the period of tough on crime and policies of mass incarceration, and we knew that, but we needed to fix it. We didn’t think we could get Congress to do it. We just did not see a path in Congress. So we used our experimental authority under the Higher Education Act to create a program called Second Chance Pell that would allow 65 colleges and universities on a pilot basis to use Pell grants for students who are incarcerated. And what that did was create extraordinary opportunities for those campuses, but also a proof point where we could bring governors, members of Congress, state legislators, to see these programs, talk to students who are participating, and show that, in fact, these programs are transformational and ought to be how we think about criminal justice reform. And after I left the administration, I was leading a civil rights organization, and we continued with the civil rights community, the criminal justice reform community, to work on these issues, and ultimately we were able to persuade Congress to change the law to repeal that ban, and now Pell Grants are broadly available to students who are incarcerated. And I talk in the book about going to graduation in prisons are just so incredibly moving, because you see not only how people are changing their lives, but how they are changed by the experience of education, and they will describeseeing the world differently, the different relationships they’re able to have with their family members, their kids, and themselves because of what they’ve learned through their higher ed work. It’s incredibly inspiring work, and I’m really proud to have been a part of that movement, really.
Rebecca: We’ve talked a bit about the impactful work that the federal government can do… has done… but there’s been a decline in public support for higher education over the last decade. What can we do to rebuild political support for higher education, especially in this time.
Chancellor King: We have to acknowledge that there’s less faith in institutions generally, and so higher ed has been caught up in what I think is a broader cultural phenomenon of less faith in institutions. That said I think we gotta do a better job of delivering and storytelling. Why I say we need to do a better job on delivering is if you went to one of those predatory for-profit colleges and you left there no degree, no job prospects, deeply in debt, you’re going to be pretty resentful of higher ed. And everybody you know is going to be pretty resentful of higher ed . If you went to a private nonprofit or a public college, and you didn’t finish, but you have debt, no degree, feel stuck, you’re not going to feel very good about higher ed institutions. And so one thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that the students who start have the support to finish, and that when folks finish, they see the economic benefit. That’s one of the reasons I’m committed to the idea of internships for all undergraduates, because I think it’s really important that students are able to, when they leave college, realize the intended economic benefit of college. Of course, we’re preparing citizens and we’re preparing folks to be well-rounded adults, to lead fulfilling lives, and we want to make sure they’re able to support themselves. And so delivering on the promise of higher education and getting better at delivering is a part of the work. But then the other is storytelling. I don’t think people realize how impactful higher education is in every aspect of American life, that I don’t think people realize that when they’re looking at their phone, that there are hundreds, if not thousands of things that are happening inside of their phone that were made possible by research that was done on higher ed campuses. Or when people go to the doctor and they’re getting their treatment. I’m not sure they realize that the reason that treatment is even available is because of research that was done on higher ed campuses. And so I think there’s some storytelling we need to do. I was struck that last week when Harvard decided to push back on the demands of the administration to really violate principles of academic freedom, one of the things they did was they changed their whole websites and that now when you go on the Harvard website, it really walks you through Alzheimer’s research, cancer research, research that helps our military members be safer. There are just so many things that research is making possible. And I thought that was really smart on their part, and I think that is something we as a sector need to do a much better job.
John: Yes, the change in the Harvard website is really impressive, and it’s a case, I think, that we all need to make in our own ways too. And your book actually helps in this way too, by showing the impact that education had on your life as well. You conclude the book with a discussion of tracing your ancestry to enslaved people owned by Thomas Griffith on a farm in Maryland that was still owned by Griffith’s direct descendants. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience of visiting that family?
Chancellor King: Yeah, well, I’d mentioned earlier that my grandmother graduated from University of Maryland Eastern Shore, 1894, and UMES reached out and asked me to give the commencement. And it took a while, different events for me to do the commencement, but during that period, as I was preparing for the commencement, I decided to do some family research to try to flesh out the speech. And I worked with a woman who did genealogy-type projects at the Schomburg, the part of the New York City Public Library that works on African-American history. And one night, she sends an email to me and my family. We’re sitting on the couch watching TV, and we get this email, and it says, “I’ve discovered the place where your great-grandfather was enslaved. And by the way, it’s less than 25 miles from where you live. Ir’s in Gaithersburg, Maryland.” I was living at the time in Silver Spring, Maryland. And “Oh, by the way, the property is still owned,” as you said, “by the direct line descendents of the family that enslaved your family. And, oh, by the way, the cabin that your great-grandfather lived in as an enslaved person with his family is still standing on the ground.” And you know, it took your breath away, right? Because, as an African American, you know that there’s this tie to the institution of slavery, but to think that you’d be able to be in the place, that was very jarring. And then this conversation followed like, so now, what do we do with this information and like, do you call ahead? Do you send a note? Like, how do you introduce yourself [LAUGHTER] to this family and you have this complicated history? And it happened that my cousin was in town, maybe the next weekend, to visit the new Smithsonian, the African-American History and Culture Museum, and they have a cabin in there exhibit that they brought there, that cabin for enslaved people. And that prompted my cousin to say, “You know, I got to go see this place.” So she literally went there with her husband. She knocked on the door and she said, “Our people were enslaved here,” and that opened up this whole relationship and journey that we’ve had with the Beckers, the family, two sisters, who are descended from the Griffith’s and it’s been a fascinating journey. One, it’s there’s something quite profound about standing inside that cabin and appreciating, really, the cruelty of the institution of slavery. The cabin is not 30 feet from the main house. So you have this profound sense that these were two families living together in the same physical space, one owning the other. Certainly in our family, we also have the profound sense of gratitude for the journey of our family, the fact that in my family, we went in three generations from enslaved in that cabin to serving the Cabinet of the first black President. Incredible story about what’s possible in America. We also have had a journey in just getting to know the Beckers and talking about this history and realizing that even though they grew up amongst the artifacts of the institution of slavery, called that cabin the quarters, they had not spent a lot of time thinking about what the institution of slavery was and meant, and we’ve had some really difficult conversations around that, but I think we’ve learned, they’ve learned, from those conversations, and it’s made me even more committed that our schools, higher ed institutions, have to grapple with the truth of our history, the complex truth, the pain and the progress and that, to me, is just essential to the health of our democracy.
John: And we’re seeing a lot of pushback on that right now, which is really, really troubling.
Chancellor King: Yes, horrifying. I mean, some of the things you’re reading of people taking down the Harriet Tubman poster, taking books out of the library, it’s chilling.
John: Changing the history curriculum in many states so that mentions of slavery are being removed and so much else.
Chancellor King: Yes, during the confirmation hearings for Secretary McMahon, Chris Murphy asked her, do you think teaching African-American history would violate the President’s executive order against diversity, equity, inclusion? And she couldn’t give an answer. She said, “I’d have to look back at it.” I mean, that was shocking to me. And to be clear, I think it’s 100% crystal clear that teaching African American history is 100% consistent with the law, so I was shocked by that exchange.
Rebecca: …and consistent with the history of our nation.
Chancellor King: Yeah, it has the benefit of being the truth, right? [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: This has been really fascinating, and I think folks will really enjoy reading your book to really see the impact education can have through the many stories of teachers that you’ve shared and various aspects of our education system in the U.S., we always wrap up by asking, what’s next? The big, daunting question [LAUGHTER] of what’s next?
Chancellor King: Yes, yes. President Obama would always say, he’d always quote Dr. King, and the line that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And I truly believe that. And I know there are things happening today that can feel like sliding backwards, but I am nonetheless optimistic that in the long run, we will continue America’s history of progress toward expanding the circle of opportunity. And so these are setbacks, but they are temporary, and we have to continue to build, and educators have the opportunity to do that every day with their students, the opportunity to build towards a future that is more just, more sustainable, and we just can’t be deterred from that by the awful backsliding that we’re seeing. We have to just double down on our efforts to invest in a better future.
John: And it’s encouraging to see the proteststhroughout the country right now.
Chancellor King: Yes, people standing up for the rule of law, for due process, for academic freedom, for the important services that government provides. for our public servants. There are half as many people today working at the U.S. Education Department as there were on January 20. And my heart aches for colleagues who I know were so committed to being of service to the country, who many of whom are former teachers, principals, faculty members at higher ed institutions, student affairs people in higher ed institutions. they came to the department so that they could contribute, and they’ve been treated so horribly, and that’s true across so many areas of government where people have been tossed aside who only want to serve. I’m so glad people are standing up for them.
Rebecca: Well, we appreciate you spending time with us and sharing your story and sharing pieces of your book with us today. Thanks.
Chancellor King: Thanks for that opportunity, always great to talk with you.
John: Great talking to you.
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Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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