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Carlos Doesn’t Remember · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:18
Speaker 2: Yes, I am a sophomore high school.
0:20
Speaker 1: And that high school you started there in ninth grade.
0:23
Speaker 2: No, this is my first year.
0:25
Speaker 1: This is your first year.
0:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.
0:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, Were you challenged in your old school?
0:29
Speaker 2: Uh? No, no, not really.
0:40
Speaker 1: Welcome to Revisionist History, where every week we re examined
0:44
Speaker 1: something from the past that's been forgotten or misunderstood. I'm
0:47
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell. This episode is about a young man named Carlos,
1:01
Speaker 1: which is not his real name. I've changed it for
1:03
Speaker 1: reasons that will become obvious. Were you bored most of
1:13
Speaker 1: the time and what were you doing when you're sitting
1:14
Speaker 1: in class?
1:16
Speaker 2: Well, I usually finished my class work a lot earlier
1:21
Speaker 2: in some of the other kids, and I guess I
1:24
Speaker 2: was a little bored.
1:26
Speaker 1: Carlos is slight, a little short for his age, braces,
1:29
Speaker 1: thick head of black hair. A good looking kid, but normal.
1:34
Speaker 1: He wouldn't stand out if you saw him on a
1:35
Speaker 1: school bus. It's his manner that's distinctive for a teenager.
1:40
Speaker 1: He's really deliberate, thoughtful, a little guarded in a way
1:43
Speaker 1: that makes him seem much older. He lives in Los Angeles.
1:47
Speaker 1: He's just transferred from a massive public high school, to
1:50
Speaker 1: an elite private school.
1:51
Speaker 2: I really enjoy math. Math is just is not easy,
1:56
Speaker 2: but it just makes the most sense.
1:58
Speaker 1: When he talks about math, Carlos relaxes. He looks happy,
2:02
Speaker 1: like math is the warmest and safest place he knows.
2:06
Speaker 2: Some people just say they hate math because they don't
2:08
Speaker 2: understand it. But I just like learning about, like the
2:11
Speaker 2: concepts of math. When I can understand something, I feel,
2:16
Speaker 2: it just makes it. Everything's very precise, you know, it's
2:21
Speaker 2: not a lot of room for error. That's I guess
2:24
Speaker 2: that's why I like math.
2:25
Speaker 1: Is that the subject that you'd get the best grades in.
2:28
Speaker 2: Well, I do get pretty good grades all my classes.
2:31
Speaker 1: What's the last time in school you ever felt that
2:33
Speaker 1: you didn't understand something or couldn't do something.
2:36
Speaker 2: Or I'm going to sound kind of arrogant, I think,
2:41
Speaker 2: but most concepts that I'm taught, I catch on to
2:47
Speaker 2: them pretty quickly.
2:52
Speaker 1: Carlos is a smart kid. He's gotten a scholarship to
2:55
Speaker 1: a really good private school. He's excelling. It's not hard
2:59
Speaker 1: to imagine that one day he'll go to a college
3:02
Speaker 1: of his choice. He's going places. This is what civilized
3:06
Speaker 1: societies are supposed to do to provide opportunities for people
3:11
Speaker 1: to make the most of their ability, so that if
3:14
Speaker 1: you're born poor, you can move up. If you work hard,
3:17
Speaker 1: you can improve your lot. There's even a term for this, capitalization.
3:23
Speaker 1: A society's capitalization rate is the percentage of people in
3:27
Speaker 1: any group who are able to reach their potential capitalize
3:32
Speaker 1: on their potential. I think the capitalization rate is one
3:35
Speaker 1: of the single best ways we have to capture how
3:38
Speaker 1: successful and just a society is. If I know that number,
3:43
Speaker 1: I think I have a better handle on how well
3:45
Speaker 1: a country is doing than if I know it's GDP
3:48
Speaker 1: or its growth rate or its per capita income. And
3:52
Speaker 1: right from the beginning, Americans have told themselves that they're
3:56
Speaker 1: really good at capitalization, really good at social mobility. Any
4:01
Speaker 1: kid can grow up to be president. That's what's supposed
4:04
Speaker 1: to set America apart from everywhere else. Over the course
4:12
Speaker 1: of the next three episodes of Revisionist History, I want
4:16
Speaker 1: to reevaluate this idea, go back and ask the question,
4:20
Speaker 1: is it true that we're good at capitalization. In one
4:24
Speaker 1: upcoming show, we're going to talk about where the money
4:27
Speaker 1: goes in American higher ed. I'm going to take you
4:30
Speaker 1: to a small college in South Jersey and ask the
4:32
Speaker 1: question is the system geared to serve the poor smart
4:36
Speaker 1: kid or the rich smart kid. In another episode, I'm
4:40
Speaker 1: going to compare two liberal arts colleges and ask what
4:43
Speaker 1: happens when a school really tries to help someone like Carlos.
4:48
Speaker 1: But this episode is about Carlos himself, because his story
4:51
Speaker 1: is a little more complicated than it seems, actually a
4:55
Speaker 1: lot more complicated. I met Carlos through a man named
5:02
Speaker 1: Eric Eisner, And what was your first impression of it?
5:07
Speaker 2: Mister Eisner?
5:09
Speaker 1: You can speak freely even though he's in the.
5:10
Speaker 2: Room ostris at caned be intimidating and sometimes.
5:16
Speaker 1: Eric used to be a big shot entertainment lawyer back
5:19
Speaker 1: in the day. He worked for David Geffen. He's a
5:21
Speaker 1: kind of athlete swagger, wears impeccable tom Ford suits. Anyway,
5:26
Speaker 1: he retired in the early nineteen nineties and a few
5:29
Speaker 1: years later started a program for gifted public school kids
5:32
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. It's called Yes. He talks to a
5:36
Speaker 1: lot of teachers, looks at test scores, identifies the most
5:39
Speaker 1: promising kids, tutors them, and uses his connections to get
5:44
Speaker 1: them into private schools. He's been doing it for nearly
5:47
Speaker 1: twenty years. A couple hundred students have passed through Yes
5:51
Speaker 1: and have gone on to graduate from some of the
5:53
Speaker 1: top universities in the country. Carlos is one of his kids.
5:58
Speaker 1: When Carlos was in fifth grade, Eric got him into
6:01
Speaker 1: a fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Now several years later,
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Speaker 1: Carlos comes to meet me at Eric's house in bel Air,
6:10
Speaker 1: up one of those winding, gorgeous canyon roads from Sunset Boulevard.
6:14
Speaker 1: I'm across the table from Carlos. Eric is behind me,
6:17
Speaker 1: sitting in an armchair. That's why his voice is sometimes
6:20
Speaker 1: a little faint. Eric asks Carlos to think back to
6:24
Speaker 1: that fancy elementary school in Brentwood. Did he feel self
6:27
Speaker 1: conscious going there?
6:29
Speaker 2: I did, but not because I was Hispanic.
6:31
Speaker 1: Eric asks whether it was because Carlos was poor and
6:35
Speaker 1: those kids were rich. Did that make Carlos feel self conscious?
6:39
Speaker 2: Well, not a thing about it. I think it kind of,
6:43
Speaker 2: did you know it? Definitely? I felt like I was
6:48
Speaker 2: the only one, not the only one the episode with sneakers.
6:53
Speaker 1: Eric asks about the episode with the sneakers. Did Carlos
6:58
Speaker 1: remember that? Do you erase this from your memory I have, I.
7:03
Speaker 2: Can tell me what happened.
7:05
Speaker 1: Here's what happened. The teachers in Brentwood called Eric to
7:08
Speaker 1: tell him that Carlos would isn't playing with the other
7:10
Speaker 1: kids at recess, even though he seemed very engaged with
7:13
Speaker 1: him in the classroom. Eric then talked with Carlos and
7:16
Speaker 1: noticed that his sneakers were about three sizes too big.
7:20
Speaker 1: So he bought him shoes the right size, and that's
7:22
Speaker 1: solved the problem. Do you remember this.
7:24
Speaker 2: Well, the being not wanting to play the sports with
7:28
Speaker 2: the other kids, That does ring a bell, But I
7:31
Speaker 2: don't remember the sneakers.
7:32
Speaker 1: Eric says Carlos's sneakers were so big they curled up
7:36
Speaker 1: like elf shoes. But Carlos says he doesn't remember the sneakers.
7:41
Speaker 1: This happens to him a lot. I said at the
7:49
Speaker 1: beginning that the capitalization story for people like Carlos is complicated,
7:54
Speaker 1: and this is what I mean. Carlos is a really,
7:57
Speaker 1: really gifted kid. But it's almost impossible to imagine Carlos
8:01
Speaker 1: making it into the fancy school without Eric. In other words,
8:05
Speaker 1: in order for the system to work, for the smart
8:08
Speaker 1: kid to make it up the ladder, he needs an advocate,
8:12
Speaker 1: and not just an ordinary advocate, a high power guy
8:15
Speaker 1: with lots of connections who can get you in and
8:18
Speaker 1: watch over you and make sure you get new sneakers
8:21
Speaker 1: because the ones you have are curled up like elfshoes.
8:25
Speaker 1: Capitalization requires an Eric Eisner. And how many Eric Eisner's
8:30
Speaker 1: do you think there are out there? Then there's the
8:33
Speaker 1: second complication. To find opportunity, Carlos had to go to Brentwood,
8:39
Speaker 1: forty five minutes up the freeway from where he grew up,
8:42
Speaker 1: a wealthy, white, leafy green neighborhood. The truth is that's
8:47
Speaker 1: where opportunity is in America these days. But you can't
8:51
Speaker 1: just jump from where Carlos was from straight to Brentwood
8:54
Speaker 1: and leave your past behind. Your past comes with you.
9:00
Speaker 1: What were the other students.
9:01
Speaker 2: Like, Well, those students, well, you know, actually kids aren't
9:06
Speaker 2: going to be kids, and so they weren't two different. Okay,
9:13
Speaker 2: I need to give me a second here, I'm being nervous.
9:20
Speaker 1: A few years ago, two prominent economists, Carolyne Hawkesby of
9:24
Speaker 1: Stanford and Chris Avery of Harvard published a really important
9:27
Speaker 1: paper called The Missing One Offs. Hawksby and Avery start
9:32
Speaker 1: out by talking about something that happened ten years ago.
9:35
Speaker 1: That's when some of the elite US colleges, the Harvard's
9:38
Speaker 1: and Princetons of the world, announced that they'd give free
9:41
Speaker 1: tuition to any deserving student who came from the bottom
9:44
Speaker 1: of the economic ladder. At the time, the cutoff was
9:48
Speaker 1: a family income of forty thousand dollars a year. Now
9:51
Speaker 1: it's sixty five thousand. In other words, if a poor
9:54
Speaker 1: kid is smart enough to get in, she can attend
9:57
Speaker 1: for free. And what happens after the elite schools make
10:00
Speaker 1: this announcement not much. To use Harvard as an example,
10:04
Speaker 1: they ended up taking in about an additional fifteen or
10:08
Speaker 1: so low income student year after changing their policies. That's
10:11
Speaker 1: out of a freshman class of more than sixteen hundred.
10:15
Speaker 1: It's a drop in the bucket. Let me quote directly
10:18
Speaker 1: from the paper now, because this is a crucial point. Interestingly,
10:23
Speaker 1: this very modest effect was not a surprise to many
10:26
Speaker 1: college admission staff. They explained that there was a small
10:30
Speaker 1: pool of low income, high achieving students who were already
10:33
Speaker 1: fully tapped, so that additional aid and recruiting could do
10:38
Speaker 1: little except shift them among institutions that were fairly similar
10:42
Speaker 1: In other words, the admissions officers felt they had gone
10:46
Speaker 1: out of their way to look for these kinds of kids.
10:49
Speaker 1: They'd made special visits to high schools with lots of
10:51
Speaker 1: poor students, that sent out letters to kids with high
10:54
Speaker 1: test coores living in bad neighborhoods. They had built a
10:57
Speaker 1: network of guidance counselors. They sponsored free campus visits for
11:01
Speaker 1: low income students, and they made it tuition free. But
11:04
Speaker 1: if you do all those things and you only get
11:07
Speaker 1: an extra fifteen smart poor cares a year at Harvard,
11:10
Speaker 1: that must mean that there aren't a lot of poor
11:12
Speaker 1: smart kids out there. They're talking about Carlos. They're saying
11:16
Speaker 1: that kids like Carlos are pretty rare. Hoxby and Avery
11:27
Speaker 1: decide to fact check this is it true. They go
11:31
Speaker 1: to the College Board and get the entire database of
11:33
Speaker 1: college test scores SAT and ACT. Then they take those
11:38
Speaker 1: scores and match each score to a high school and
11:41
Speaker 1: a neighborhood and a zip code, and to all they
11:43
Speaker 1: could find about where the student comes from. And they
11:47
Speaker 1: end up with a giant map of every high achieving,
11:49
Speaker 1: low income high school senior in the country. And here's
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Speaker 1: what Hoxby and Avery discover the admissions officers are totally wrong. Actually,
11:59
Speaker 1: there are a huge number of poor smart kids in
12:02
Speaker 1: the United States. There's probably thirty five thousand students a
12:06
Speaker 1: year who score in the ninetieth percent or above on
12:09
Speaker 1: their SATs, and who also come from families living on
12:14
Speaker 1: less than forty thousand dollars a year. Now, keep in mind,
12:17
Speaker 1: these are kids who don't have tutors, who don't go
12:20
Speaker 1: to high schools with a million advanced placement courses, and
12:23
Speaker 1: who probably took the test once, not two or three
12:26
Speaker 1: times like upper middle class kids. So these scores are
12:29
Speaker 1: on the low side. These are kids who could ace
12:31
Speaker 1: a test in one shot. Seven. Eric Eisner started yes
12:39
Speaker 1: almost twenty years ago at an LA Middle School in
12:42
Speaker 1: a place called Lenox, which is this small, heavily Hispanic
12:46
Speaker 1: community of about twenty thousand people hallowed out in the
12:50
Speaker 1: middle of Los Angeles, right across the four or five
12:53
Speaker 1: freeway from Lax. I mean, right across you can practically
12:58
Speaker 1: touch the planes as they take off and land. The
13:03
Speaker 1: median household income in Lenox is thirty seven thousand dollars
13:07
Speaker 1: a year. It's not a good name. Lennox Middle School
13:20
Speaker 1: has six hundred kids per grade. The classrooms are these
13:24
Speaker 1: standalone wooden and cinderblock huts, row upon row of them.
13:28
Speaker 1: They only put in windows in the huts last year,
13:31
Speaker 1: tiny little windows high on the wall. There's a big
13:34
Speaker 1: fence around the outside, a guard in a hut at
13:37
Speaker 1: the gate. I don't want this to come across the
13:39
Speaker 1: wrong way, but Lennox looks like a concentration camp. When
13:44
Speaker 1: I was there, a police cruiser drove slowly back and
13:47
Speaker 1: forth between the long rows of huts. Oh, and next
13:50
Speaker 1: to the principal's office there are what looked like six
13:53
Speaker 1: narrow closets, solitary confinement cells where they stash a kid
13:58
Speaker 1: until the cops come. Remember this is a middle school.
14:02
Speaker 1: You go to a place like Lenox and you can't
14:04
Speaker 1: help feeling hopeless. This is as bad as La gets.
14:08
Speaker 1: Right from the beginning when he came there looking for
14:11
Speaker 1: bright kids. Eric Eisner hit Peter, I'm curious about the
14:15
Speaker 1: idea you can go to a fairly randomly selected middle
14:19
Speaker 1: school in a disadvantaged neighborhood in a major American city
14:25
Speaker 1: and reliably find every year a handful of really, really
14:31
Speaker 1: really gifted kids, Right.
14:34
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, it's it varies even within the school.
14:39
Speaker 3: From year to year, you never know what kind of
14:41
Speaker 3: crop it's going to be. It's a little like wine.
14:44
Speaker 3: But some years it's very very few, and sometimes one
14:49
Speaker 3: or none. But then other years you'll they'll be five
14:51
Speaker 3: of them. But there is you know, it's it's it's
14:55
Speaker 3: not like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
14:59
Speaker 1: It's not like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
15:03
Speaker 1: There's a ton of talent out there, all right. If
15:09
Speaker 1: there are so many smart poor kids, why aren't they
15:12
Speaker 1: showing up at places like Harvard. The researchers Avery and
15:16
Speaker 1: Hawsby find that a good chunk of the thirty five
15:18
Speaker 1: thousand high achievers don't even so much as apply to
15:21
Speaker 1: a good school. That's crazy, right. Most selective schools are
15:25
Speaker 1: practically free for these kids. An elite school is cheaper
15:29
Speaker 1: than the local state college down the street. More importantly,
15:32
Speaker 1: these are really smart kids. We're not talking here about
15:35
Speaker 1: some mediocre student who gets into an elite college because
15:38
Speaker 1: he's a great football player, or his dad built a
15:41
Speaker 1: new dorm and he ends up being way over his head.
15:43
Speaker 1: We're talking about kids like Carlos.
15:46
Speaker 2: Most concepts that I'm taught. I catch on something pretty quickly.
15:51
Speaker 1: Eric thinks that the system can't find kids like Carlos
15:54
Speaker 1: because it starts looking much too late. The admissions officers
15:57
Speaker 1: are sending out their letters to high school juniors seventeen
16:00
Speaker 1: year olds kidding me in Lenox. Eric says, you have
16:04
Speaker 1: to start finding the smart kids in the fourth grade.
16:07
Speaker 1: That's because they may not even show up later.
16:12
Speaker 3: It's like any muscle, it atrophies. And then by the
16:15
Speaker 3: time the boy girl thing happens, if that hasn't been encouraged,
16:21
Speaker 3: that excitement of being smart, it goes. It goes away
16:26
Speaker 3: because when the struggle hits them of going to any
16:29
Speaker 3: kind of challenge in college, they don't have the cleats
16:33
Speaker 3: for that anymore. They don't have those hiking shoes anymore.
16:37
Speaker 3: They're just not accustomed to it.
16:39
Speaker 1: So what was happening.
16:42
Speaker 4: Before Yes shows up at this school or in schools
16:46
Speaker 4: where there is no no one looking out for the
16:49
Speaker 4: promising fourth grader, what happens to those kids?
16:53
Speaker 3: Well, when we came here, they discouraged me from waiting
16:58
Speaker 3: until the eighth grade to meet with the boys, which
17:01
Speaker 3: is what I wanted to do. They said, you can't
17:04
Speaker 3: wait that long because eighty percent of those boys get
17:08
Speaker 3: gang affiliated by the eighth grade.
17:11
Speaker 1: Eighty percent gone by the eighth grade. Then comes high school,
17:16
Speaker 1: but there is no high school in Lenox. The kids
17:18
Speaker 1: from Lenox have to go one town over to Hawthorne,
17:21
Speaker 1: and that means crossing gang lines. Remember that statistic that
17:25
Speaker 1: Husby and Avery came up with for the total number
17:28
Speaker 1: of smart poor kids. It's low. That number is based
17:32
Speaker 1: on the pool of high school seniors who took either
17:34
Speaker 1: the ACT or the SAT. So to show up in
17:37
Speaker 1: their pool of thirty five thousand poor smart kids, you
17:41
Speaker 1: had to have made it all the way to the
17:43
Speaker 1: end of high school and taking one of those standardized tests.
17:47
Speaker 1: Eric's point is at a good number of high achievers
17:49
Speaker 1: in places like Lenox never even get that far. What's
17:53
Speaker 1: the capitalization rate in Lenox if you have to cross
17:55
Speaker 1: a gang line to get to high school. I think
18:05
Speaker 1: we have an ideology about talent that says the talent
18:08
Speaker 1: is a tangible, resilient, hard and shiny thing. It will
18:11
Speaker 1: always rise to the top. And to find and encourage talent,
18:15
Speaker 1: all you have to do as a society is to
18:17
Speaker 1: make sure the right doors are open. Free campus visits
18:21
Speaker 1: free tuition letters to the kids with high scores. That's
18:25
Speaker 1: the ideology of the admissions officer. You raise your hand
18:29
Speaker 1: and say over here, and the talent will come running.
18:32
Speaker 1: But that's not true in Lenox. It's not resilient and shiny.
18:35
Speaker 1: At Lennox Middle School, talent is really, really fragile. So
18:43
Speaker 1: Eric found Carlos and Lenox and used his West Side
18:46
Speaker 1: LA lawyer savvy to get Carlos into an elite private
18:49
Speaker 1: elementary school in Brentwood. Every morning, Carlos took a long
18:54
Speaker 1: bus ride up the four or five from Lenox to
18:56
Speaker 1: this school. I've known Eric for a long time, and
18:59
Speaker 1: I always joke with him that the slogan of his
19:01
Speaker 1: organization YES ought to be that every Los Angeles public
19:04
Speaker 1: school child deserves his own Jewish entertainment lawyer. He always
19:08
Speaker 1: laughs because that's what he's been doing for close to
19:10
Speaker 1: twenty years, cutting deals with private schools for his YES kids.
19:15
Speaker 1: So Carlos is doing really well. Of course he is.
19:18
Speaker 1: He's an exceptional student. Eric starts looking for Carlos's next step.
19:22
Speaker 1: He makes some inquiries. Carlos gets an offer of a
19:26
Speaker 1: full ride scholarship to one of the most exclusive private
19:29
Speaker 1: high schools in the country. If he were a kid
19:31
Speaker 1: from a normal middle class neighborhood and family, you'd say
19:35
Speaker 1: he's all set. But he's not.
19:38
Speaker 2: I've really wanted to go to boarding school. Yeah no,
19:41
Speaker 2: But in the end I didn't get to go.
19:44
Speaker 1: The boarding school he's referring to is Choate in Central Connecticut.
19:48
Speaker 1: It's his ticket out. But remember I said that Carlos's
19:52
Speaker 1: story gets complicated. Well, here's yet another complication. Carlos has
19:57
Speaker 1: a little sister. She's also in the room with us,
20:00
Speaker 1: along with Elena Bereff, who runs Yes. With Eric, we
20:04
Speaker 1: start talking about why Carlos couldn't go to Choate's.
20:07
Speaker 2: The summer after your birthday.
20:10
Speaker 1: Right, it was the summer before Carlos was supposed to
20:13
Speaker 1: go to high school. But Eric has to remind him
20:16
Speaker 1: that there was a lot else going on other than school.
20:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, you won't talk about well, in the eighth it
20:25
Speaker 2: was eighth grade, right, eighth grade for me, foster care. Yeah,
20:30
Speaker 2: I forget.
20:31
Speaker 1: Did you catch that? He set up really quickly under
20:35
Speaker 1: his breath that phrase again, I forgot.
20:38
Speaker 2: In the summer going into the eighth grade, his sister
20:43
Speaker 2: and I were put into foster homes.
20:46
Speaker 1: Carlos and his sister were put into foster homes.
20:50
Speaker 2: We're living away from from my mother, and I guess
20:54
Speaker 2: I had a bit of an emotional, you know, toll
20:57
Speaker 2: on me. And I definitely still tried at school. I
21:03
Speaker 2: didn't let it, you know, affect my grades like too much.
21:09
Speaker 1: Maybe by now you can understand the strategic value of
21:11
Speaker 1: Carlos's selective memory, because there weren't a lot of good
21:15
Speaker 1: things happening in his life. I'll let you use your imagination.
21:19
Speaker 1: It was bad, Lennox bad, not Brentwood bad. Then he says,
21:24
Speaker 1: I definitely still tried at school. I didn't let it
21:27
Speaker 1: affect my grades too much. Things are falling apart, but
21:32
Speaker 1: he understands that he has one way out, and that
21:35
Speaker 1: is to be a great student, not a good one.
21:38
Speaker 1: Good doesn't get you anywhere a great one. So he
21:42
Speaker 1: puts everything else in a box. He's got to take
21:45
Speaker 1: care of his sister and get good grades. I spoke
21:51
Speaker 1: with Eric about it later.
21:53
Speaker 3: He took on this burden that was so above his
21:57
Speaker 3: skill set of being a father, of being a husband,
22:00
Speaker 3: being everything. And that's why she wouldn't let him go
22:03
Speaker 3: to choke when they gave him a full scholars Oh that.
22:06
Speaker 1: Was the she he's talking about is Carlos's mother.
22:10
Speaker 3: You can imagine how frustrating and angering that was for me,
22:17
Speaker 3: the opportunity of him going to a school like that
22:21
Speaker 3: and getting away from all that and her understand to
22:26
Speaker 3: bleed killing it because he was taking care of her
22:31
Speaker 3: and that's what he was what in the.
22:33
Speaker 4: Eighth grade he did say I would have liked to
22:35
Speaker 4: go to boarding school.
22:36
Speaker 1: Oh, he definitely wanted to go.
22:39
Speaker 3: We sort of licked our wounds by convincing ourselves that
22:43
Speaker 3: at least he would be there for the little sister.
22:47
Speaker 1: It's a chaotic time. Carlos's mother tells him not to
22:51
Speaker 1: go to Choate but stay so he can take care
22:54
Speaker 1: of her and his sister. Then the two are taken
22:57
Speaker 1: from their mother. They become wards of Los Angeles County.
23:01
Speaker 2: You know, growing up with your parents and being suddenly,
23:05
Speaker 2: you know, taken away, and you know it can't be good.
23:10
Speaker 2: But I guess, I guess the hardest part was moving
23:14
Speaker 2: around house house Like It's not that I moved to
23:17
Speaker 2: one foster home and then stay there for a year
23:20
Speaker 2: and a half. I've I think four.
23:24
Speaker 1: Homes and worse than that. For a time, he was
23:27
Speaker 1: separated from his little sister. How long were you separated.
23:30
Speaker 2: For the first foster home? Didn't that We weren't separated
23:34
Speaker 2: for too long because we made a point to our
23:37
Speaker 2: social workers to please, no reunite us.
23:41
Speaker 1: He's making it sound like it wasn't that much of
23:43
Speaker 1: a big deal. It was a big deal. Choke goes away,
23:48
Speaker 1: their mother goes away. Now his little sister is taken away,
23:52
Speaker 1: and the two of them start bouncing around the foster
23:54
Speaker 1: homes of South LA and made a point to our
23:58
Speaker 1: social workers to please reunite us. It was a war.
24:02
Speaker 1: This is Eric again from later.
24:04
Speaker 3: He didn't tell you how disastrous these first foster homes were.
24:09
Speaker 1: When you say disastrous, what do you mean just idiotic?
24:12
Speaker 3: I mean it wasn't like, oh, thank god, they're in
24:15
Speaker 3: this wonderful home. First of all, they were one of
24:18
Speaker 3: five foster kids in the You know what I mean,
24:20
Speaker 3: This is not let us take you into our home.
24:23
Speaker 3: This is how much are you going to pay us?
24:25
Speaker 3: How many kids can we write? Meanwhile, the mother is
24:30
Speaker 3: roaming around the planet like beetlejuice, and we have to,
24:36
Speaker 3: you know, keep her at babe. It was just you know, it.
24:39
Speaker 2: Was a mess.
24:41
Speaker 1: Did you know your father?
24:43
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I still have my father, and I we
24:48
Speaker 2: he was he was absent for a large part of
24:50
Speaker 2: my life.
24:52
Speaker 1: And where is your mother now?
24:56
Speaker 2: My mother? My mother is in prison. Oh yeah, yeah
25:03
Speaker 2: in Texas.
25:05
Speaker 1: I'll let you use your imagination again. As to why
25:09
Speaker 1: it wasn't an easy thing for a kid, two kids
25:11
Speaker 1: to deal with. Eric's colleague Alna, is sitting quietly in
25:15
Speaker 1: the room. She tries to put things in perspective. Carlos's mom, Alena, says,
25:21
Speaker 1: had a difficult time with losing control of her children.
25:24
Speaker 1: That made it hard for Eric and Alena to stay involved. Finally,
25:29
Speaker 1: the mother tells Eric and Alena, and this is the
25:32
Speaker 1: phrase Alena uses to detach themselves. The kids vanish for
25:40
Speaker 1: a year and a half, and neither Eric nor Alena
25:43
Speaker 1: know whether they'll ever see them again. That's the difference
25:53
Speaker 1: between being privileged and being poor in America. It's how
25:57
Speaker 1: many chances you get if you're wealthy. All kinds of
26:01
Speaker 1: things can happen and you'll be okay. You can drop
26:03
Speaker 1: out of school for a year, you can get addicted
26:06
Speaker 1: to painkillers, you can have a bad car, accident. No
26:09
Speaker 1: one ever says of the upper middle class high school
26:11
Speaker 1: kid whose parents get a terrible divorce, I wonder if
26:14
Speaker 1: she'll ever go to college. She's going to college. Disruption
26:18
Speaker 1: is not fatal to life chances. A friend of mine
26:21
Speaker 1: was once stopped by cops speeding on the East River
26:24
Speaker 1: Drive in Manhattan, drunk with a syringe on the dashboard.
26:28
Speaker 1: And what happened. Nothing happened. He went on to have
26:31
Speaker 1: the kind of brilliant career he deserved to have. That's
26:34
Speaker 1: the point of privilege. It buys you second chances. But
26:41
Speaker 1: if you're from Lenox, even if you're a kid with
26:44
Speaker 1: all the talent in the world, you don't get the
26:46
Speaker 1: same number of chances. That's why there are at least
26:49
Speaker 1: thirty five thousand really smart, poor high school seniors every
26:53
Speaker 1: year in his country, and so few of them are
26:55
Speaker 1: making it to the kinds of colleges they deserve because
26:59
Speaker 1: too many things get in the way. When I met
27:08
Speaker 1: Eric again and a few days later, he told me
27:11
Speaker 1: a second story. He said. It was about another Carlos.
27:14
Speaker 1: As he put it, he said he got a call
27:17
Speaker 1: from an elementary school principal in Lennox.
27:19
Speaker 3: She says, I want you to come meet a bunch
27:22
Speaker 3: of fourth graders that I think are outstanding. When I
27:26
Speaker 3: got to the third boy, I said, so tell me
27:29
Speaker 3: about yourself.
27:31
Speaker 1: Eric asks about the little boy's father, Where is he?
27:34
Speaker 1: It's the standard question he always starts with, because there
27:37
Speaker 1: are so many absent fathers in that world that that
27:40
Speaker 1: question narrows things down pretty quickly.
27:42
Speaker 3: His answer was so peculiar. It gripped me so fast.
27:48
Speaker 3: He looked at me and he said there was violence.
27:51
Speaker 3: Those were the very words that came out of his mouth.
27:54
Speaker 3: And the minute he said it, I wed, Oh my god,
27:58
Speaker 3: I had more than a sneaking suspicion. This is the
28:02
Speaker 3: boy who saw his virtually his entire family murdered by
28:09
Speaker 3: a crazy neighbor with who got into a beef with
28:13
Speaker 3: his father. He saw his father killed, his older brother killed.
28:19
Speaker 3: Guy had a shotgun. He ran into the house, grabbed
28:22
Speaker 3: his little sister. They hid under a bed, and the
28:24
Speaker 3: guy burned the house down. He was hiding under the
28:27
Speaker 3: bed while the house was on fire. His mother finally
28:30
Speaker 3: came back. He ran outside to see his mother beaten up.
28:33
Speaker 3: She was in the hospital for months after this, and
28:36
Speaker 3: the police came and killed the shut gun. It was
28:39
Speaker 3: so horrendous, and it didn't occur to me that this
28:43
Speaker 3: was an analytics family. And I'm realized, I am now
28:47
Speaker 3: talking to this boy because he is one of the
28:50
Speaker 3: three outstanding boys in the class.
28:54
Speaker 1: Wait, what was he like?
28:55
Speaker 3: Fantastic, he was poised, he was articulate. When he said
29:00
Speaker 3: there was violence, the needle moved one hundred and eighty.
29:03
Speaker 3: It went from Wow, what an interesting, remarkable, articulate, confident
29:08
Speaker 3: kid you are, What a fortunate kid you are? To
29:12
Speaker 3: oh my god, I now think I know the reality
29:16
Speaker 3: of you.
29:24
Speaker 1: Even as an eight year old, this kid was smart
29:26
Speaker 1: enough to know that meeting Eric was his big chance
29:30
Speaker 1: and that his job was to put all the bad
29:32
Speaker 1: stuff aside, to put it in a box. That's what
29:36
Speaker 1: these kids are like the ones who make it out.
29:39
Speaker 1: They learn from a very early age where the exits
29:41
Speaker 1: are and they don't let anything get in their way.
29:44
Speaker 1: You see your family getting massacred or your mother go
29:47
Speaker 1: to prison, and you say, like Carlos did, I definitely
29:51
Speaker 1: still tried at school. I didn't let it affect my
29:54
Speaker 1: grades too much. So what happens to Carlos? He gets lucky,
30:02
Speaker 1: lucky because the foster care, situation works itself out, he
30:06
Speaker 1: forgets all the bad stuff that's happening, He takes care
30:09
Speaker 1: of his sister, He re establishes contact with Eric and Elena,
30:13
Speaker 1: and they find him another private school, not joke, not
30:17
Speaker 1: a boarding school, something closer to home. But whatever you do,
30:23
Speaker 1: don't call this story inspirational, because it's not. It's depressing
30:28
Speaker 1: because it says that if you live in Lennox and
30:30
Speaker 1: things go awry, you have to have an Eric and
30:33
Speaker 1: an Alena in your corner and be as tough and
30:36
Speaker 1: single minded and one in a million as Carlos is.
30:39
Speaker 1: To make it out, that's why the capitalization of talent
30:43
Speaker 1: is such an issue, because these are really long odds.
30:53
Speaker 1: Back with Carlos and his sister at Eric Eisner's house,
30:57
Speaker 1: Eric turns to Carlos and asks, do you remember feeling
31:00
Speaker 1: pessimistic for the first time you were? Were you ever pessimistic?
31:08
Speaker 2: I wasn't really pessimistic, as yeah, overwhelmed it is a
31:15
Speaker 2: great word. I guess it's just a lot happening at
31:19
Speaker 2: the time, and I was, and then I was back
31:22
Speaker 2: in the public school. You know, it was like it
31:25
Speaker 2: was like I started right back, you know, right from
31:28
Speaker 2: square one.
31:29
Speaker 1: Eric turns to Carlos's sister and asks whether she ever
31:33
Speaker 1: worried that her brother had had enough? What would you
31:37
Speaker 1: do if he gave up?
31:38
Speaker 3: You remember a time when you looked at him and
31:40
Speaker 3: were concerned that he was card What would you do
31:43
Speaker 3: if you give up?
31:46
Speaker 1: Oh, he was a very optimistic person. He was a
31:51
Speaker 1: very optimistic person, she says. I feel like he was
31:55
Speaker 1: strong for the both of us. A lot of the times.
32:00
Speaker 1: Carlos is looking straight ahead as she's speaking, like he
32:04
Speaker 1: doesn't want to cry. Then she says it again, I
32:08
Speaker 1: said thanks.
32:10
Speaker 2: I never thought of him.
32:11
Speaker 1: As honestly, I never thought of him as someone who
32:17
Speaker 1: gives up.
32:19
Speaker 2: I was never worried about it.
32:21
Speaker 1: She was never worried about it. You've been listening to
32:53
Speaker 1: Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, do us
32:57
Speaker 1: a favor and rate us on iTunes it helps. You
33:00
Speaker 1: can get more information about this and other episodes at
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Speaker 1: Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our
33:09
Speaker 1: show is produced by me LaBelle, Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith.
33:14
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis
33:18
Speaker 1: Quira and Taka Yasuzawa Flon Williams is our engineer and
33:23
Speaker 1: our fact checker is Michelle Sarraka Penalty management team Laura Mayer,
33:29
Speaker 1: Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.