Equity Leadership Now!

10. Leading with Compassion in Polarizing Times with Pedro Noguera

Jabari Mahiri

Episode 10 Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/yc8fdd9a

In episode 10 of Equity Leadership Now!, Dr. Pedro Noguera explored the interconnectedness of race, class, and socio-economic factors in educational outcomes with host Jabari Mahiri. Dr. Noguera is a prominent educational leader and Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. He reflected on his journey into educational leadership, beginning as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, where he was encouraged to run for a position on the Berkeley school board. This experience exposed him to the realities of urban education and the challenges of policy-making, informing his later work.

 Dr. Noguera's extensive career in education spans over 30 years through which his commitment has been to addressing educational inequities shaped by social and economic factors. Noguera emphasized the importance of empathy in leadership, differentiating it from sympathy and compassion, which he argued is essential for understanding and addressing social issues, such as gun violence and homelessness.

Dr. Noguera also discussed his 2020 book, City Schools and the American Dream 2: The Enduring Promise of Public Education,  in which he deals with the resilience of teachers and students amid systemic challenges. He underscored that school leaders must focus on substance over symbolism in their efforts to promote equity and ensure all students receive quality education, particularly in the face of political pressures and public scrutiny. Dr. Noguera also addressed the current political climate and the vital role of PK-12 education in fostering democracy and equality. He noted the increasing challenges posed by conservative policies targeting educational equity and emphasized the need for school leaders to navigate these issues skillfully. His insights from co-authoring The Search for Common Ground highlight the importance of civil discourse and collaboration across ideological divides to address complex educational challenges.

In discussing another one of his books, Excellence through Equity, Dr. Noguera outlined five principles of courageous leadership necessary for achieving equity in education. He argues that confronting inequity often requires courage and accountability, advocating for equitable treatment and access to opportunities for all students. His experiences illustrate the need for systemic change in how talent is recognized and nurtured within schools, stressing that educational outcomes should not be predetermined by demographic factors.

Finally, the discussion touched on the role of technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), in education. Noguera posited that AI is a tool that can be used positively or negatively, depending on intentions and design. He criticized educational technology companies for prioritizing profit over genuine educational advancement. Noguera concluded by encouraging aspiring educational leaders to persevere despite challenges. 


Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating students, particularly for those from historically marginalized communities.

Leading with Compassion in Polarizing Times
with Pedro Noguera


Jabari Mahiri Host, Editor, and Producer
Brianna Luna Audio Editor and Production Specialist
Mayra Reyes External Relations and Production Specialist
Becca Minkoff Production Manager
Diana Garcia Communications Manager and External Relations
Audra Puchalski Communications Manager and Web Design
Jennifer Elemen Digitally Mediated Learning Coordinator
Jen Burke Graphic Designer
Robyn Ilten-Gee Editor and Media Consultant
Rian Whittle Sound Technician


Transcript


Brianna Luna 0:18
Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from Pre-K
through university settings, who transform structures and strategies for educating,
particularly for those who are marginalized. We complement the mission and goals of the
21st Century California School Leadership Academy, 21CSLA.
Housed in the Leadership Programs of Berkeley School of Education, we acknowledge our
presence on unceded Ohlone land.
We explore innovative ideas and compelling work of educational leaders at the intersection
of research, policy, and practice to realize individual social and environmental justice
because our democracy depends on it.

Jabari Mahiri 1:03
Pedro Noguera is a distinguished professor of education and the Emory Stoops and Joyce
King Stoops Dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern
California. Dr. Pedro Noguera, welcome to our podcast, Equity Leadership Now.
Pedro Noguera 1:19
Great to be with you, Dr. Mahiri.
Jabari Mahiri 1:23
I was just telling our staff here the whole relationship that we've had for many, many years,
30 years, at least, since I first came to the University of California, Berkeley, and you were
here already, as a professor from the School of Sociology, went through tenure here and
then went on to many other places. We won't belabor all of the places you've been in, all of
the good work that you've done in those arenas, because we want to talk a little bit about
how your research and the other myriad professional activities that are focused on
educational policies and ways that schools are influenced by social and economic
conditions, as well as demographic trends in local, regional, and global context can be
illuminated a little more by us asking a couple pointed questions about how some of these
entities and activities have surfaced in your scholarship.
So, you are the author, or co-author, of more than 250 research articles, research
publications and reports and editorials, book chapters, as well as 13 books. In our
conversation this morning, we'll discuss insights that a few of your more recent books,
provide for issues and challenges of leadership in schools and society. But first, what were
some of the key milestones and personal motivations in your own educational leadership
journey?
Pedro Noguera 2:43
So it's interesting, because when I became an assistant professor, I got hired as an
assistant professor in 1990 at Berkeley, I had been considering going elsewhere, going back
East, and I got the offer at Berkeley, and then as soon as folks in Berkeley heard I was going
to stay, they started pressuring me to run for school board, which is not typical for a new
assistant professor to run for local government. But I thought, you know, what the heck?
You know, they needed representation. I had been thinking about, had been involved
politically in the community, so I thought I would do it. I remember at the time, Jim Guthrie,
who was a senior faculty member here, approached me, says, "If you do this, you will never
get tenure".

And he had been on the school board, so he knew how demanding it was, but I didn't
listen. I did it anyway, and that really started me on a path of holding leadership positions
even as I was holding academic positions. I can't say I enjoyed being on the school board, I
really came to understand that it was maintaining a very inequitable status quo, which
really frustrated me. But I did learn so much about urban education from being on the
board, and about policy, that I probably wouldn’t have- had a different perspective sitting
on the board and seeing it, than if I had just been studying it as an academic. So that was
the beginning of, in some ways, of that leadership journey. Before that, I’d been chief of
staff to the mayor here in Berkeley, and before that, student body president on campus. So
this was always part of my journey, and I would say that part of what's drawn me to
leadership roles, including now serving as Dean at USC is, I've never been satisfied with just
being a critic from, you know, the ivory tower, right, about what's going on.
You know, like we're at a conference today on youth homelessness, and it's very easy to
write about it, and think that because you're doing research on the issue, that somehow,
that's impactful. But I think both you and I know there are volumes and volumes and
volumes of studies on poverty and inequality and racism and what changes, and I think it's
it's that frustration with the disconnect between research and policy, between research
and practice, and how that affects the lives of particularly the most vulnerable people, that
has drawn me into leadership, in the hope that I can play a role in actually addressing some
of the issues we care about, that I care about, and you know, so to some degree, I've had
the experience of seeing that is true, that you can actually do things, and that keeps me
inspired and motivated, even now.
Jabari Mahiri 5:57
Picking up on that, Pedro. Where I first came in contact with you as a new assistant
professor here that came in 1992, here being UC Berkeley, I think you may have leveraged
some of that background and experience working in public schools and being the chair of
the board of Berkeley school system to elevate that further to the diversity project that you
initiated, became the PI for, that 15 or more doctoral students got into the research on,
and almost all of them published their dissertations on the same work. Your book,
Unfinished Business, it's a classic. So that leads me to this question of you are the lead
author on a 2020 book entitled City Schools and the American Dream 2: The Enduring Promise
of Public Education in the Multicultural Education Series of James Banks. So can you provide
detailed insights into the lives of teachers and students working against these tremendous

odds? You do that in the book, but what are some of the critical roles of school leaders
specifically to realize the promise of public education?
Pedro Noguera 7:07
Yes, great question, because I think that when you're an educator, particularly a teacher,
it's easy to feel like you know, your impact is so minimal, but I try to remind teachers when I
speak to them, when the classroom door closes, you have a lot of power. You have the
power to connect with kids. You have the ability to inspire kids, motivate kids, and we
should never lose sight of that. That's what drew me to education in the first place, is that
you can, in fact, make a difference through teaching, through counseling, through being a
principal. And I see it over and over and over again. So what I also know is that when it's
not just one teacher, but groups of teachers, groups of educators, working together for a
common cause, common vision, you can have real impact and I've seen that in schools,
usually the schools that you see that are really making a difference in reducing disparities
and helping students to do things with their lives that expand opportunity. It's because that
whole school, that whole community, is working together, and that's inspiring to see. And
so that also keeps me motivated, and I try to when I speak to educators and speak to new
teachers. I say, you know, this is a powerful profession, people. It may not be a highly
compensated profession or even respected, but that says more about our society and the
fact that we don't respect people who do such important work, but as long as you're not in
it for the money [laughing], you could do such important work in education, and that's still
the case today.
Jabari Mahiri 9:00
Thank you. We're having this conversation on September 27, 2024, and I mentioned the
date because it's also on the cusp of a historic, historic presidential election in which
democracy itself is being challenged. So my question is, how is PreK-12 public education
crucial to equality and democracy in US society, and what roles can school leaders play in
this historic moment specifically?
Pedro Noguera 9:29
Well, we've seen just in the last few years that the Republican party has decided to make
war on schools. They've decided to ban books. They've decided to go after educators who
are committed to equity and diversity. They've decided to politicize school boards and go
make the jobs of superintendents difficult. And that's happened throughout the country,
including a place like California, in more conservative areas, and so this is a critical time, I
think, for educators to really be clear about what's at stake and how to navigate this

polarized environment. One of my friends, who's also a graduate of our school at USC, he's
a superintendent in Orange County. And he said, you know, his board was telling him they
don't want to hear about equity anymore because it's conservative board. He said, “Okay,
well, then from now on we're just going to focus on educating all kids.” And they said,
“Okay, we're with that. He says, “Okay, good. So we won't use equity, but we'll just do that
work.” And he kept his board with him, kept his job. And what it tells us is sometimes you
have to be a little more nimble. You know. You have to not focus on the words, focus on
the work. Focus on whether or not you're actually doing the work of advancing equity and
serving all kids. Sometimes you go to places where they got all the words and the slogans,
but there's no evidence of impact. I think of a lot of schools here in the Bay Area where
that's the case. So I would much rather focus on the substance than on the symbols. And
when I see leaders who get that and they're doing that kind of work in Florida and Texas,
where the hostility is so great. What I see is parents who will step up and defend them,
because they know that those educators are actually advocates for their children, and we
should keep that in mind.
Jabari Mahiri 11:34
You've already touched on my next question a bit, but I still want to ask it to go a little bit
deeper into one aspect of it, in terms of how it's captured in a recent book that you
co-authored in 2021 entitled The Search for Common Ground: Conversations About the
Toughest Questions in K-12 Education. So what are additional really tough questions for
PreK-12 education, and how can school leaders help us find common ground, like the
example that you gave in schools and society?
Pedro Noguera 12:06
So that book I did with a conservative writer, Rick Hess from the American Enterprise
Institute. We don't agree on most things, but he invited me to co-author this book with him,
and we started before the pandemic. And what's interesting about the book is we did it
through letters that we wrote to each other back and forth. And what's interesting about
doing it through letters is you have time to think before you respond. You even have time
to go get some research to back up your arguments, but it also gives you time to hear what
the other person is saying, and what we did in the book is model civil discourse, right? That
is, we disagreed about issues like school choice, about race and diversity in schools, about
social, emotional learning. We disagreed on most things, but we also had enough respect
for each other that we could listen to each other, and that's what we called it, The Search for
Common Ground. There were areas where we found common ground where we thought,
okay, we can agree reasonably on some of these issues, like choice. I always say, you know,


I have many criticisms of the way charter schools are used, but when I see a charter school
that is serving poor kids of color well, I support that school, and I'm not an ideologue,
because it's a charter. No, if they're doing good work with schools, and I know there are so
many public schools that are not serving those kids, I will support that school. At the same
time, I know that choice systems often exclude the most vulnerable kids, and that often
makes the job of public schools more difficult.
So my position on choice is more nuanced. It's not, and it takes money away from public
schools. So you know, what we modeled is that you have to address the complexity of
issues right, rather than just take an ideological position. And I think that at a moment like
this, when we are in such polarized times, is helpful. When we published the book, we got
invited all around the country to speak on it, including before state legislatures in Kentucky
and Utah, because, and Wyoming, because people, because this was even before the
polarization that happened as we approached 2020, and so and people were struck, wow, a
progressive and a conservative can actually talk to each other. So I think it's helpful to be
able to demonstrate that we don't run away from people we disagree with. We can engage,
and it doesn't mean we have to give up our principles, but it is important to listen and to
not just use your ideology to support your arguments, but really look at evidence and look
at how the impact of our stances are- how does it affect the lives of the people we say we
care about?
Jabari Mahiri 15:15
I like that point of not giving up our principles, but one of your other more recent books
talks about five principles of courageous leadership to guide achievement for every
student, and it's you know primary title is Excellence Through Equity. And you've already
indicated that some of these terms that code what our principles are themselves are under
attack, like equity and excellence and DEIB and other kinds of terms of diversity that we
embrace as principles. So this question is like, what do school leaders need to know and be
able to do in order to increase equity for our most marginalized students? We just came up
from a conference that's still going on unhoused students, but we also talk about
low-income students, disproportionately disciplined students, special education, disability,
gay and gender, and transgender kinds of issues. This is very complex. So what is your
experience and insight into how school leaders need to address these complicated issues
from the standpoint of the five principles that this book establishes?


Pedro Noguera 16:25
So, I want to draw attention to the point about courageous leadership, what we took and
why, so think about it for a sec. Why would you need courage to be an educational leader?
Because when you confront inequity, you shake things up, and you're holding people
accountable for what they're supposed to do. You're holding teachers accountable, you're
holding kids accountable, you're holding their parents accountable, the community
accountable. So let's go back to Berkeley High.
Here we have this school in this progressive community less than a mile away from here,
next to City Hall, next to the school district, and every day, at lunchtime, I would see kids
cutting class, smoking weed in the park, most of them Black and Latino kids and all the
adults stand around act like they don't care. They clearly don't care because they're not
doing anything about it. No one had the courage to tell those kids, come to class. You need
to be in class right now, right? You need to focus on learning.
And that's the thing that always frustrated me about Berkeley, is that there we had all the
rhetoric and none of the action to address what I thought was a problem that Berkeley
should have been a leader in solving reducing racial disparities in education.
So the other part of the title that's important is Excellence Through Equity, right? And the
idea there is that by focusing on equity, equitable treatment of students, equitable access
to opportunities, then you can start to produce excellence from all kinds of communities,
right? And we love to celebrate the students who come, who came here as undocumented
students and now they're doing awesome things, or who were once homeless or in foster
care, but there are so few, and that should disturb us, because we know there are so many
others that had they had the opportunity, they too, could have used education to help
themselves, help their families and help their communities. And so again, when we're doing
this work, we should not be able, to look at a classroom, and because of the demographics,
know that that classroom is honors or special ed because talent is distributed across our
society, right and right now in so many of our schools, the class of our kids is predicting the
outcomes the class and the race. That's what needs to be disrupted if we're going to use
education as a way to expand opportunity.
19:18
[music break]


Jabari Mahiri 19:47
I know one of the things you came up with maybe 30 years ago was not only class and race,
but your zip code could predict what's your outcome and what your educational
achievement was going to be. So then, how do you connect these considerations to
another focus from a recent book that you published that had to do with the empathy gap?
How do leaders respond with empathy, rather than through othering and fear?
Pedro Noguera 20:15
Yeah, you know my wife, who's a psychologist and leads mindfulness work at USC, just
wrote an article on sympathy, empathy, and compassion, and talked about the fact that all
three were important, but if you think about them like they're on a continuum. Sympathy
allows us to hopefully react to the suffering of others, not with indifference, but with a
desire to do something, but it doesn't implicate us in their suffering. Empathy takes it to
another level. It says I can identify with what you're going through, like we just heard those
homeless students. I can feel your pain. I can feel the difficulty that you're going through,
and I can really connect with you on a human level.
Jabari Mahiri 21:10
But can we become empathetic without the same set of experiences? I want to shift it to
another place where empathy is often missing, and that's between, say, male-female
relationships. And as much as I might try, I'm still not able to completely empathize with
ways that women might be experiencing fear in a situation in a parking lot, and I'm just
walking through, you know.
Pedro Noguera 21:33
No, I think that's true, although on that point, I've learned so much from my daughters,
from my wives, from the women in my life, about what it's like to be a woman. And so
whenever I try to think about, okay, well, how would a woman experience I think about,
how would my daughter experience this? How would my, you know, the various women
that I'm close to, experience this issue, and I have to try to do the same thing with people
who are gay or lesbian or trans or who are just not, we're not in the same shoes. So that's
what to go back to. Compassion is a verb, because compassion requires action. Requires
that we do something. We don't just say, What a shame. And that's what I think is really in
short supply right now. We, you know, we hear about a school shooting, and often the
reaction is, what a shame. Good thing it wasn’t my school, let's make sure my kids are
protected. And that action, that kind of response, actually leads to more school shootings,
because we don't say what we got to get guns out of, you know, make it more difficult for

people to have access to assault weapons, you know. And we just treat so many of these
issues, whether we're talking about mass shootings or homelessness, as though they're
unsolvable, and all you do is go to other countries and you see they don't have this. They
don't have mass shootings like we do. They don't have people living on their streets like we
do. So we need to, I think, generate a sense in our society that we can do better and we
don't have to accept things as they are.
Jabari Mahiri 23:23
Thank you for that, and let's shift a little bit, because you posted on LinkedIn a few months
ago a comment about how male enrollment in higher education has been declining for
several years, and this is especially the case for black and Latino males, but also for
working-class white men, their numbers are significantly down too. This trend will have
important ramifications for society in years ahead, and some colleges are taking steps to
address this issue. But what are your thoughts about these gender disparities in addition to
racial inequities in higher education?
Pedro Noguera 23:56
I think we're seeing a crisis in masculinity in this country, and that the crisis manifests itself
in certain pathologies that we see in the you know, if you think, who does the school
shootings? You never hear about girls shooting up to school. It's always a boy, you know,
and often a white male, right? So many of our social problems are male, and I think it
comes because we don't have a clear sense of what it means to be a man today, right?When you and I were growing up, we had a very narrow notion of masculinity, that it was
about being a provider, being strong, being stoic, but as we rejected that, to become
nurturers, to become allies to women, to understand the way patriarchy was harmful, we
didn't construct a new image of what masculinity means.
And I see a lot of young men now who are struggling with that, who don’t have a clear
sense, and unfortunately, without that, where does education fit in? A lot of young men
right now are faced with, do I work or do I go to school? And right now, here’s a quiz for
you, who are the top streamers in the country right now?
Jabari Mahiri 25:21
Well, um, they're women I would say. But the ones I look at, Bryan Tiller Coin, this guy who
has the Midas touch, 3.5 million. These are progressive, white men.


Pedro Noguera 25:37
Wrong. She’ll know, who are the top streamers in the country today?
Becca Minkoff 25:45
Joe Rogan.
Pedro Noguera 25:46
Joe Rogan? Bigger than Joe Rogan.
Becca Minkoff 25:49
Jordan Peterson? Video gamers? Twitch?
Pedro Noguera 25:55
Video gamers, two of them are Black males.
Jabari Mahiri 25:59
I didn’t even know.
Pedro Noguera 26:06
Exactly, I don’t watch it either. I just learn because I talk to the kids. Why is this important?
Because there are a whole lot of young men watching these streamers play video games,
and they’re saying, they're making millions of dollars streaming. Why should I go to college?
They didn't have to go to college [laughing]. And we might say, how many people can do
that and make a lot of money, not many. But if you don't have another path that's clear to
you, you can fall for it. We have a lot to do to challenge the ways in which young men are
thinking about their own identity and their place in the world, and where education fits in.
Because the old models don’t work anymore.
Jabari Mahiri 26:52
I love where we are going with this, in terms of particularly this crisis of masculinity and all
of the toxic masculinity issues that are playing themselves out in our society. And I'm
almost feeling bad asking the question connecting it to college, because that’s already a set
of suppositions about what you need to do to be a full-fledged member of this society. One
of our presidential candidates is talking about the idea of taking the college requirement
out of a lot of the federal jobs, and people are quite capable of doing these jobs without it.
But again, it’s more than just whether men being reduced in terms of the numbers of
enrollment in college. There is a crisis of masculinity in this society, and it gets


differentiated across the different racial categories in different ways too, and there's a lot
of myths associated with it. Obviously these streamers are making a lot of money, but you
can also have rap artists who are making a lot of money, but everybody can’t be that
successful, and even when they do, they might bring with them a lot of baggage, as we are
seeing in the news today.
So I just want to ask you two more quick questions, the first one has to do with this
groundbreaking work you did, and I was a part of it too, with the diversity projects let's say
30 years ago, you connected with UCLA and their Center for Urban Schools, Jeannie Oakes
and John Rogers and all those people, so it was like getting beyond an institutional
positionality and saying that we are going to go wherever we need to go to make the
connections happen to transform education.
All that work that was done on diversity and equity was groundbreaking over 30 years ago,
has there been actual progress since then?
Pedro Noguera 28:52
You know, it's not at the scale that I would like to see, but I can point to places. I'll give you
an example. I just heard today that Berkeley High is making some progress now, so I can't
vouch, although, their Black enrollment is way down from where it was. So Santa Monica
High School, you mentioned Jeannie Oakes and John Rogers, they started the equivalent of
the diversity project there. Shortly after I moved to UCLA in 2015, I was invited to do a study
similar to the diversity project at Santa Monica High- no, for the whole district, to
understand the source of their racial disparities. We did the work over a year, made
recommendations that we presented not just to the board, but to the entire community,
and to their credit, they took it seriously in ways that Berkeley never did.
The person that was the principal at the high school is now the Superintendent, Antonio
Shelton, and they're still addressing the issues, and it's showing up in outcomes for kids. It's
showing up in reduced disparities. So that's encouraging to me. It's encouraging me to see
a place where we could document the problem, but now is a place where we could point to
and say, look, they're doing it. They're doing well. So I wish there was more that I could say
in the way of examples. But, you know, work is too important to allow ourselves to get
discouraged by the lack of progress.


Jabari Mahiri 30:39
But it is sort of cyclic at the same time. So as we close out, Pedro, my good friend, Pedro, I
want to ask a question that has to do with thinking about these issues of equity and social
justice that we've been addressing in this conversation. But to factor in any thoughts you
have about AI and how that might be changing the educational landscape, particularly
regarding these issues of equity and social justice.
Pedro Noguera 31:07
Yeah, so I just heard a talk by Deepak Chopra, the guru, health guru and spiritual guru, and
he just wrote a book about AI, and he is the most enthusiastic person I've heard that I kind
of agree with. And, you know, his argument is that AI is just a new tool, like all new tools
that can be used for bad or for good, you know, the scissors or the knife was a tool to hurt,
but it's also can use as a scalpel, right, or to cut food. And he said AI is like that too. It can
be trained to do good. The biggest problems I have with the edtech companies is that
rather than working with educators to design tools that can be used to further learning and
improve teaching. And, you know, advance equity, they see schools as markets, and their
motive is profits, and they're just out to make more money. And I hope there will be some
companies with conscience that understand the good that could come from this and will be
motivated in that way. But for that to happen, they have to work with educators, because
they need to understand what educators are seeing, what their work is, and what kinds of
tools would be most helpful. So I'm holding on to hope that that can happen.
Jabari Mahiri 32:34
So let's play with your metaphor just a little bit, the idea that the knife works, being able to
cut both ways. But let's change the metaphor to an AR-15 and make and I'm essentially
making the case that, is their technology that by its very nature, is only able to create more
problems than it solves?
Pedro Noguera 33:03
That could be true. It's kind of hard to argue that nuclear weapons or AR-15s can be used
for good. I can't even see how you could use that for hunting, even though some people do
that. You might be right that there are just some technologies that are, are there to harm,
and because that was the intent, right? It’s interesting that the guy who developed
dynamite is also the guy who developed the Nobel Peace Prize [both laughing]. And so, I
don’t know too many good uses of dynamite out there, but maybe there are. So I think
you're right, and that we should be concerned about the intentions behind it.


Jabari Mahiri 33:47
This is a good place to end on. But I do want to ask, since we have this, since you have our
microphone, Did we miss anything? Is there anything else you'd like to say to our Equity
Leadership Now podcast audience, which is in the billions? [both laughing] No, this is
growing slightly, but it's going to grow a lot more after they hear your podcast. Anything
else you'd like to say in closing,
Pedro Noguera 34:08
Just that, I think that I admire the students who are choosing to become educational
leaders. Now, it's not an easy job. You're under a lot of scrutiny, you're under a lot of
pressure, you're dealing with constraints of budgets and politics, but you can still make a
difference there, and if you can keep your mind focused on how, how to make a difference,
how to have an impact, it could be worth it. So I just want to encourage them. Don't let the
difficulty of the moment we're in discourage them from doing this important work.
Jabari Mahiri 34:45
Distinguished Professor of Education and USC, Dean of Education. Pedro Noguera, thank
you so much for sharing your ideas with Equity Leadership Now.
Pedro Noguera 34:56
Thank you, Jabari, so good to be with you after so many years, to see that you're still doing
this work. So I appreciate it, and it's good to be at Berkeley.
Jabari Mahiri 35:04
Thank you.
Brianna Luna 35:13
Thank you for listening to Equity Leadership Now!.
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on your preferred podcast
platform. Subscribing helps you stay updated with our latest episodes featuring leaders
who are redefining education.
We also invite you to share the episode with colleagues, friends, or anyone passionate
about equity and justice in education.


Our podcast team includes Jabari Mahiri, Brianna Luna, Mayra Reyes, Becca Minkoff, Diana
Garcia, Audra Puchalski, Jennifer Elemen, Jen Burke, Robyn Ilten-Gee, and Rian Whittle.