- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of State of Affairs with Steve Adubato has been provided by Valley Bank.

The New Jersey Education Association.

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[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC] - Hi, everyone, Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with Maura Collinsgru, who is director of policy and advocacy at New Jersey Citizen Action.

Good to see you, Maura.

- Good to see you, Steve.

Thanks for having me.

- You got it.

And we're gonna put up the website of Citizen Action, an organization that's been doing important work for a long time.

Tell everyone what the organization's about.

- Citizen Action, we're celebrating 40 years this year.

We deliver direct services to low and moderate income New Jerseyans across the state.

We have a range of direct service programs, as well as policy and advocacy to help improve the economic and racial disparities that exist still in the state of New Jersey.

- So, I want to zero in on one of these areas.

As we were prepping, our producers put some great notes together, and one of the areas that jumped off the page for me was this whole issue having to do with auto insurance rates in the state.

Talk about injustice, talk about disparities.

Is it fair to say, is it accurate to say that if someone who happens to be white, who happens to be wealthy, who happens to be well-educated in a certain community compared to someone who has a good credit in another community that doesn't have the same education.

But one person has a DUI, the other person has never had a DUI, but because of their education level and what other ever factors you're going to share with us, one's rate, the DUI driver is lower than... Am I making any sense?

Am I screwing this whole thing up or what?

- Well, you're not, and it's really a surprising reality once you learn about it.

Consumer Reports, who we've been working with for a number of years on a variety of consumer issues, issued a report recently that demonstrated that people with poor credit pay on average more than people with higher credit and potential drunk driving convictions.

We have a system- - For auto insurance.

- For auto insurance, correct.

We allow here in the state of New Jersey auto premiums to be set using factors that are not related to your driving, such as education, occupation, credit score, even marital status.

And those factors really become a proxy for income because what we know is that across the state, across the country actually, the most recent census data backs this up is that, you know, whites have college degrees at around 40%.

The numbers for Blacks and Latinos are much lower.

So, if a white driver has better education, and hence a better paying job than someone maybe- - And a better credit rating.

- And a better credit rating from someone who has a high school diploma and works in an occupation that pays less, and hence their credit score may not be as strong, their auto insurance is costing them more simply because of those factors.

That is something that is just outright discriminatory.

And what we have said is now that we've realized that this is going on, I don't think it was planned when New Jersey revamped their auto insurance many years ago.

But now that we know it exists, it's a problem we must fix.

We can't turn a blind eye to this.

- I'm sorry, Maura.

I'm sorry for interrupting.

Be specific.

Is there legislation that actually would bar - Yes.

- insurers from using that criteria, which, defacto, winds up being discriminatory towards certain people?

Disproportionately, people of color?

- Yes.

Yes there is.

And in June, the legislature passed a bill that raised the mandatory minimums that have existed for a long time in liability insurance.

So, drivers are going to have to carry higher minimum liability limits come this January.

As part of that, we asked the legislature, and the governor, when the bill passed, to please incorporate the ban on these discriminatory factors.

That didn't happen.

There is a standalone bill.

It's prime sponsor is Senator Nia Gill.

It's supported and co-sponsored by Senator Pou, Senator Ruiz, Senator Cruz-Perez.

Many- - Where are we then?

Again, in the interest of time, where is the governor on this?

- Yeah.

- Again, we're taping on the 20th of September, will be seen later.

Where are we with this?

- Well, we've had the assurance of the Senate President.

We had a meeting with them yesterday, and they are looking into the issue.

They are, of course, talking to the industry.

The industry is trying to say that these factors do in fact impact.

And they are also saying that there's a concern that rates could go up.

- And as- - For whom?

- Well, - For whom?

- I use myself as an example.

As an older white woman who graduated college just 10 years ago, I saw my insurance go down when I graduated college.

Now, I had been driving for decades.

My driving habits, my driving record, my residence, nothing had changed.

But because of that- - Except the fact that you had a college degree?

- Correct.

- So, I want to understand something.

I'm sorry, just managing time here.

- Yeah.

- I'm sorry.

So, I wanna be clear.

You said you met with them, and I don't want to get into the weeds here, but you're talking about the staff of the Senate President, Nick Scutari?

- Correct.

- You met with that staff?

- As we speak right now, - Yes.

- toward the end of September, the bill is not posted in the state Senate.

Is that correct?

- That's correct.

They have just begun their session again, but we have asked that the bill be posted without delay.

- And the insurance industry has taken the position, and I don't want to be unfair and we'll have a representative from that side as well, they're saying that college education, credit rating, and your job impacts your ability to avoid being in an accident and your driving record?

- Yes.

In essence, that's what they are saying.

That these are valid things that are predictive of claim and driving.

And, you know, we can't allow, basically, we are allowing low income, Black and brown drivers to subsidize the discounts that upper income people with college, educated white drivers living in zip codes that are not majority zip codes of color to be subsidized by lower income, Black and brown drivers.

- But, Maura, I want to be clear on this, and I have obviously fallen to the category that you just described.

That being said, I thought your zip code was not a legal criteria to determine auto insurance rates.

- Zip code can in fact be used.

But what's happening is that these other factors are being used.

So, for instance, there are things like- - We still have a few seconds left.

Go ahead.

- Yeah, there are things like a density of where you live and things like that that could impact your auto insurance rates.

But the socioeconomic factors that we are using are outright discriminatory based upon the fact that Black and brown drivers, people of color, do not have access to the things that white drivers do, and they need to be banned.

We cannot come up with an excuse why we need to preserve these for the profits of insurance companies.

- Maura, first of all, I want to thank you for joining us to talk about this important issue, but in the spirit of, quote, unquote, "fairness" and hearing all sides of a complex issue, I'll ask our producers to book a representative from the auto insurance industry to make the case as to why these factors are relevant.

Maura, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you for your time, and let's hope we can fix this problem soon.

- Well said.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

(grand music) - [Announcer] To watch more State of Affairs with Steve Adubato, find us online and follow us on social media.

- We're now joined by Dr. Diane Wong, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark.

Good to see you, professor.

- Thanks, Steve.

Thanks for having me.

- Let's talk about anti-Asian violence, or violence directed toward the Asian American community.

And I also wanna say this is part of a series you'll see the graphic called Confronting Racism.

This Confronting Racism series we're doing in cooperation with our colleagues at Rutgers Newark.

Let me ask you, Professor, the incidence of violence and discrimination against the Asian American community has risen dramatically.

First of all, how dramatically?

Second of all, some of the primary reasons for that, please?

- Of course.

Well, since the start of the pandemic, as you mentioned, there's been an alarming increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

This increase can largely be attributed to the harmful and xenophobic language used by some media and politicians, like former President Trump, to wrongfully blame and associate Asians with the pandemic.

According to data collected by Stop AAPI Hate, which is a self-reporting online tool that documents harassment, almost 11,500 incidents of anti-Asian discrimination were self-reported across the country from March of 2020 to this year.

And the majority of these instances involve verbal harassment and physical assault in public spaces.

And keep in mind that this data does not account for microaggressions, which are more subtle forms of discrimination against Asian Americans that happen in a variety of spaces, including the workplace, that often go unnoticed and unreported.

- Why are women more likely to be assaulted, attacked, discriminated against than men?

- Right, so this is really important to emphasize, right?

I think the data right now shows that women are disproportionately impacted by anti-Asian violence and represent over 70% of incidents reported, right?

This is a staggering, significant, significant increase.

And so if you recall last year in March, a man drove to three different massage parlors in Atlanta and deliberately shot and killed eight people, including six Asian American women.

And so a lot of this accounts for how Asian-American women in particular are over-fetishized and sexualized by the media, and in conversations around Asian women, as as seen as stereotypically docile.

And so as a result of all of this, and in particular Asian-American women, they continue to experience more physical assaults and fear for personal safety.

I think questions around the intertwined effects of racism, violence and health outcomes demand a much more scholarly research and media attention overall.

- So you made mention, and I'm no fan of, and it's not an opinion, well, I guess it is, an opinion blaming virtually everything that's wrong in our society on former President Trump.

However, we need to be clear, we're not editorializing, we're not editing.

The president on many, former president on many, many, many occasions called Covid-19, quote, the China Flu emphasizing the China flu.

And from your research, what do you believe the correlation, the connection is between the president of the United States, the leader of the free world at the time, referring to the China flu and the discrimination, violence that you're referring to right now against the Asian American community?

- I think the effects of that kind of xenophobic language are really harmful.

And I think a lot of Americans who listen to this kind of language, the China virus, kung flu, right?

Sort of internalize the correlation of the coronavirus with Asians.

And I think that uptick, especially as we saw in the spring of 2020, was directly correlated to this kind of increase in language.

And so I think it shows in many ways sort of the effect of this kind of trickle down language when it comes to what politicians and former President Trump used in their everyday rhetoric to what happens interpersonally on an everyday level.

But I do wanna emphasize this, this kind of anti-Asian violence and rhetoric is not new.

Or unprecedented.

It's actually can be contextualized in a much longer history of anti-Asian violence and exclusion within the United States.

- But I wanna follow up on something.

You've argued that white people are the main perpetrators of anti-Asian racism.

And then you said white supremacy does not require that a white person perpetuate it.

I'm confused by that because there are history, Crown Heights and other communities, where it is in fact African Americans who are involved in perpetrating violence against the Asian community, and conflict between the African American community and the Asian community.

Respectfully, how is that white supremacy?

- So I think that this is something that's really important.

And you know, what the data has indicated is that vast majorities of hate incidents that are self-reported have actually been perpetuated by non-black people, right?

And I think when it comes to the sort of more heightened incidents that are often picked up by the media and are circulated online, a lot of the perpetrators are unfortunately black.

And I think this sort of increases narratives around black and Asian tension when, I think it also masks the important histories that black and Asian Americans have when it comes to building in political solidarity and longer histories of working in alignment, right?

As opposed to this kind of tension that is only focused on often by the media.

- Respectfully, Professor, why can't both be true?

Why can't it be true that disproportionately whites in power, governmental policies connected to World War II, the internment camps, and the discrimination, institutional discrimination perpetuated by white politicians in power.

And that has existed for a long time, but there's also a problem or issues involving the African American community and the Asian American community.

Why can't both be true?

- I think so what this moment around anti-Asian violence has revealed is the need to look for root causes and interconnections, right?

What are the reasons in which we're seeing this uptick in anti-Asian violence, as well as these kinds of incidents that you're talking about, right?

I think it very much so needs to be contextualized within larger state sanctioned policies, right?

And so often when we talk about anti-Asian violence, it begins with the 1882 Exclusion Act which was introduced as a xenophobic effort to curtail the migration of Chinese people to the United States and moves through decades of exclusionary top down laws, policies, and practices used to justify war, violence abroad in the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia.

But there was also, as you mentioned, incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans across the country during World War II.

- Led by then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

So go ahead.

- Absolutely, and the truth is that a lot of people don't know about this history, right?

And I think it's really important to contextualize this present moment within these longer histories to illuminate sort of the ebb and flow of anti-Asian violence in response to domestic and global shifts.

And I think when we look at history, especially in the 1960s and seventies, we do see a lot of parallel organizing between black and Asian communities around the same systems of oppression and discrimination that affects both communities, right?

And we still see this organizing today in the present day.

- Professor, cannot thank you enough for joining us.

Complex, I appreciate the term contextualize, but the other thing is how complex this is.

But I promise you this will not be the last time we visit with you and get your perspective on these issues and other leaders and academic scholars in the community that are particularly concerned about the discrimination, racism, institutional and otherwise against the Asian American community.

Professor, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you so much, Steve.

See you next time.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

(grand music) - [Announcer] To watch more State of Affairs with Steve Adubato, find us online and follow us on social media.

- We're now joined by Dr. Mark Weber, Special Analyst for Education Policy at New Jersey Policy Perspective and a teacher of what grades, Doctor?

- I teach fourth and fifth grades.

I teach music.

- Why, why?

Before we get into the education, or the teacher shortage in the state, why teaching?

- Why teaching for me, or why teaching in general?

- For you, no, for you - For me, it was something I actually fell into as a second career, and I, surprisingly, turned out to be pretty good at it, and it's something that I actually love to do.

I've been a researcher for a good long while, but I never really wanted to give up being in the classroom, just because it's something I really enjoy.

But it also gives me a perspective as a researcher, that I think a lot of other people maybe don't have.

There are a lot of times people will talk about policy initiatives, but if you haven't actually been in a school, and worked in a school, it's hard to know how you can get those going, how you can get those off the ground.

So, I like having one foot in both worlds.

- Got it.

Let me ask you about this, Mark, the teacher shortage.

We have a series, you'll see the graphic up "Who Will Teach Our Kids".

It's a miniseries we're committed to doing, over as long as it's necessary, which my sense is it's gonna be a while, to talk about who will in fact teach our kids.

Does it, there's a shortage of teachers right now, the alternate route or the going a different route to become a teacher, what does it actually mean?

A and B, How much more should the state, and the nation should be doing in that regard?

- The alternate route is basically an alternative to becoming a teacher through getting a four year degree at a university, and becoming certificated that way.

So it's generally for people who've already earned their degree, and are considering teaching, like myself, as a second career.

I actually began as an alternate route teacher, and then went on and got a master's degree in teaching.

So it's a very valid, very perfectly important way to enter into the teaching profession.

The problem is that we've seen fewer people pursue both that route, and the traditional route, over the last, say, decade or so.

We've seen a steep drop off in the number of people who are entering teaching preparation programs, and we've seen a steep drop off in people who are earning degrees in education, that would eventually lead them to a teaching job.

And this has got to be part of the problem that we are having with the teacher shortage, that we're hearing about from our district leaders, across the state.

- Mark, I just actually interviewed, I just finished an interview with Governor Murphy.

It's a full half hour, if you haven't seen it on the broadcast side, check out our website, steveadubato.org.

You can see it there as well.

But I asked the governor about this, and he talked about a whole range of things the Murphy administration is doing in this regard, to create more opportunities for teachers or people to come into the teaching profession.

How would you not just rate, but describe the Murphy Administration's efforts in this regard?

- I think that Governor Murphy has done something important, and that is elevate the teaching profession itself.

I don't think there's any mystery about how Governor Christie before viewed the teaching profession, and more specifically the unions that represent that profession.

- To be fair, I, to be fair, I've interviewed Governor Christie, former Governor Christie, many times.

He would often say he separates his relationship with the teachers union, the NJEA, in fact one of the underwriters of our programming, from teachers.

That's how he would describe it.

But go ahead, Mark.

- I can understand that.

I'm not quite sure that a lot of educators in the state would see it the same way.

In terms of Governor Murphy though, he did come in, and he said he wanted to elevate the teaching profession.

I think that that's important, and I'm glad he's done that.

However, I'd have to say there are some things that I do not understand that the governor has not pursued, in terms of policy to make it easier for teachers to enter the profession.

- Be more specific, Mark, be more specific.

- Well, one specifically would be something called edTPA, which is a test, basically a portfolio assessment that student teachers do, that is sent off, not to their professors, not to the people in their teaching preparation programs, but sent off basically to strangers to go take a look at.

We've had some good evidence here in this state.

Very pleased to have worked with Dr. Drew Gitomer at Rutgers University over the years.

He has done research that points out there are some problems with this.

The legislature passed a bill to eliminate the edTPA requirement, and yet it is sitting on the governor's desk, from what I understand.

So I haven't heard yet a rationale from the governor's office about why that may be.

Having said all that, I do think that these probably are smaller issues, than the big issue.

And the big issue is, is teaching now a job that people want to do?

We have a very strong labor market.

There are a lot of opportunities for people with a college degree out there, in all sorts of fields.

What is it about teaching that attracts people that wants to draw them in?

And I'm afraid, from what I'm seeing, that there are fewer and fewer reasons why a young person would go into a great deal of debt, earn their college degree, and then turn around to become a teacher.

- Well, we've got about a minute left.

But you did it and, and make the case right now.

- I did it back at a time where the pay gap between what I earned and what someone else who has an equivalent education earned, was not as great as it is today.

That pay gap has grown over the last 10 years.

- We have to, sorry for interrupting.

In the limited time we have, we have to pay, you're arguing, we have to pay our teachers significantly at a significantly higher rate.

- I put it this way, let's pay them a competitive rate.

Certainly there are, and I'm, take myself as an example.

There are people who go into teaching because they love it, but the the economic cost cannot be so great that even if it was something that you wanted to do, you have to say, I can't do it.

I have to pay off my college loans.

I have to go basically make enough money to make a decent middle class living - Dr. Mark Weber, not just a teacher.

Not, I shouldn't say just, in addition to being a teacher, a senior, a Special Policy Analyst over at New Jersey Policy Perspective regarding education policy.

Mark, thanks so much for joining us.

- Thank you, Steve.

- You got it, I'm Steve Adubato, that's Dr. Weber.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] State of Affairs with Steve Adubato Is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Valley Bank.

The New Jersey Education Association.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

Hackensack Meridian Health.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

And by Johnson & Johnson.

Promotional support provided by Insider NJ.

And by Northjersey.com and Local IQ.

Part of the USA Today Network.

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Since joining the NJEDA, I've been struck by the incredible assets and resources that New Jersey has to offer.

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Visit njeda.com to learn more about how NJEDA is building a stronger and fairer New Jersey economy.