July 6, 2016 • 33 mins
Of the tens of thousands of talented, low-income students who graduate from high school every year in the United States, most never make it to universities appropriate to their gifts. America leaves an enormous amount of talent on the table every year. “Carlos Doesn’t Remember” explains why.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Yes, I am a sophomore high school and that
high school you started there in ninth grade. No, it's
my first year. This is your first year. Yeah yeah,
will you challenge in your old school? No? No, not really.
(00:40):
Welcome to Revisionist History, where every week we re examine
something from the past that's been forgotten or misunderstood. I'm
Malcolm Gladwow. This episode is about a young man named Carlos,
(01:01):
which is not his real name. I've changed it for
reasons that will become obvious. Were you bored most of
the timing? What were you doing when you're sitting in class? Well,
I usually finished my classwork a lot earlier than some
(01:21):
of the other kids, and I guess I was a
little boared. Carlos is slight, a little short for his age, braces,
thick head of black hair. A good looking kid, but normal.
He wouldn't stand out if you saw him on a
school bus. It's his manner that's distinctive for a teenager.
He's really deliberate, thoughtful, a little guarded in a way
(01:43):
that makes him seem much older. He lives in Los Angeles.
He's just transferred from a massive public high school to
an elite private school. I really enjoy math. Math is
just it's not easy, but it just makes the most sense.
When he talks about math, Carlos relaxes. He looks happy,
like math is the warmest and safest place. He knows.
(02:06):
Some people just say they hate math because they don't
understand it. But I just like learning about like the
concepts of math, and when I can understand something, I
feel it just makes it. Everything's very precise, you know,
it's not a lot of room for error. That's I
guess that's why I like math. Is that the subject
that you'd get the best grades in. Well, I do
(02:28):
get pretty good grades all my classes. What's the last
time in school you ever felt that you didn't understand
something or couldn't do something or I'm going to sound
kind of arrogant, I think, but most concepts that you
know I'm taught, I catch on them pretty quickly. Carlos
(02:52):
is a smart kid. He's gotten a scholarship to a
really good private school. He's excelling. It's not hard to
imagine that one day he'll go to a college of
his choice. He's going places. This is what civilized societies
are supposed to do. To provide opportunities for people to
make the most of their ability, so that if you're
(03:14):
born poor, you can move up. If you work hard,
you can improve your lot. There's even a term for this, capitalization.
A society's capitalization rate is the percentage of people in
any group who are able to reach their potential capitalize
on their potential. I think the capitalization rate is one
(03:35):
of the single best ways we have to capture how
successful and just a society is. If I know that number,
I think I have a better handle on how well
a country is doing than if I know it's GDP
or its growth rate or its per capita income. And
right from the beginning, Americans have told themselves that they're
(03:56):
really good at capitalization, really good at social mobility. Any
kid can grow up to be president. That's what's supposed
to set America apart from everywhere else. Over the course
of the next three episodes of Revisionist History, I want
to reevaluate this idea, go back and ask the question,
(04:20):
is it true that we're good at capitalization. In one
upcoming show, we're going to talk about where the money
goes in American higher ed. I'm going to take you
to a small college in South Jersey and ask the
question is the system geared to serve the poor smart
kid or the rich smart kid. In another episode, I'm
(04:40):
going to compare two liberal arts colleges and ask what
happens when a school really tries to help someone like Carlos.
But this episode is about Carlos himself, because his story
is a little more complicated than it seems, actually a
lot more complicated. I met Carlos through a man named
(05:02):
Eric Eisner, And what was your first impression of it?
Miss Eisner? You can speak freely even though he's in
the room. What was rising? Canvey intimidating and sometimes. Eric
used to be a big shot entertainment lawyer back in
the day. He worked for David Geffen. He's a kind
of athletes swagger where his impeccable Tom Ford's suits. Anyway,
(05:26):
he retired in the early nineteen nineties and a few
years later started a program for gifted public school kids
in Los Angeles. It's called Yes. He talks to a
lot of teachers, looks at test scores, identifies the most
promising kids, tutors them, and uses his connections to get
them into private schools. He's been doing it for nearly
(05:47):
twenty years. A couple hundred students have passed through Yes
and have gone on to graduate from some of the
top universities in the country. Carlos is one of his kids.
When Carlos was in fifth grade, Eric got him into
a fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Now several years later,
Carlos comes to meet me at Eric's house in bel Air,
(06:10):
up one of those winding, gorgeous canyon roads from Sunset Boulevard.
I'm across the table from Carlos. Eric is behind me,
sitting in an armchair. That's why his voice is sometimes
a little faint. Eric asks Carlos to think back to
that fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Did he feel self
conscious going there? I did, but not because I was Hispanic.
(06:31):
Eric asks whether it was because Carlos was poor and
those kids were rich. Did that make Carlos feel self conscious? Well,
not a thing about it. I think he kind of did,
you know? Definitely, I felt like I was the only one,
not the only one the episode of the scenes. Eric
(06:54):
asks about the episode with the sneakers. Did Carlos remember
that your racists from your memory? I have? I Keith
telling what happened. Here's what happened. The teachers in Brentwood
called Eric to tell him that Carlos wasn't playing with
the other kids at recess, even though he seemed very
engaged with him in the classroom. Eric then talked with
(07:15):
Carlos and noticed that his sneakers were about three sizes
too big. So he bought him shoes the right size,
and that's solved the problem. Do you remember this, the
being not willing to play his forts with the other kids.
That does ring a bell, But I don't, don't I
remember the snee years. Eric says Carlos's sneakers were so
big they curled up like elf shoes. But Carlos says
(07:38):
he doesn't remember the sneakers. This happens to him a lot.
I said at the beginning that the capitalization story for
people like Carlos is complicated, and this is what I mean.
Carlos is a really, really gifted kid. But it's almost
(08:00):
impossible to imagine Carlos making it into the fancy school
without Eric. In other words, in order for the system
to work, for the smart kid to make it up
the ladder, he needs an advocate and not just an
ordinary advocate, a high powered guy with lots of connections
who can get you in and watch over you and
make sure you get new sneakers because the ones you
(08:22):
have are curled up like elf shoes. Capitalization requires an
Eric Eisner. And how many Eric Eisner's do you think
there are out there? Then there's the second complication. To
find opportunity, Carlos had to go to Brentwood, forty five
minutes up the freeway from where he grew up, a wealthy, white,
(08:44):
leafy green neighborhood. The truth is that's where opportunity is
in America these days. But you can't just jump from
where Carlos was from straight to Brentwood and leave your
past behind. Your past comes with you. What were the
other students like, Well those students, well you actually kids
(09:05):
aren't going to be kids, and so they weren't two different. Okay,
I need to give me a second here, ending nervous.
A few years ago two prominent economists, Caroline Hawksby of
Stanford and Chris Avery of Harvard, published a really important
(09:27):
paper called The Missing One Offs. Hawksby and Avery start
out by talking about something that happened ten years ago.
That's when some of the elite US colleges, the Harvards
and Princetons of the world, announced that they'd give free
tuition to any deserving student who came from the bottom
of the economic ladder. At the time, the cutoff was
(09:48):
a family income of forty thousand dollars a year. Now
it's sixty five thousand. In other words, if a poor
kid is smart enough to get in, she can attend
for free. And what happens after the elite schools make
this announcement not much. To use Harvard as an example,
they ended up taking in about an additional fifteen or
so low income student a year after changing their policies.
(10:11):
That's out of a freshman class of more than sixteen hundred.
It's a drop in the bucket. Let me quote directly
from the paper now, because this is a crucial point. Interestingly,
this very modest effect was not a surprise to many
college admission staff. They explained that there was a small
pool of low income, high achieving students who were already
(10:33):
fully tapped, so that additional aid and recruiting could do
little except shift them among institutions that were fairly similar.
In other words, the admissions officers felt they had gone
out of their way to look for these kinds of kids.
They'd made special visits to high schools with lots of
poor students, that sent out letters to kids with high
(10:54):
test scores living in bad neighborhoods. They had built a
network of guidance counselors. They sponsored free campus visits for
low income students, and they made a tuition free. But
if you do all those things and you only get
an extra fifteen smart poor kids a year at Harvard,
that must mean that there aren't a lot of poor,
smart kids out there. They're talking about Carlos. They're saying
(11:16):
that kids like Carlos are pretty rare. Hucksby and Avery
decide to fact check this is it true. They go
to the College Board and get the entire database of
college test scores SAT and ACT. Then they take those
(11:38):
scores and match each score to a high school and
a neighborhood and a zip code, and to all that
they could find about where the student comes from. And
they end up with a giant map of every high achieving,
low income high school senior in the country. And here's
what Hucksby and Avery discover. The admissions officers are totally wrong. Actually,
(11:59):
there are a huge number of poor smart kids in
the United States. There's probably thirty five thousand students a
year who score in the ninetieth percent or above on
their SATs, and who also come from families living on
less than forty thousand dollars a year. Now, keep in mind,
these are kids who don't have tutors, who don't go
(12:20):
to high schools with a million advanced placement courses, and
who probably took the test once, not two or three
times like upper middle class kids. So these scores are
on the low side. These are kids who could ace
a test in one shot. Eric Eisner started yes almost
(12:40):
twenty years ago at an LA Middle School in a
place called Lennox, which is this small, heavily Hispanic community
of about twenty thousand people hollowed out in the middle
of Los Angeles, right across the four or five Freeway
from Lax. I mean right across you can practically touch
the planes as they take off in land. The median
(13:03):
household income in Lennox is thirty seven thousand dollars a year.
It's not a good name hood. Lennox Middle School has
six hundred kids per grade. The classrooms are these standalone
(13:24):
wooden and cinder block huts, row upon row of them.
They only put in windows in the huts last year,
tiny little windows high on the wall. There's a big
fence around the outside, a guard in a hut at
the gate. I don't want this to come across the
wrong way, but Lennox looks like a concentration gam When
(13:44):
I was there, a police cruiser drove slowly back and
forth between the long rows of huts. Oh, and next
to the principal's office, they are what looked like six
narrow closets, solitary confinement cells with a stash a kid
until the cops come. Remember this is a middle school.
You go to a place like Lennox and you can't
help feeling hopeless. This is as bad as La gets.
(14:08):
But from the beginning, when he came there looking for
bright kids, Eric Eisner hit paydirt. I'm curious about the
idea you can go to a fairly randomly selected middle
school in a disadvantaged neighborhood in a major American city
and reliably find every year a handful of really, really
(14:31):
really gifted kids. Right, I think, yeah, it's It varies
even within the school. From year to year, you never
know what kind of crop it's going to be. It's
a little like wine. But some years it's very they're
very few, and sometimes one or none. But then other
years you'll dey'll be five of them. But there is,
(14:53):
you know, it's it's it's not like you're looking for
a needle in a haystack. It's not like you're looking
for a needle in a haystack. There's a ton of
talent out there, all right. If there are so many
smart poor kids, why aren't they showing up at places
like Harvard. The researchers Avery and Hawksby find that a
(15:16):
good chunk of the thirty five thousand high achievers don't
even so much as apply to a good school. That's crazy, right,
Most selective schools are practically free for these kids. An
elite school is cheaper than the local state college down
the street. More importantly, these are really smart kids. We're
not talking here about some mediocre student who gets into
(15:37):
an elite college because he's a great football player, or
his dad built a new dorm and he ends up
being way over his head. We're talking about kids like Carlos.
Most concepts that I'm taught. I catch Onston pretty quickly.
Eric thinks that the system can't find kids like Carlos
because it starts looking much too late. The admissions officers
are sending out their letters to high school juniors seventeen
(16:00):
year olds kidding me in Lennox. Eric says, you have
to start finding the smart kids in the fourth grade.
That's because they may not even show up later. It's
like any muscle, it atrophies, and then by the time
the boy girl thinn happens, if that hasn't been encouraged,
(16:21):
that excitement of being smart, it goes away. It goes
away because when the struggle hits them of going to
any kind of challenge in college, they don't have the
cleatsa for that anymore. They don't have those hiking shoes anymore.
They're just not accustomed to it. So what was happening
(16:42):
before Yes shows up at this school or in schools
where there is no one looking out for the promising
fourth grader, what happens to those kids? Well, when we
came here, they discouraged me from waiting until the eighth
grade to meet with the boys, which is what I
(17:02):
wanted to do. They said, you can't wait that long
because eighty percent of those boys get gang affiliated by
the eighth grade. Gone by the eighth grade then comes
high school. But there is no high school Lennox. The
kids from Lennox have to go one town over to Hawthorne,
and that means crossing gang lines. Remember that statistic that
(17:25):
Hucksby and Avery came up with for the total number
of smart poor kids. It's low. That number is based
on the pool of high school seniors who took either
the ACT or the SAT. So to show up in
their pool of thirty five thousand poor smart kids, you
had to have made it all the way to the
end of high school and taking one of those stanandized tests.
(17:47):
Eric's point is that a good number of high achievers
in places like Lennox never even get that far. What's
the capitalization rate in Lennox if you have to cross
a gang line to get to high school. I think
we have an ideology about talent that says the talent
(18:08):
is a tan jible, resilient, hard and shiny thing. It
will always rise to the top. And to find an
encouraged talent, all you have to do as a society
is to make sure the right doors are open, free
campus physics, free tuition letters to the kids with high scores.
That's the ideology of the admissions officer. You raise your
(18:28):
hand and say over here, and the talent will come running.
But that's not true in Lennox. It's not resilient and shiny.
At Lennox Middle School, talent is really really fragile. So
Eric found Carlos and Lennox and used his Westside LA
lawyer savvy to get Carlos into an elite private elementary
(18:50):
school in Brentwood. Every morning, Carlos took a long bust
ride up the four or five from Lennox to this school.
I've known Eric for a long time, and I always
joke with him that the slogan of his organization YES
ought to be that every Los Angeles public school child
deserves his own Jewish entertainment lawyer. He always laughs because
that's what he's been doing for close to twenty years,
(19:12):
cutting deals with private schools for his YES kids. So
Carlos is doing really well. Of course he is. He's
an exceptional student. Eric starts looking for Carlos's next step.
He makes some inquiries. Carlos gets an offer of a
full ride scholarship to one of the most exclusive private
high schools in the country. If he were a kid
from a normal middle class neighborhood and family, you'd say
(19:35):
he's all set. But he's not. I really wanted to
go to boarding school. Yeah no, but in the end
I didn't get to go. The boarding school he's referring
to is Chod in Central Connecticut. It's his ticket out.
But remember I said that Carlos's story gets complicated. Well,
here's yet another complication. Carlos has a little sister. She's
(19:59):
also in the room with us, along with Elina Bereff,
who runs Yes. With Eric, we start talking about why
Carlos couldn't go to Choate birthday right. It was the
summer before Carlos was supposed to go to high school.
But Eric has to remind him that there was a
lot else going on other than school. Yeah. Um, well,
(20:23):
in the eighth was the eighth grade? Right? Eighth grade
for me? Foster care, Yeah, I forgot. Did you catch that?
He set it really quickly under his breath. That phrase again,
I forgot. In the summer going into the eighth grade,
my sister and I were put into um Foster homes.
(20:46):
Carlos and his sister were put into foster homes. We're
leaving away from from our mother, and I guessed I
had a bit of an emotional, you know, toll on me.
And I definitely still tried at school. I didn't let it,
you know, affect my grades like too much. Maybe by
(21:09):
now you can understand the strategic value of Carlos's selective memory,
because there weren't a lot of good things happening in
his life. I'll let you use your imagination. It was bad,
Lennox bad, not Brentwood bad. Then he says, I definitely
still tried at school. I didn't let it affect my
grades too much. Things are falling apart, but he understands
(21:33):
that he has one way out, and that is to
be a great student, not a good one. Good doesn't
get you anywhere a great one. So he puts everything
else in a box. He's got to take care of
his sister and get good grades. I spoke with Eric
about it later. He took on this burden that was
(21:55):
so above his skill set of being a father, being
a husband, being everything. And that's why she wouldn't let
him go to choke when they gave him a full
scholars Oh that was the she he's talking about, Carlos's mother.
You can imagine how frustrating and angering that was for me,
(22:17):
The opportunity of him going to a school like that
and getting away from all that, and her understandably killing
it because he was taking care of her and that's
what he was what in the eighth grade he did
say I would have liked to go to boarding school. Oh,
he definitely wanted to go. We sort of licked our
(22:40):
wounds by convincing ourselves that at least he would be
there for the little sister. It's a chaotic time. Carlos's
mother tells him not to go to Choke, but stay
so he can take care of her and his sister.
Then the two are taken from their mother. They become
wards of Los Angeles County. You know, growing up with
(23:02):
your parents and being suddenly, you know, taken away, and
you know it can't be good. And but I guess,
I guess the hardest part was moving around house house.
It's not that I moved to one foster home and
then stay there for a year and a half. I've
I think four four homes and worse than that for
(23:26):
a time he was separated from his little sister. How
long will you separated from the first foster home? Didn't like,
we weren't separated for too long because we made a
point to our social workers to please, you know, reunite us.
He's making it sound like it wasn't that much of
a big deal. It was a big deal. Choke goes away,
(23:48):
their mother goes away. Now his little sister is taken away,
and the two of them start bouncing around the foster
homes of South LA and made a point to our
social workers to please reunite us. It was a war.
This is Eric again from later. He didn't tell you
how disastrous these first foster homes were. When you say disastrous,
(24:10):
what do you mean just idiotic? I mean, it wasn't like, oh,
thank god, they're in this wonderful home. First of all,
they were one of five foster kids in the You
know what I mean, this is not let us take
you into our home. This is how much are you
going to pay us? How many kids can we write? Meanwhile,
the mother is roaming around the planet like beetlejuice, and
(24:35):
we have to, you know, keep her at bay. It
was just you know it was. It was a mess.
Did you know your father? Yeah? Yeah, I still have
my father, and I we he was he was absent
for a large part of my life. And where is
your mother now? My mother, my mother is is in prison.
(25:01):
Oh yeah, yeah, in Texas. I'll let you use your
imagination again as to why it wasn't an easy thing
for a kid, two kids to deal with. Eric's Collegelna,
is sitting quietly in the room. She tries to put
things in perspective. Carlos's mum, Alina, says, had a difficult
(25:21):
time with losing control of her children. That made it
hard for Eric and Elina to stay involved. Finally, the
mother tells Eric and Elina, and this is the phrase
Elina uses to detach themselves. The kids vanish for a
year and a half, and neither Eric nor Elena know
(25:43):
whether they'll ever see them again. That's the difference between
being privileged and being poor in America. It's how many
chances you get if you're wealthy. All kinds of things
can happen and you'll be okay. You can drop out
(26:03):
of school for a year, you can get addicted to painkillers,
you can have a bad car, accident. No one ever
says of the upper middle class high school kid whose
parents get a terrible divorce, I wonder if she'll ever
go to college. She's going to college. Disruption is not
fatal to life chances. A friend of mine was once
stopped by cops speeding on the East River Drive in Manhattan,
(26:25):
drunk with a syringe on the dashboard. And what happened.
Nothing happened. He went on to have a kind of
brilliant career he deserved to have. That's the point of privilege.
It buys you second chances. But if you're from Lennox,
even if you're a kid with all the talent in
the world, you don't get the same number of chances.
(26:48):
That's why there are at least thirty five thousand really smart,
poor high school seniors every year in this country, and
so few of them are making it to the kinds
of colleges they deserve because too many things get in
the way. When I'm at Erica, and a few days later,
(27:10):
he told me a second story. He said it was
about another Carlos. As he put it, he said, he
got a call from an elementary school principle in Lennox.
She says, I want you to come meet a bunch
of fourth graders that I think are outstanding. When I
got to the third boy, I said, so tell me
about yourself. Eric asks about the little boy's father, Where
(27:33):
is he? It's the standard question he always starts with,
because there are so many absent fathers in that world
that that question narrows things down pretty quickly. His answer
was so peculiar. It gripped me so fast. He looked
at me and he said there was violence. Those were
the very words that came out of his mouth. And
(27:54):
the minute he said it, I wed, Oh my god,
I had more than the sneaking suspicion. This is the
boy who saw virtually his entire family murdered by a
crazy neighbor with who got into a beef with his father.
(28:16):
He saw his father killed, his older brother killed. Guy
had a shotgun. He ran into the house, grabbed his
little sister. They hit under a bed, and the guy
burned the house down. He was hiding under the bed
while the house was on fire. His mother finally came back.
He ran outside to see his mother beaten up. She
was in the hospital for months after this, and the
(28:37):
police came. The shotgun. It was so horrendous, and it
didn't occur to me that this was an Olytics family.
And I'm realized, I am now talking to this boy
because he is one of the three outstanding boys in
the class. Wait, what was he like? Fantastic, he was poised,
(28:58):
he was articulate. When he said there was violence, the
needle moved one hundred and eighty. It went from Wow,
what an interesting, remarkable, articulate, confident kid you are, What
a fortunate kid you are? To oh my god, I
now think I know the reality of you. Even as
(29:24):
an eight year old, this kid was smart enough to
know that meeting Eric was his big chance and that
his job was to put all the bad stuff aside,
to put it in a box. That's what these kids
are like the ones who make it out. They learn
from a very early age where the exits are and
they don't let anything get in their way. You see
(29:44):
your family getting massacred or your mother go to prison,
and you say, like Carlos did, I definitely still tried
at school. I didn't let it affect my grades too much.
So what happens to Carlos He gets lucky, lucky because
the foster care, situation works itself out. He forgets all
(30:07):
the bad stuff that's happening, He takes care of his sister,
He re established his contact with Eric and Elena, and
they find him another private school, not shout, not a
boarding school, something closer to home. But whatever you do,
don't call this story inspirational, because it's not. It's depressing
(30:28):
because it says that if you live in Lennox and
things go awry, you have to have an Eric and
Elena in your corner and be as tough and single
minded and one in a million as Carlos is. To
make it out, that's why the capitalization of talent is
such an issue, because these are really long odds. Back
(30:53):
with Carlos and his sister at Eric Eisner's house, Eric
turns to Carlos and asks, do you remember feeling pessimist?
Were you ever pessimistic? I wasn't really pessimistic as well. Yeah,
(31:13):
overwhelms it is a great word. I guess it's just
a lot happening at the time, and I was, and
then I was back in the public school. You know,
it was like it was like I started right back,
you know, right from square one. Eric turns to Carlos's
sister and asks whether she ever worried that her brother
(31:34):
had had enough. What would you do if he gave up?
You remember the time when you looked at him and
we're concerned that he was kind of what would you
do if he gave up? He was a very optimistic person.
He was a very optimistic person, She says. I feel
(31:55):
like he was strong for the both of us a
lot of the times. A time, Carlos is looking straight
ahead as she's speaking, like he doesn't want to cry.
Then she says it again, and never live. Honestly, I
never thought of him as someone who gives up. That's
(32:19):
never worried about it. She was never worried about it.
(32:52):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
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It helps. You can get more information about this in
other episodes at revisionist history dot com or on your
favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Meil LaBelle,
Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
(33:16):
Music is composed by Luis Kerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn
Williams is our engineer and Our fact checker is Michelle Siroca.
Penetly Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg.
I'm Malcolm Cladwell.
Pushkin. Yes, I am a sophomore high school and that
high school you started there in ninth grade. No, it's
my first year. This is your first year. Yeah yeah,
will you challenge in your old school? No? No, not really.
(00:40):
Welcome to Revisionist History, where every week we re examine
something from the past that's been forgotten or misunderstood. I'm
Malcolm Gladwow. This episode is about a young man named Carlos,
(01:01):
which is not his real name. I've changed it for
reasons that will become obvious. Were you bored most of
the timing? What were you doing when you're sitting in class? Well,
I usually finished my classwork a lot earlier than some
(01:21):
of the other kids, and I guess I was a
little boared. Carlos is slight, a little short for his age, braces,
thick head of black hair. A good looking kid, but normal.
He wouldn't stand out if you saw him on a
school bus. It's his manner that's distinctive for a teenager.
He's really deliberate, thoughtful, a little guarded in a way
(01:43):
that makes him seem much older. He lives in Los Angeles.
He's just transferred from a massive public high school to
an elite private school. I really enjoy math. Math is
just it's not easy, but it just makes the most sense.
When he talks about math, Carlos relaxes. He looks happy,
like math is the warmest and safest place. He knows.
(02:06):
Some people just say they hate math because they don't
understand it. But I just like learning about like the
concepts of math, and when I can understand something, I
feel it just makes it. Everything's very precise, you know,
it's not a lot of room for error. That's I
guess that's why I like math. Is that the subject
that you'd get the best grades in. Well, I do
(02:28):
get pretty good grades all my classes. What's the last
time in school you ever felt that you didn't understand
something or couldn't do something or I'm going to sound
kind of arrogant, I think, but most concepts that you
know I'm taught, I catch on them pretty quickly. Carlos
(02:52):
is a smart kid. He's gotten a scholarship to a
really good private school. He's excelling. It's not hard to
imagine that one day he'll go to a college of
his choice. He's going places. This is what civilized societies
are supposed to do. To provide opportunities for people to
make the most of their ability, so that if you're
(03:14):
born poor, you can move up. If you work hard,
you can improve your lot. There's even a term for this, capitalization.
A society's capitalization rate is the percentage of people in
any group who are able to reach their potential capitalize
on their potential. I think the capitalization rate is one
(03:35):
of the single best ways we have to capture how
successful and just a society is. If I know that number,
I think I have a better handle on how well
a country is doing than if I know it's GDP
or its growth rate or its per capita income. And
right from the beginning, Americans have told themselves that they're
(03:56):
really good at capitalization, really good at social mobility. Any
kid can grow up to be president. That's what's supposed
to set America apart from everywhere else. Over the course
of the next three episodes of Revisionist History, I want
to reevaluate this idea, go back and ask the question,
(04:20):
is it true that we're good at capitalization. In one
upcoming show, we're going to talk about where the money
goes in American higher ed. I'm going to take you
to a small college in South Jersey and ask the
question is the system geared to serve the poor smart
kid or the rich smart kid. In another episode, I'm
(04:40):
going to compare two liberal arts colleges and ask what
happens when a school really tries to help someone like Carlos.
But this episode is about Carlos himself, because his story
is a little more complicated than it seems, actually a
lot more complicated. I met Carlos through a man named
(05:02):
Eric Eisner, And what was your first impression of it?
Miss Eisner? You can speak freely even though he's in
the room. What was rising? Canvey intimidating and sometimes. Eric
used to be a big shot entertainment lawyer back in
the day. He worked for David Geffen. He's a kind
of athletes swagger where his impeccable Tom Ford's suits. Anyway,
(05:26):
he retired in the early nineteen nineties and a few
years later started a program for gifted public school kids
in Los Angeles. It's called Yes. He talks to a
lot of teachers, looks at test scores, identifies the most
promising kids, tutors them, and uses his connections to get
them into private schools. He's been doing it for nearly
(05:47):
twenty years. A couple hundred students have passed through Yes
and have gone on to graduate from some of the
top universities in the country. Carlos is one of his kids.
When Carlos was in fifth grade, Eric got him into
a fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Now several years later,
Carlos comes to meet me at Eric's house in bel Air,
(06:10):
up one of those winding, gorgeous canyon roads from Sunset Boulevard.
I'm across the table from Carlos. Eric is behind me,
sitting in an armchair. That's why his voice is sometimes
a little faint. Eric asks Carlos to think back to
that fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Did he feel self
conscious going there? I did, but not because I was Hispanic.
(06:31):
Eric asks whether it was because Carlos was poor and
those kids were rich. Did that make Carlos feel self conscious? Well,
not a thing about it. I think he kind of did,
you know? Definitely, I felt like I was the only one,
not the only one the episode of the scenes. Eric
(06:54):
asks about the episode with the sneakers. Did Carlos remember
that your racists from your memory? I have? I Keith
telling what happened. Here's what happened. The teachers in Brentwood
called Eric to tell him that Carlos wasn't playing with
the other kids at recess, even though he seemed very
engaged with him in the classroom. Eric then talked with
(07:15):
Carlos and noticed that his sneakers were about three sizes
too big. So he bought him shoes the right size,
and that's solved the problem. Do you remember this, the
being not willing to play his forts with the other kids.
That does ring a bell, But I don't, don't I
remember the snee years. Eric says Carlos's sneakers were so
big they curled up like elf shoes. But Carlos says
(07:38):
he doesn't remember the sneakers. This happens to him a lot.
I said at the beginning that the capitalization story for
people like Carlos is complicated, and this is what I mean.
Carlos is a really, really gifted kid. But it's almost
(08:00):
impossible to imagine Carlos making it into the fancy school
without Eric. In other words, in order for the system
to work, for the smart kid to make it up
the ladder, he needs an advocate and not just an
ordinary advocate, a high powered guy with lots of connections
who can get you in and watch over you and
make sure you get new sneakers because the ones you
(08:22):
have are curled up like elf shoes. Capitalization requires an
Eric Eisner. And how many Eric Eisner's do you think
there are out there? Then there's the second complication. To
find opportunity, Carlos had to go to Brentwood, forty five
minutes up the freeway from where he grew up, a wealthy, white,
(08:44):
leafy green neighborhood. The truth is that's where opportunity is
in America these days. But you can't just jump from
where Carlos was from straight to Brentwood and leave your
past behind. Your past comes with you. What were the
other students like, Well those students, well you actually kids
(09:05):
aren't going to be kids, and so they weren't two different. Okay,
I need to give me a second here, ending nervous.
A few years ago two prominent economists, Caroline Hawksby of
Stanford and Chris Avery of Harvard, published a really important
(09:27):
paper called The Missing One Offs. Hawksby and Avery start
out by talking about something that happened ten years ago.
That's when some of the elite US colleges, the Harvards
and Princetons of the world, announced that they'd give free
tuition to any deserving student who came from the bottom
of the economic ladder. At the time, the cutoff was
(09:48):
a family income of forty thousand dollars a year. Now
it's sixty five thousand. In other words, if a poor
kid is smart enough to get in, she can attend
for free. And what happens after the elite schools make
this announcement not much. To use Harvard as an example,
they ended up taking in about an additional fifteen or
so low income student a year after changing their policies.
(10:11):
That's out of a freshman class of more than sixteen hundred.
It's a drop in the bucket. Let me quote directly
from the paper now, because this is a crucial point. Interestingly,
this very modest effect was not a surprise to many
college admission staff. They explained that there was a small
pool of low income, high achieving students who were already
(10:33):
fully tapped, so that additional aid and recruiting could do
little except shift them among institutions that were fairly similar.
In other words, the admissions officers felt they had gone
out of their way to look for these kinds of kids.
They'd made special visits to high schools with lots of
poor students, that sent out letters to kids with high
(10:54):
test scores living in bad neighborhoods. They had built a
network of guidance counselors. They sponsored free campus visits for
low income students, and they made a tuition free. But
if you do all those things and you only get
an extra fifteen smart poor kids a year at Harvard,
that must mean that there aren't a lot of poor,
smart kids out there. They're talking about Carlos. They're saying
(11:16):
that kids like Carlos are pretty rare. Hucksby and Avery
decide to fact check this is it true. They go
to the College Board and get the entire database of
college test scores SAT and ACT. Then they take those
(11:38):
scores and match each score to a high school and
a neighborhood and a zip code, and to all that
they could find about where the student comes from. And
they end up with a giant map of every high achieving,
low income high school senior in the country. And here's
what Hucksby and Avery discover. The admissions officers are totally wrong. Actually,
(11:59):
there are a huge number of poor smart kids in
the United States. There's probably thirty five thousand students a
year who score in the ninetieth percent or above on
their SATs, and who also come from families living on
less than forty thousand dollars a year. Now, keep in mind,
these are kids who don't have tutors, who don't go
(12:20):
to high schools with a million advanced placement courses, and
who probably took the test once, not two or three
times like upper middle class kids. So these scores are
on the low side. These are kids who could ace
a test in one shot. Eric Eisner started yes almost
(12:40):
twenty years ago at an LA Middle School in a
place called Lennox, which is this small, heavily Hispanic community
of about twenty thousand people hollowed out in the middle
of Los Angeles, right across the four or five Freeway
from Lax. I mean right across you can practically touch
the planes as they take off in land. The median
(13:03):
household income in Lennox is thirty seven thousand dollars a year.
It's not a good name hood. Lennox Middle School has
six hundred kids per grade. The classrooms are these standalone
(13:24):
wooden and cinder block huts, row upon row of them.
They only put in windows in the huts last year,
tiny little windows high on the wall. There's a big
fence around the outside, a guard in a hut at
the gate. I don't want this to come across the
wrong way, but Lennox looks like a concentration gam When
(13:44):
I was there, a police cruiser drove slowly back and
forth between the long rows of huts. Oh, and next
to the principal's office, they are what looked like six
narrow closets, solitary confinement cells with a stash a kid
until the cops come. Remember this is a middle school.
You go to a place like Lennox and you can't
help feeling hopeless. This is as bad as La gets.
(14:08):
But from the beginning, when he came there looking for
bright kids, Eric Eisner hit paydirt. I'm curious about the
idea you can go to a fairly randomly selected middle
school in a disadvantaged neighborhood in a major American city
and reliably find every year a handful of really, really
(14:31):
really gifted kids. Right, I think, yeah, it's It varies
even within the school. From year to year, you never
know what kind of crop it's going to be. It's
a little like wine. But some years it's very they're
very few, and sometimes one or none. But then other
years you'll dey'll be five of them. But there is,
(14:53):
you know, it's it's it's not like you're looking for
a needle in a haystack. It's not like you're looking
for a needle in a haystack. There's a ton of
talent out there, all right. If there are so many
smart poor kids, why aren't they showing up at places
like Harvard. The researchers Avery and Hawksby find that a
(15:16):
good chunk of the thirty five thousand high achievers don't
even so much as apply to a good school. That's crazy, right,
Most selective schools are practically free for these kids. An
elite school is cheaper than the local state college down
the street. More importantly, these are really smart kids. We're
not talking here about some mediocre student who gets into
(15:37):
an elite college because he's a great football player, or
his dad built a new dorm and he ends up
being way over his head. We're talking about kids like Carlos.
Most concepts that I'm taught. I catch Onston pretty quickly.
Eric thinks that the system can't find kids like Carlos
because it starts looking much too late. The admissions officers
are sending out their letters to high school juniors seventeen
(16:00):
year olds kidding me in Lennox. Eric says, you have
to start finding the smart kids in the fourth grade.
That's because they may not even show up later. It's
like any muscle, it atrophies, and then by the time
the boy girl thinn happens, if that hasn't been encouraged,
(16:21):
that excitement of being smart, it goes away. It goes
away because when the struggle hits them of going to
any kind of challenge in college, they don't have the
cleatsa for that anymore. They don't have those hiking shoes anymore.
They're just not accustomed to it. So what was happening
(16:42):
before Yes shows up at this school or in schools
where there is no one looking out for the promising
fourth grader, what happens to those kids? Well, when we
came here, they discouraged me from waiting until the eighth
grade to meet with the boys, which is what I
(17:02):
wanted to do. They said, you can't wait that long
because eighty percent of those boys get gang affiliated by
the eighth grade. Gone by the eighth grade then comes
high school. But there is no high school Lennox. The
kids from Lennox have to go one town over to Hawthorne,
and that means crossing gang lines. Remember that statistic that
(17:25):
Hucksby and Avery came up with for the total number
of smart poor kids. It's low. That number is based
on the pool of high school seniors who took either
the ACT or the SAT. So to show up in
their pool of thirty five thousand poor smart kids, you
had to have made it all the way to the
end of high school and taking one of those stanandized tests.
(17:47):
Eric's point is that a good number of high achievers
in places like Lennox never even get that far. What's
the capitalization rate in Lennox if you have to cross
a gang line to get to high school. I think
we have an ideology about talent that says the talent
(18:08):
is a tan jible, resilient, hard and shiny thing. It
will always rise to the top. And to find an
encouraged talent, all you have to do as a society
is to make sure the right doors are open, free
campus physics, free tuition letters to the kids with high scores.
That's the ideology of the admissions officer. You raise your
(18:28):
hand and say over here, and the talent will come running.
But that's not true in Lennox. It's not resilient and shiny.
At Lennox Middle School, talent is really really fragile. So
Eric found Carlos and Lennox and used his Westside LA
lawyer savvy to get Carlos into an elite private elementary
(18:50):
school in Brentwood. Every morning, Carlos took a long bust
ride up the four or five from Lennox to this school.
I've known Eric for a long time, and I always
joke with him that the slogan of his organization YES
ought to be that every Los Angeles public school child
deserves his own Jewish entertainment lawyer. He always laughs because
that's what he's been doing for close to twenty years,
(19:12):
cutting deals with private schools for his YES kids. So
Carlos is doing really well. Of course he is. He's
an exceptional student. Eric starts looking for Carlos's next step.
He makes some inquiries. Carlos gets an offer of a
full ride scholarship to one of the most exclusive private
high schools in the country. If he were a kid
from a normal middle class neighborhood and family, you'd say
(19:35):
he's all set. But he's not. I really wanted to
go to boarding school. Yeah no, but in the end
I didn't get to go. The boarding school he's referring
to is Chod in Central Connecticut. It's his ticket out.
But remember I said that Carlos's story gets complicated. Well,
here's yet another complication. Carlos has a little sister. She's
(19:59):
also in the room with us, along with Elina Bereff,
who runs Yes. With Eric, we start talking about why
Carlos couldn't go to Choate birthday right. It was the
summer before Carlos was supposed to go to high school.
But Eric has to remind him that there was a
lot else going on other than school. Yeah. Um, well,
(20:23):
in the eighth was the eighth grade? Right? Eighth grade
for me? Foster care, Yeah, I forgot. Did you catch that?
He set it really quickly under his breath. That phrase again,
I forgot. In the summer going into the eighth grade,
my sister and I were put into um Foster homes.
(20:46):
Carlos and his sister were put into foster homes. We're
leaving away from from our mother, and I guessed I
had a bit of an emotional, you know, toll on me.
And I definitely still tried at school. I didn't let it,
you know, affect my grades like too much. Maybe by
(21:09):
now you can understand the strategic value of Carlos's selective memory,
because there weren't a lot of good things happening in
his life. I'll let you use your imagination. It was bad,
Lennox bad, not Brentwood bad. Then he says, I definitely
still tried at school. I didn't let it affect my
grades too much. Things are falling apart, but he understands
(21:33):
that he has one way out, and that is to
be a great student, not a good one. Good doesn't
get you anywhere a great one. So he puts everything
else in a box. He's got to take care of
his sister and get good grades. I spoke with Eric
about it later. He took on this burden that was
(21:55):
so above his skill set of being a father, being
a husband, being everything. And that's why she wouldn't let
him go to choke when they gave him a full
scholars Oh that was the she he's talking about, Carlos's mother.
You can imagine how frustrating and angering that was for me,
(22:17):
The opportunity of him going to a school like that
and getting away from all that, and her understandably killing
it because he was taking care of her and that's
what he was what in the eighth grade he did
say I would have liked to go to boarding school. Oh,
he definitely wanted to go. We sort of licked our
(22:40):
wounds by convincing ourselves that at least he would be
there for the little sister. It's a chaotic time. Carlos's
mother tells him not to go to Choke, but stay
so he can take care of her and his sister.
Then the two are taken from their mother. They become
wards of Los Angeles County. You know, growing up with
(23:02):
your parents and being suddenly, you know, taken away, and
you know it can't be good. And but I guess,
I guess the hardest part was moving around house house.
It's not that I moved to one foster home and
then stay there for a year and a half. I've
I think four four homes and worse than that for
(23:26):
a time he was separated from his little sister. How
long will you separated from the first foster home? Didn't like,
we weren't separated for too long because we made a
point to our social workers to please, you know, reunite us.
He's making it sound like it wasn't that much of
a big deal. It was a big deal. Choke goes away,
(23:48):
their mother goes away. Now his little sister is taken away,
and the two of them start bouncing around the foster
homes of South LA and made a point to our
social workers to please reunite us. It was a war.
This is Eric again from later. He didn't tell you
how disastrous these first foster homes were. When you say disastrous,
(24:10):
what do you mean just idiotic? I mean, it wasn't like, oh,
thank god, they're in this wonderful home. First of all,
they were one of five foster kids in the You
know what I mean, this is not let us take
you into our home. This is how much are you
going to pay us? How many kids can we write? Meanwhile,
the mother is roaming around the planet like beetlejuice, and
(24:35):
we have to, you know, keep her at bay. It
was just you know it was. It was a mess.
Did you know your father? Yeah? Yeah, I still have
my father, and I we he was he was absent
for a large part of my life. And where is
your mother now? My mother, my mother is is in prison.
(25:01):
Oh yeah, yeah, in Texas. I'll let you use your
imagination again as to why it wasn't an easy thing
for a kid, two kids to deal with. Eric's Collegelna,
is sitting quietly in the room. She tries to put
things in perspective. Carlos's mum, Alina, says, had a difficult
(25:21):
time with losing control of her children. That made it
hard for Eric and Elina to stay involved. Finally, the
mother tells Eric and Elina, and this is the phrase
Elina uses to detach themselves. The kids vanish for a
year and a half, and neither Eric nor Elena know
(25:43):
whether they'll ever see them again. That's the difference between
being privileged and being poor in America. It's how many
chances you get if you're wealthy. All kinds of things
can happen and you'll be okay. You can drop out
(26:03):
of school for a year, you can get addicted to painkillers,
you can have a bad car, accident. No one ever
says of the upper middle class high school kid whose
parents get a terrible divorce, I wonder if she'll ever
go to college. She's going to college. Disruption is not
fatal to life chances. A friend of mine was once
stopped by cops speeding on the East River Drive in Manhattan,
(26:25):
drunk with a syringe on the dashboard. And what happened.
Nothing happened. He went on to have a kind of
brilliant career he deserved to have. That's the point of privilege.
It buys you second chances. But if you're from Lennox,
even if you're a kid with all the talent in
the world, you don't get the same number of chances.
(26:48):
That's why there are at least thirty five thousand really smart,
poor high school seniors every year in this country, and
so few of them are making it to the kinds
of colleges they deserve because too many things get in
the way. When I'm at Erica, and a few days later,
(27:10):
he told me a second story. He said it was
about another Carlos. As he put it, he said, he
got a call from an elementary school principle in Lennox.
She says, I want you to come meet a bunch
of fourth graders that I think are outstanding. When I
got to the third boy, I said, so tell me
about yourself. Eric asks about the little boy's father, Where
(27:33):
is he? It's the standard question he always starts with,
because there are so many absent fathers in that world
that that question narrows things down pretty quickly. His answer
was so peculiar. It gripped me so fast. He looked
at me and he said there was violence. Those were
the very words that came out of his mouth. And
(27:54):
the minute he said it, I wed, Oh my god,
I had more than the sneaking suspicion. This is the
boy who saw virtually his entire family murdered by a
crazy neighbor with who got into a beef with his father.
(28:16):
He saw his father killed, his older brother killed. Guy
had a shotgun. He ran into the house, grabbed his
little sister. They hit under a bed, and the guy
burned the house down. He was hiding under the bed
while the house was on fire. His mother finally came back.
He ran outside to see his mother beaten up. She
was in the hospital for months after this, and the
(28:37):
police came. The shotgun. It was so horrendous, and it
didn't occur to me that this was an Olytics family.
And I'm realized, I am now talking to this boy
because he is one of the three outstanding boys in
the class. Wait, what was he like? Fantastic, he was poised,
(28:58):
he was articulate. When he said there was violence, the
needle moved one hundred and eighty. It went from Wow,
what an interesting, remarkable, articulate, confident kid you are, What
a fortunate kid you are? To oh my god, I
now think I know the reality of you. Even as
(29:24):
an eight year old, this kid was smart enough to
know that meeting Eric was his big chance and that
his job was to put all the bad stuff aside,
to put it in a box. That's what these kids
are like the ones who make it out. They learn
from a very early age where the exits are and
they don't let anything get in their way. You see
(29:44):
your family getting massacred or your mother go to prison,
and you say, like Carlos did, I definitely still tried
at school. I didn't let it affect my grades too much.
So what happens to Carlos He gets lucky, lucky because
the foster care, situation works itself out. He forgets all
(30:07):
the bad stuff that's happening, He takes care of his sister,
He re established his contact with Eric and Elena, and
they find him another private school, not shout, not a
boarding school, something closer to home. But whatever you do,
don't call this story inspirational, because it's not. It's depressing
(30:28):
because it says that if you live in Lennox and
things go awry, you have to have an Eric and
Elena in your corner and be as tough and single
minded and one in a million as Carlos is. To
make it out, that's why the capitalization of talent is
such an issue, because these are really long odds. Back
(30:53):
with Carlos and his sister at Eric Eisner's house, Eric
turns to Carlos and asks, do you remember feeling pessimist?
Were you ever pessimistic? I wasn't really pessimistic as well. Yeah,
(31:13):
overwhelms it is a great word. I guess it's just
a lot happening at the time, and I was, and
then I was back in the public school. You know,
it was like it was like I started right back,
you know, right from square one. Eric turns to Carlos's
sister and asks whether she ever worried that her brother
(31:34):
had had enough. What would you do if he gave up?
You remember the time when you looked at him and
we're concerned that he was kind of what would you
do if he gave up? He was a very optimistic person.
He was a very optimistic person, She says. I feel
(31:55):
like he was strong for the both of us a
lot of the times. A time, Carlos is looking straight
ahead as she's speaking, like he doesn't want to cry.
Then she says it again, and never live. Honestly, I
never thought of him as someone who gives up. That's
(32:19):
never worried about it. She was never worried about it.
(32:52):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes.
It helps. You can get more information about this in
other episodes at revisionist history dot com or on your
favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Meil LaBelle,
Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
(33:16):
Music is composed by Luis Kerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn
Williams is our engineer and Our fact checker is Michelle Siroca.
Penetly Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg.
I'm Malcolm Cladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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