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