September 30, 2025 • 37 mins
When 80% of kids aren't reading on grade level in Oklahoma, Chris Brewster believes that they don't love kids in his state. His wife told him "Suck it up princess, get to work" and so Chris did. He founded Santa Fe South Schools, which has an inner-city population of 5,000 students that usually score in the bottom 5-10% in the state, but their elementary and early childhood students are in the top 5-10%!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
When people ask me the sort of broad question, what's
wrong with with education in Oklahoma? We managed to languish
around fiftieth, sometimes up to forty seven, forty eighth in
the nation in almost all indicators. What's wrong with education
in Oklahoma? And I say something that kind of pisses
some people off sometimes. And what it is is, I say,
(00:24):
I don't think we love kids in Oklahoma.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
What do you mean we don't love kids in Oklahoma?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I said, well, I don't think we love I think
empirically I can prove to you that we don't love
children in Oklahoma. I think we love our kids, and
those love.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Your own children.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, I'm not saying you don't love your kids or
those who play football your kids, or soccer your k
or go to church with your kids. I mean you
might even like some of those kids, but there is
a mountain of evidence to say we do not love
those kids.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father,
I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach in
inner city Memphis. And that last part somehow led to
an oscar for the film about our team. That movie
is called Undefeated. Guys, I believe our country's problems are
(01:12):
never going to be solved by a bunch of fancy
people in nice suits using big words that nobody ever
uses on CNN and Fox, but rather by an army
of normal folks. Guys. That's us, just you and me deciding, Hey,
you know what, maybe I can help. That's what Chris Brewster,
(01:33):
the voice you just heard, has done. Chris has made
his life's work loving all kids in Oklahoma. He's the
founder of Santa Fe South Schools, the largest comprehensive charter
school in the state, with twelve different campuses serving five
(01:54):
thousand students, and they're achieving extraordinary results. I cannot wait
for you to meet Chris right after these brief messages
from our general sponsors. Chris Brewster, Welcome to Memphis.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Good morning.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
What'd you find in last night?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Sometimes last night?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Sometimes? And I hear alex Is. Alex has told me
you got a busy day here in Memphis.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
We do with some of your friends, Bill, we could
talk about it.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Yeah, so where you had it? After this? Do you
even know?
Speaker 1 (02:32):
We're gonna do some work studying how you guys are
attacking the sort of the healthcare initiative, and.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
So you're going to see Scott Morris and Churchill.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Good.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Get to figure out how Memphis is solving for underinsured
or uninsured healthcare, especially for kids.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
That's mine.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I think you're going to be floored. Yeah, I think.
Do you know much about the facility.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I've been to Memphis a couple of times looking at
some of the ED reform stuff here, and I visit
their Crosstown concourse because we're looking, you know, at them
all project, but never looked at any of the healthcare.
So I'm excited about that. I've been learning and rereading.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
It's pretty impressive. We'll get to that later in your story, everybody.
Chris is from Oklahoma City and he is the pastor
of the Well, which is a Southern Baptist church, which
I don't think he's handling snakes or anything, but it's
still Southern Baptist. I don't know you handling snakes.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Well, not unless they get in the building. Then they
tell me there's a snake in the building.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
It's just, you know, I'm a Presbyterian. I gotta you know,
think about you know, I'm sure you think we're heathens,
all right, And so then, for the purposes of our
time together today, and very impressively, folks, he is the
founder and superintendent of Santa Fe South Schools. Spoiler alert,
(03:50):
he founded it. It's a charter school organization. And we'll
get into all of how a pastor is a super
intendent of schools and all of it. And before we start,
I want to say that I love all of our
interviews and guests, but your work is near and dear
(04:12):
to my heart because your focus is on schools and children, yep,
which is what I've spent the last thirty five years
of my life engaged with. So I feel like we're
probably gonna reveal that we're kindred spirits by the end
of this chat. And I'm genuinely very excited to visit
with you today and I can't wait to hear I
(04:35):
can't wait to learn from what you have to share
with me and our audience. So first though, tell me
about you. You know, where are you from? Tell me
tell me how you kind of came around and your
story kind of picks up when you start teaching. But
get us there.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Well, my daddy's in Okie, for the Bixby area in Oklahoma,
and my mom is from southeast Missouri. If you're from Missouri,
U say in Missouri.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I thought there was an eye on the end of
that word.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Not for real folks from but I love it the
show me state folks will understand that. But they met
in college at OBU and Oklama Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma.
And my dad came from the kind of family that
my mom's family probably would not have been supportive of.
He came from alcoholic, divorced family, a lot of issues.
(05:36):
My grandpa was a high steel worker who traveled around
all over the country building skyscrapers and dams and stuff,
and was a functioning alcoholic, and so it was hard
on the family. But yeah, my grandpa was a only
met him once, but he was a tough man. He
used to My dad would would talk about the way
that he and his crew would work were drunk because
(05:57):
it would stabilize their nerves to be up on top
of the building.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Forget what alcohol may do to your balance, logger ground
out there, but at least we're not nervous when we're there.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Not nervous, not in an Osha approved a safety technique
for sure.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
So I grew up here in the stories of you know,
my dad's upbringing, and he was he was saved. He
found a relationship with God as a as a young man,
was mentored and really kind of found his own way.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
My dad's a tough man.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
He's one of my heroes, probably my main earthly hero
to come from the background he came from. He had
a learning disability, put himself through he was college, Yeah,
put himself through college, through graduate school, married way up,
like he's taught all of his boys to do the
same thing.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
We've all married way up.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Uh. And both he and my mom felt a call
to serve overseas at some point and served in local
churches until seventy six or so when they went to
the Philippines. I was born in Kansas City and lived
in Topeka, Kansas and a few places around the Midwest
until the last church they served in the US was
(07:06):
in Connewingham, Maryland, and so we left the East Coast
and went to the Philippines. I grew up in the
Philippines from about second grade on until I graduated from
high school and came back.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
I don't think I realized that. So you grew up
and lived in the Philippines from the second grade till
the end of high school.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, I was a missionary kid.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
My siblings and I grew up around people like my
parents who were highly educated, extremely talented, who spent their
life in service.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
That's what they did. How many siblings, I've got three,
so two brothers and a sister.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
And what is it like as an American Anglo Saxon
kid spending your entire childhood in a place like the
Philippines because you are a minority.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, it was really My minority experience was radically different
than the minority experience in the US, which is part
of my sort of the arc of my story was
formed early because we were accepted and loved and cared
for as a minority and honored by the Filipino people.
I treated with tremendous hospitality and graciousness. They had had
(08:14):
a deep loyalty to Americans since they were liberated during
World War two General MacArthur and I.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Was say, MacArthur's still a hero.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Still a hero? Right?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
So I grew I grew up in a society that
revered America and honored those that would come, especially those
were missionaries that would come and genuinely serve to help
other people. So my minority experience was very different than
when I came back to go to college here in
the US, and I saw a really different approach to
how minorities are treated in the country that I have
(08:46):
been taught with the Land of the Free and Home
of the brave, and it was very patriotic in my upbringing,
but I'd never really lived in the US, so when
I came back, it was jarring to me to see
the sort of radical inequity in society. But even in
the church, it's like what's going on on Sunday Morning.
We're radically segregated, socioeconomically divided. And after about one year
(09:09):
back in the States, I was like, I'm done with this.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
I got to go back.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
I gotta go somewhere else, because this country doesn't have
this thing right, and this is supposed to be a
country founded on, you know, Christian principles. There's this disconnect
between what I grew up hearing for the foundation of
principles and the reality of vast swaths of kids who
(09:33):
just didn't have opportunity and mostly black and brown kids.
So it was culture shock, but it was not culture
shock about food and clothing and music. It was about like,
what the heck is going on? This is the richest
country in the world, but we have this entire like subculture.
In fact, the majority of kids I was around were
(09:55):
underserved and under resource compared to those like me who
were white and had opportunity to go to college and
those types of things.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
So that began to really kind of to shake my world.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
When I came this happened your first year back.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Freshman year in college or were you in college Ocoma
Baptist University studying music education.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I want to be a teacher, but you're a freshman
in college. I mean, how are you even getting exposed
to this culture shock?
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Well, I just looked around, right, I would go to
church and it was all people that looked like me. Right,
I had grown up and I knew there were black
and brown people in the town I was in. And
then I began to look at the school system in
Oklahoma and see just starting to understand like there are
some people who always do well and a whole bunch
of people who never do well, and there's no there's
(10:43):
no real approach to how we bring these things together.
I didn't understand anything really about, you know, the vast
academic outcome differential between whites and blacks or Hispanics. I
didn't understand what was going on, but it was beginning
to sort of bubble up in me, especially through the Church,
that we were not a United States at this point.
(11:04):
We were very divided, and the main devide was socioeconomic.
But it tends to be, of course, concentrated in minority
populations who who maintain that sort of level of poverty,
like generation after generations. I would just sort of waking
up to these things, and my experience had been very different, Coach,
than what I was experiencing as a majority.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Well, and I guess i'm you know, those of us
who don't grow up in the Philippines, which is ninety
nine point nine point nine percent of us. I guess
I can't help but listening to you, wondering if we
see it too. But because it is so common, we
get to sensitize to its wickedness. Yeah, and because you
(11:49):
didn't see it growing up, you were hitting a face
stark with it.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
They describe kids like us as green culture kids.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Is what green culture.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Kids, green kids or missionary kids.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, and some of those military kids.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Your parents are a blue culture and they take you
to a yellow culture and you become this sort of combination.
You don't fit in either anymore. Right, I'm not a Filipino,
but I love the Philippines, but I also see the
real problems with government and poverty and corruption there. And
I love American I'm an American, but man, I can
(12:25):
see with real clarity what the real issues are because
I grew up outside of the culture.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
So my loyalty might be to.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
The American concept and American ideal, but not to the
embedded systems unless they're a part of helping. So I
think missionary kids get this sort of weird worldview that
helps you see some things. The other side of that
is you just don't. You don't fit in anywhere anymore.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Now, that's really really interesting. That's also in some ways
a tax that missionary kids pay for their children's service.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Yeah, that's eas exactly right. That's another whole podcast for you, coach.
When you talked to I didn't realize what my parents
had sacrificed. Well, in all different ways, but especially that piece.
It was related to their kids. Now, I didn't grow
up impoverished in any way, mind, body, or spirit, but
(13:20):
there were some real sacrifices growing up outside of your culture,
being educated outside of your culture. And then I left
home at fourteen to go to boarding school, so they
lost me. And then I left again to go to college,
so I moved out of the house when I was fourteen.
They were sacrificing that relationship in proximity so I could
be well educated and go to Missionary Kids School for
(13:41):
high school and then off to college. So there's an
interesting piece there as well.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
And now a few messages from our general sponsors. But first,
are you following us on Instagram more than likely or not?
But you should be because it's awesome and we're cool.
We've briefly mentioned a few times this cool normal Folks
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(14:12):
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(14:37):
Normal Folks to check out Normal Folks Wisdom and other
inspirational content. We'll be right back. Yeah. But I think
you're discounting your own sacrifice there, even though you weren't
(15:00):
making it cognitively as a kid. But I'm just saying,
for the level of service a missionary does, I think
the children are also paying some of that taxes. I
hear you.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
There's a lot of a lot of work being done
around the trauma that some missionary kids have gone through.
I know many of my peers went through some real struggles.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Which is the mere fact that you have your own
term green culture kids. Yeah, that's interesting. So this green
culture kid comes back to go to I'm sorry, Okloma.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Baptist comb A Babtist University ob Obu Southern Baptists ob Bison.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
There we go, Tobu Bison. So there you are, and
you want to go into education chart Lotok, around the church,
start to look around society, and you're taken aback by
what you grew up believing the America culture is versus
the reality.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, so again my heroes or role models through high
school where my coaches and my teachers. So didn't really
know what I wanted to do, but I knew the
kind of people who'd had the best or the most
profound impact in my life for my coaches and my teachers,
so that's not unfamiliar with So I said, well, I
want to be a coaching teacher. In fact, it's exactly
(16:22):
why I was in the coach and these were the
people that like formed me. So I thought, well, if
I can ever be called coach, it's like.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
The highest you know.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
I think it's one of the greatest titles you can
ever get. So I sought out opportunities to teach. As
I graduated in the inner city of Oklahoma City in
a place called Capitol Hill High School and Capitol Hill
High School as there were the Redskins at that point
before they changed their name. But the Redskins were a
(16:51):
typical inner city urban environment. They'd been abandoned as white flight,
sort of empty of the neighborhood, and there was no
pressure on the system to improve, and so it declined
and academic outcomes were horrendous. Gangs were rampant at that point, early.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Now are you teaching?
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I was teaching music, good grief, Yeah, coaching wrestling and
soccer and volleyball.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
So I had you would appreciate this when.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
You didn't really have to be in my acchoir just
to play, but if you wanted to improve your chances
that that I understood your your skill set, you were
going to be in my choir.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
My first teaching job, I started a chess team. Yeah yeah,
And I played jess in high school as well as
everything else I did right sports wise, and the statistics
and the data so say, and they prove out that
playing chess actually makes you smarter, not increases your intelligent quotion,
(17:54):
but it teaches you to be boy analytical. It teaches
you to think ahead, and it probes your brain activity
that actually helps yep, all right, study, concentration, everything. So
I had a chess team at a club that grew
to fifty six and there were the twelve kids that
(18:17):
really wanted to play chess, and then the rest of
the football team that decided ola see if I played chess, coach,
will let me play football? If you have?
Speaker 1 (18:29):
If I could have brought a picture of my choirs
during those days, and this will speak to you, because
I was like, I was talking to football coaches and
they're like, yeah, you're a soccer boy, we're not talking
to I said, I'll take care of your athletes, get
them in my.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
In the nineties, back in the night. Well, coaches today
love soccer guys. They do now well, they well and
typically are pretty tough and pretty good skill players.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
At that point, they were like, they made us play
soccer in the spring just so it wouldn't interfere with
football in Oklahoma. So they're like, you're the soccer I
don't know, but we we start to recruit these kids,
and I've got the whole football team, and I've got
most of the basketball team and all my soccer guys,
and I have when I left Capitol Hill had two
hundred and seventy six kids in the choir.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
A third of the school was in my choir.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
And we were not very good, but we were loud.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
I bet you were.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
And when we rolled into choir competition, I mean, I've
got blindmen in their choir robes, right, I mean, these
guys were huge.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
We filled it and nobody.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Everybody was polite and kind to us because we rolled
in I mean deep getting off that bus. But they
weren't little, skinny choir kids. These were enormous athletes. And
it was funny because we nobody ever made fun of us,
Nobody ever say.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Anything I mean to us, don't mess with the choir.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
The Capitol Hill showed up, everybody sat quietly while we
made our joyful noise, and then we got back on
the bus and then went back to school.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
So all right, so you're here, but you're kind of angry.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, I didn't even really know why I was
so agitated.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
I didn't I just saw inequity but had no concept
of the depth or hadn't quantified it, or I didn't
understand we.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Were poor, but we didn't know we were poor.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
I mean, like to this day, my favorite foods are
those things that we would consider, you know, poor people food.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So I corn bread, and I like.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Cabbage, and I like all of these things that my
mom made feel like home food. But they were actually
just affordable food. So we didn't have any kind of
poverty per se and how much money. But when I
began to understand what real poverty was, that that subsistence
living cycle that so degrades the human experience.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
It was like, are you kidding?
Speaker 3 (20:52):
Man?
Speaker 1 (20:52):
These kids just to get up and show up at school.
There's an enormous conquest every single day they had food
or not they're in school. Like, how in the world
do you talk about act scores when I mean there's
just chaos around the situation.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Alex has encouraged me not to pontificate too much, but
too bad. It's my show. I know about what you're
about to say. We've already said it in like five podcasts.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
I want to hear it.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
I want to share it with you. We interviewed our
Shae Cooper and do you know our se I do not.
We interviewed our See Cooper from Chicago. He long story short,
he started a rowing team in the inner city.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Ye just imagine that.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Yeah, we've got one to Actually, ours has been big
in Oklahoma City, so I think it's been Urche helping.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
He actually was just in town last week with the
mayor with the rowing.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Yeah, yeah, we've got to connect with our Anyway, he
grew up in the projects, and he grew up going
to school passing prostitutes, starning tricks and alleys which he
could see as a child literally stepping over pools of blood,
hearing gunshots, watching drug deals rampant. And that was before
(22:08):
he got out of his building, before he was then
able to only walk three blocks to school. That was
a gauntlet of danger every single day. And he said,
you know, Bill, if you walked into the neighborhood right
now and saw that, you would be absolutely floored and shocked,
and rightly so, he said, in our apartment, we had
(22:31):
a fan to keep cool with and one of the
blades was out of balance and so it ticked. And
he said, and if you walked into our apartment, it
would have driven you nuts because of been tic issue.
Just driven you nuts. He said, But you know what,
after living with that fan for a while, we didn't
even hear the tick. And he said, what ends up
(22:53):
happening is after living in that environment as a child
for a while, you begin to think that's just normal. Yeah,
And that is how generational poverty, generational crime, and generational
all the things that are destroying a large percentage of
our population starts. It's because the unthinkable, the wicked becomes common,
(23:17):
and it becomes so common, yeah, you don't even recognize
it as inconceivable and wicked. Any longer.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
As you talk about that, a story, I mean, an
image just came to my mind. Was something that taught
me that probably my second or third year as a teacher,
was by the main office on the bottom floor of
our building, and there was this sort of rush of kids.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
You know, when something's going on, kids all run toward it.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
That's usually a fight.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
It's usually a fight. So I'm like, I've got another
fight going down to break this up.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
In my mind, I'm a hooker, got breaking up a
fight all the time. I love.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
These teeth are false. That's another story. But it was
from breaking up a fight. They all got knocked out.
So my hope was, I hope it's not girls, because
girls are really hard to they're trying to kill each other.
The boys they're just posted. They claw and they're over you. Girls.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Girlfights are way worse than boy fights are.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
They are way worse. But I was thinking it was
a fight, hoping it wasn't a girl fight, and that rose.
The kids are not stopping in front of the officer,
They're they're going out the doors to the street next
to the school and it's walker in forty four, so
people in Okama City will know exactly what I'm talking about.
And a fight had happened, has sort of spilled out
(24:32):
into the street, which was unusual. They'd gone out into
the street, and uh, these two kids were squaring up.
I see at the corner of my eye another young
person runs around with a brick in their hand and
strikes one of the kids in the at the base
of the skull with this brick and he falls right
(24:55):
to the asphalt and begins to convulse. And and this
is an absolutely surreal moment for me. This is again,
this is the United States of America. This is the
most powerful, wealthy, affluent, educated nation it's ever existed in
the history of mankind.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
And this is in the street. These are children.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
This child is laying there in his blood, beginning to pool,
and I'm like, somebody should be doing something right now.
This is like, this is wild that this is occurring
in the street. And I'm sort of standing over the kid.
As the other kids beginning to realize this is pretty
serious day, they just sort of back off, and I'm
standing in the middle of the street trying to stop
(25:41):
traffic from rolling up on this young person's laying in
the street. A car comes up real fast, stops. A
couple of kids get out, their fellow gang members throw
this kid in the back seat, and then drive off.
And I'm literally standing in the street looking at blood
in the street, going, what has just happened here?
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Somebody should be doing something.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I turned around, the kids just sort of walked slowly
back in the building and we go back to school.
I have no idea what happened to this kid, even
to this day. It never showed up in the news.
No administrator was talking to me about it. There were
no police involvement. It was just like literally blood in
(26:27):
the street, and I'm like, I just could not wrap
my mind around, as you meant, the normalization of this
type of just catastrophic violence, barbarism, This is base humanity
at and nobody was there stopping this from a kirky.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
We'll be right back. People not from that areas have
heard these stories before, and we've become My belief is
(27:09):
we've become desensitized to it because so long and we're
just like, what can you do about quote these folks,
and they've made their bed, they're going to lie in it.
And we have a free country, and we have a
free education and we have all these opportunities, and if
people choose to live that lifestyle, why should I be
concerned about it? And all of these other things that
(27:33):
I would say is equally apathetic and evil.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
When people ask me the sort of broad question what's
wrong with with education in Oklahoma, we managed to languish
around fiftieth sometimes up to forty seven to forty eighth
in the nation in almost all indicators, what's wrong with
education Oklahoma? And I say something that kind of it
(27:58):
kind of pisses some people off. Sometimes. What it is is,
I say, I don't think we love kids in Oklahoma.
What do you mean we don't love kids in Oklahoma?
I said, well, I don't think we love I think
empirically I can prove to you that we don't love
children in Oklahoma. I think we love our kids, right,
and those, Yeah, I'm not saying you don't love your kids,
or those who played football with your kids, are soccer
(28:19):
your or go to church with your kids. I mean,
you might even like some of those kids, but there
is a mountain of evidence to so we do not
love those kids. So to your point that those are
not my responsibility, those those children are not something that
I should be doing something about And I mean, I'm
I am, I'll be honest with you, coach, I'm sort of.
(28:43):
I don't mean I don't like growing ups very much.
I think we have made we made our bed, we're
lying in it. I mean, we've grown at this point.
But kids, right there should be a collective agreement that
children should be at least held harmless for what their
parents or grandparents.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Have done or not done for them. We should be
doing something about those.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
So I begin to assert early on, no matter what,
we should be caring for children, like y'all sort this
political thing out, but at least the children should be
able to start fresh. And that's been the real challenge,
trying to sort of convince people that that kid is
our responsibility.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Those children are ours.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
I've said this as well a thousand times, and I'm
gonna keep saying it because I don't think people hear
it enough. If you don't care from a spiritual or
social or cultural viewpoint about that kid, if you just
don't have a heart for it, well then you need
(29:45):
to be a pragmatist because that kid is going to
become an adult, and that kid is either going to
contribute to the tax space, or take from it that
kid is either going to have a job and be
a productive membversus society, or be a drag on society,
either having to rely on sustenance or be a homeless
(30:08):
person or continue to fill our jails. So, either, as
a pragmatic viewpoint, do you want our children becoming part
of a productive citizenry, creating jobs, filling jobs, and contributing
to a tax space, or do you want them detracting
(30:28):
from our entire culture and society. So we from a
pragmatic standpoint.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
That is so true. I mean economically, why can we
not look at that data set?
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Just look at it economically if you don't care about
it socially.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
And make legislative decisions around that.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
That's the when you said the politics thing, I'm not
caring about right left anything. What I'm saying is there's
a political economic data driven point here that I don't
see how policymakers don't care.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
I was talking to a lobbyist about this.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
I said, look, here's the economic result of this good policy.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
He goes, you don't understand it. So what do I
not understand? This is a numbers thing?
Speaker 1 (31:09):
If I look at this, it makes fiscal sense for
these conservatives to make this choice. He goes, good policy
isn't always good politics.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
So explain that to me.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Well, the people that are electing these people don't necessarily
care about the policy. They care about the politics, and
those being elected need to pay attention to the politics
even if it's not good policy, or if it is.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
So I have to find some sort of perfect blend
between policy and politics to get something passed.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
And said, yeah, no, ideally.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Policy, policy, politics and culture. Yeah, it's a tough blend. Yes,
So it is chronologically back to you as a teacher.
I think I read that at some point you just
got fount up.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, six years in I said, I'm quitting.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Six years is a lifetime in that environment and that
environment trying to coach it was there was no I mean,
there was no pathway to a win. I mean, I'm
all about tactics and strategy. I want to get to
a goal, but I couldn't see any There wasn't an
avenue forward, and I was just frustrated, like I can't
spend my one precious live doing this thing.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
I've got to do.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
It was torn up about it a little.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah. Yeah, it was aks ridden, like I think I'm
supposed to be here.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
I got to be doing this work, but I was
just anxious.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
I can't.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Ed.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
I mean, you're stuck.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
You're doing everything every day and seeing there's no long
term light at the end the there's just no no hope.
I guess it is about hope. When you see hope,
you can if there's some agency right to attain that,
you'll move forward. But when you stop seeing that you
have a path forward, it's like.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
I'm going to do something different.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
John will Fong is a very good friend of mine.
I don't know if you're all a basketball fan, but
he was the shooting guard back when mephis state was
always in the Final four and sweet sixteen.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
At some point, you're going to talk about the Grizzlies,
aren't you.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
I will if you would like to.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
We don't have to go that well.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Honestly, I don't need to speak to anybody from a
city about the Grizzlies. We just need to keep our
mouths shut.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
This year.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
I'm happy to tell you that your your barbecue is
minor league and our league.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
But you get that win.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Oh you give me the wink. Very much. We don't
have to do another We're going to go like that.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
We're going to go verify that later today.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
He coached a you bought his son and when after
the games in fifth grade, they would go to Appleby's
or whatever in between games and then they'd take the
team and some of the kids on the team were
didn't have any money. He would buy lunch or dinner,
and every single time, a guy named Frank would order
exactly what his son did. His son would or chicken fingers,
(33:54):
Frank say, I have that his son would or cheeseburger Franks,
they have that his son would order a strawberry milk
shake with sprinkles on top of it. Frank would have that.
And John finally realized that the reason Frank was ordering
everything a Sun did is because he couldn't read the menu.
He has since started a thing called coaching for Literacy.
If you ever see college football coaches, basketball coaches, baseball
(34:16):
coaches with a little lime green ribbon on their lapel,
those coaches are supporting financially coaching for literacy. What John
found out is, and I'm going to re telling the stories,
I'm gonna let you take it, is if a third
grader is not reading on grade level by third grade,
(34:40):
there are data pointscalore that says that he is like
five times more likely to not have a job or
be in jail by his twenty first birthday than he
is third grade. We can predict, the data has proven
that we can predict really, really, really well that outcome
(35:03):
of a human being's life simply by if they're reading
on grade level about third grade.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
That's correct.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
How then are we not, as a entire society hammering
down on making sure every child reads on grade level
about third grade? Because we could empty our jails, we
could fill our coffers full of earned tax dollars yep,
and we could fix society and culture in a generation
(35:35):
if we would just look at the truth and the data.
Yet we continue to look at the inner city and
the poverty and stuff our nose at them and think
you can't help these people.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I really don't know why.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I mean, to me, the natural like instinct or response
to that is, let's teach kids to read. That would
be I mean, it's it's not. I don't want to
over complicate this, but we know now through the science
of reading, exactly how humans acquire the ability to read.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
We can train teachers to do this.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
We've got the curriculum resources and the school public school
structures to do it. There really is no reason, no
reason that we cannot teach children to read. Now, all
kinds of other good things happen. Right then, you read
to learn after age through third grade, you learn to
read prior to that, All of a sudden, all of
the actual learning, the content knowledge begins to accrue. We
(36:32):
start to make tremendous gains. But I mean, as an educator,
I know we pour into our early childhood programs in
our schools focusing on math and reading and not equivocating.
It is essential so those kids are positioned to be successful.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Beyond that, I don't know why.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
And that concludes part one of my conversation with Chris Brewster,
and you don't want to miss part two. It's now
available to listen to it together. Guys, we can change
this country, but it starts with you. I'll see imparts
it
When people ask me the sort of broad question, what's
wrong with with education in Oklahoma? We managed to languish
around fiftieth, sometimes up to forty seven, forty eighth in
the nation in almost all indicators. What's wrong with education
in Oklahoma? And I say something that kind of pisses
some people off sometimes. And what it is is, I say,
(00:24):
I don't think we love kids in Oklahoma.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
What do you mean we don't love kids in Oklahoma?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I said, well, I don't think we love I think
empirically I can prove to you that we don't love
children in Oklahoma. I think we love our kids, and
those love.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Your own children.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, I'm not saying you don't love your kids or
those who play football your kids, or soccer your k
or go to church with your kids. I mean you
might even like some of those kids, but there is
a mountain of evidence to say we do not love
those kids.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father,
I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach in
inner city Memphis. And that last part somehow led to
an oscar for the film about our team. That movie
is called Undefeated. Guys, I believe our country's problems are
(01:12):
never going to be solved by a bunch of fancy
people in nice suits using big words that nobody ever
uses on CNN and Fox, but rather by an army
of normal folks. Guys. That's us, just you and me deciding, Hey,
you know what, maybe I can help. That's what Chris Brewster,
(01:33):
the voice you just heard, has done. Chris has made
his life's work loving all kids in Oklahoma. He's the
founder of Santa Fe South Schools, the largest comprehensive charter
school in the state, with twelve different campuses serving five
(01:54):
thousand students, and they're achieving extraordinary results. I cannot wait
for you to meet Chris right after these brief messages
from our general sponsors. Chris Brewster, Welcome to Memphis.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Good morning.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
What'd you find in last night?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Sometimes last night?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Sometimes? And I hear alex Is. Alex has told me
you got a busy day here in Memphis.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
We do with some of your friends, Bill, we could
talk about it.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Yeah, so where you had it? After this? Do you
even know?
Speaker 1 (02:32):
We're gonna do some work studying how you guys are
attacking the sort of the healthcare initiative, and.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
So you're going to see Scott Morris and Churchill.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Good.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Get to figure out how Memphis is solving for underinsured
or uninsured healthcare, especially for kids.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
That's mine.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I think you're going to be floored. Yeah, I think.
Do you know much about the facility.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
I've been to Memphis a couple of times looking at
some of the ED reform stuff here, and I visit
their Crosstown concourse because we're looking, you know, at them
all project, but never looked at any of the healthcare.
So I'm excited about that. I've been learning and rereading.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
It's pretty impressive. We'll get to that later in your story, everybody.
Chris is from Oklahoma City and he is the pastor
of the Well, which is a Southern Baptist church, which
I don't think he's handling snakes or anything, but it's
still Southern Baptist. I don't know you handling snakes.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Well, not unless they get in the building. Then they
tell me there's a snake in the building.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
It's just, you know, I'm a Presbyterian. I gotta you know,
think about you know, I'm sure you think we're heathens,
all right, And so then, for the purposes of our
time together today, and very impressively, folks, he is the
founder and superintendent of Santa Fe South Schools. Spoiler alert,
(03:50):
he founded it. It's a charter school organization. And we'll
get into all of how a pastor is a super
intendent of schools and all of it. And before we start,
I want to say that I love all of our
interviews and guests, but your work is near and dear
(04:12):
to my heart because your focus is on schools and children, yep,
which is what I've spent the last thirty five years
of my life engaged with. So I feel like we're
probably gonna reveal that we're kindred spirits by the end
of this chat. And I'm genuinely very excited to visit
with you today and I can't wait to hear I
(04:35):
can't wait to learn from what you have to share
with me and our audience. So first though, tell me
about you. You know, where are you from? Tell me
tell me how you kind of came around and your
story kind of picks up when you start teaching. But
get us there.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Well, my daddy's in Okie, for the Bixby area in Oklahoma,
and my mom is from southeast Missouri. If you're from Missouri,
U say in Missouri.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I thought there was an eye on the end of
that word.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Not for real folks from but I love it the
show me state folks will understand that. But they met
in college at OBU and Oklama Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma.
And my dad came from the kind of family that
my mom's family probably would not have been supportive of.
He came from alcoholic, divorced family, a lot of issues.
(05:36):
My grandpa was a high steel worker who traveled around
all over the country building skyscrapers and dams and stuff,
and was a functioning alcoholic, and so it was hard
on the family. But yeah, my grandpa was a only
met him once, but he was a tough man. He
used to My dad would would talk about the way
that he and his crew would work were drunk because
(05:57):
it would stabilize their nerves to be up on top
of the building.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Forget what alcohol may do to your balance, logger ground
out there, but at least we're not nervous when we're there.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Not nervous, not in an Osha approved a safety technique
for sure.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
So I grew up here in the stories of you know,
my dad's upbringing, and he was he was saved. He
found a relationship with God as a as a young man,
was mentored and really kind of found his own way.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
My dad's a tough man.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
He's one of my heroes, probably my main earthly hero
to come from the background he came from. He had
a learning disability, put himself through he was college, Yeah,
put himself through college, through graduate school, married way up,
like he's taught all of his boys to do the
same thing.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
We've all married way up.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Uh. And both he and my mom felt a call
to serve overseas at some point and served in local
churches until seventy six or so when they went to
the Philippines. I was born in Kansas City and lived
in Topeka, Kansas and a few places around the Midwest
until the last church they served in the US was
(07:06):
in Connewingham, Maryland, and so we left the East Coast
and went to the Philippines. I grew up in the
Philippines from about second grade on until I graduated from
high school and came back.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
I don't think I realized that. So you grew up
and lived in the Philippines from the second grade till
the end of high school.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, I was a missionary kid.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
My siblings and I grew up around people like my
parents who were highly educated, extremely talented, who spent their
life in service.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
That's what they did. How many siblings, I've got three,
so two brothers and a sister.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
And what is it like as an American Anglo Saxon
kid spending your entire childhood in a place like the
Philippines because you are a minority.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah, it was really My minority experience was radically different
than the minority experience in the US, which is part
of my sort of the arc of my story was
formed early because we were accepted and loved and cared
for as a minority and honored by the Filipino people.
I treated with tremendous hospitality and graciousness. They had had
(08:14):
a deep loyalty to Americans since they were liberated during
World War two General MacArthur and I.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Was say, MacArthur's still a hero.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Still a hero? Right?
Speaker 1 (08:23):
So I grew I grew up in a society that
revered America and honored those that would come, especially those
were missionaries that would come and genuinely serve to help
other people. So my minority experience was very different than
when I came back to go to college here in
the US, and I saw a really different approach to
how minorities are treated in the country that I have
(08:46):
been taught with the Land of the Free and Home
of the brave, and it was very patriotic in my upbringing,
but I'd never really lived in the US, so when
I came back, it was jarring to me to see
the sort of radical inequity in society. But even in
the church, it's like what's going on on Sunday Morning.
We're radically segregated, socioeconomically divided. And after about one year
(09:09):
back in the States, I was like, I'm done with this.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
I got to go back.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
I gotta go somewhere else, because this country doesn't have
this thing right, and this is supposed to be a
country founded on, you know, Christian principles. There's this disconnect
between what I grew up hearing for the foundation of
principles and the reality of vast swaths of kids who
(09:33):
just didn't have opportunity and mostly black and brown kids.
So it was culture shock, but it was not culture
shock about food and clothing and music. It was about like,
what the heck is going on? This is the richest
country in the world, but we have this entire like subculture.
In fact, the majority of kids I was around were
(09:55):
underserved and under resource compared to those like me who
were white and had opportunity to go to college and
those types of things.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
So that began to really kind of to shake my world.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
When I came this happened your first year back.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Freshman year in college or were you in college Ocoma
Baptist University studying music education.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I want to be a teacher, but you're a freshman
in college. I mean, how are you even getting exposed
to this culture shock?
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Well, I just looked around, right, I would go to
church and it was all people that looked like me. Right,
I had grown up and I knew there were black
and brown people in the town I was in. And
then I began to look at the school system in
Oklahoma and see just starting to understand like there are
some people who always do well and a whole bunch
of people who never do well, and there's no there's
(10:43):
no real approach to how we bring these things together.
I didn't understand anything really about, you know, the vast
academic outcome differential between whites and blacks or Hispanics. I
didn't understand what was going on, but it was beginning
to sort of bubble up in me, especially through the Church,
that we were not a United States at this point.
(11:04):
We were very divided, and the main devide was socioeconomic.
But it tends to be, of course, concentrated in minority
populations who who maintain that sort of level of poverty,
like generation after generations. I would just sort of waking
up to these things, and my experience had been very different, Coach,
than what I was experiencing as a majority.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Well, and I guess i'm you know, those of us
who don't grow up in the Philippines, which is ninety
nine point nine point nine percent of us. I guess
I can't help but listening to you, wondering if we
see it too. But because it is so common, we
get to sensitize to its wickedness. Yeah, and because you
(11:49):
didn't see it growing up, you were hitting a face
stark with it.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
They describe kids like us as green culture kids.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Is what green culture.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Kids, green kids or missionary kids.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, and some of those military kids.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Your parents are a blue culture and they take you
to a yellow culture and you become this sort of combination.
You don't fit in either anymore. Right, I'm not a Filipino,
but I love the Philippines, but I also see the
real problems with government and poverty and corruption there. And
I love American I'm an American, but man, I can
(12:25):
see with real clarity what the real issues are because
I grew up outside of the culture.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
So my loyalty might be to.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
The American concept and American ideal, but not to the
embedded systems unless they're a part of helping. So I
think missionary kids get this sort of weird worldview that
helps you see some things. The other side of that
is you just don't. You don't fit in anywhere anymore.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Now, that's really really interesting. That's also in some ways
a tax that missionary kids pay for their children's service.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Yeah, that's eas exactly right. That's another whole podcast for you, coach.
When you talked to I didn't realize what my parents
had sacrificed. Well, in all different ways, but especially that piece.
It was related to their kids. Now, I didn't grow
up impoverished in any way, mind, body, or spirit, but
(13:20):
there were some real sacrifices growing up outside of your culture,
being educated outside of your culture. And then I left
home at fourteen to go to boarding school, so they
lost me. And then I left again to go to college,
so I moved out of the house when I was fourteen.
They were sacrificing that relationship in proximity so I could
be well educated and go to Missionary Kids School for
(13:41):
high school and then off to college. So there's an
interesting piece there as well.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
And now a few messages from our general sponsors. But first,
are you following us on Instagram more than likely or not?
But you should be because it's awesome and we're cool.
We've briefly mentioned a few times this cool normal Folks
Wisdom feature that we've started doing there, where we distill
down the most powerful points, data and quotes from our
(14:12):
guests into punchy text because normal folks got wisdom too,
and it's fun and a quick way of getting it
from them. I've even started writing them out on a
coach's clipboard because I'm a coach and you guys need
to see graphics, and they are high faluting graphics. So
get on it. Follow us on Instagram at Army of
(14:37):
Normal Folks to check out Normal Folks Wisdom and other
inspirational content. We'll be right back. Yeah. But I think
you're discounting your own sacrifice there, even though you weren't
(15:00):
making it cognitively as a kid. But I'm just saying,
for the level of service a missionary does, I think
the children are also paying some of that taxes. I
hear you.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
There's a lot of a lot of work being done
around the trauma that some missionary kids have gone through.
I know many of my peers went through some real struggles.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Which is the mere fact that you have your own
term green culture kids. Yeah, that's interesting. So this green
culture kid comes back to go to I'm sorry, Okloma.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Baptist comb A Babtist University ob Obu Southern Baptists ob Bison.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
There we go, Tobu Bison. So there you are, and
you want to go into education chart Lotok, around the church,
start to look around society, and you're taken aback by
what you grew up believing the America culture is versus
the reality.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, so again my heroes or role models through high
school where my coaches and my teachers. So didn't really
know what I wanted to do, but I knew the
kind of people who'd had the best or the most
profound impact in my life for my coaches and my teachers,
so that's not unfamiliar with So I said, well, I
want to be a coaching teacher. In fact, it's exactly
(16:22):
why I was in the coach and these were the
people that like formed me. So I thought, well, if
I can ever be called coach, it's like.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
The highest you know.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
I think it's one of the greatest titles you can
ever get. So I sought out opportunities to teach. As
I graduated in the inner city of Oklahoma City in
a place called Capitol Hill High School and Capitol Hill
High School as there were the Redskins at that point
before they changed their name. But the Redskins were a
(16:51):
typical inner city urban environment. They'd been abandoned as white flight,
sort of empty of the neighborhood, and there was no
pressure on the system to improve, and so it declined
and academic outcomes were horrendous. Gangs were rampant at that point, early.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Now are you teaching?
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I was teaching music, good grief, Yeah, coaching wrestling and
soccer and volleyball.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
So I had you would appreciate this when.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
You didn't really have to be in my acchoir just
to play, but if you wanted to improve your chances
that that I understood your your skill set, you were
going to be in my choir.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
My first teaching job, I started a chess team. Yeah yeah,
And I played jess in high school as well as
everything else I did right sports wise, and the statistics
and the data so say, and they prove out that
playing chess actually makes you smarter, not increases your intelligent quotion,
(17:54):
but it teaches you to be boy analytical. It teaches
you to think ahead, and it probes your brain activity
that actually helps yep, all right, study, concentration, everything. So
I had a chess team at a club that grew
to fifty six and there were the twelve kids that
(18:17):
really wanted to play chess, and then the rest of
the football team that decided ola see if I played chess, coach,
will let me play football? If you have?
Speaker 1 (18:29):
If I could have brought a picture of my choirs
during those days, and this will speak to you, because
I was like, I was talking to football coaches and
they're like, yeah, you're a soccer boy, we're not talking
to I said, I'll take care of your athletes, get
them in my.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
In the nineties, back in the night. Well, coaches today
love soccer guys. They do now well, they well and
typically are pretty tough and pretty good skill players.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
At that point, they were like, they made us play
soccer in the spring just so it wouldn't interfere with
football in Oklahoma. So they're like, you're the soccer I
don't know, but we we start to recruit these kids,
and I've got the whole football team, and I've got
most of the basketball team and all my soccer guys,
and I have when I left Capitol Hill had two
hundred and seventy six kids in the choir.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
A third of the school was in my choir.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
And we were not very good, but we were loud.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
I bet you were.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
And when we rolled into choir competition, I mean, I've
got blindmen in their choir robes, right, I mean, these
guys were huge.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
We filled it and nobody.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Everybody was polite and kind to us because we rolled
in I mean deep getting off that bus. But they
weren't little, skinny choir kids. These were enormous athletes. And
it was funny because we nobody ever made fun of us,
Nobody ever say.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Anything I mean to us, don't mess with the choir.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
The Capitol Hill showed up, everybody sat quietly while we
made our joyful noise, and then we got back on
the bus and then went back to school.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
So all right, so you're here, but you're kind of angry.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, I didn't even really know why I was
so agitated.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
I didn't I just saw inequity but had no concept
of the depth or hadn't quantified it, or I didn't
understand we.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Were poor, but we didn't know we were poor.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
I mean, like to this day, my favorite foods are
those things that we would consider, you know, poor people food.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So I corn bread, and I like.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Cabbage, and I like all of these things that my
mom made feel like home food. But they were actually
just affordable food. So we didn't have any kind of
poverty per se and how much money. But when I
began to understand what real poverty was, that that subsistence
living cycle that so degrades the human experience.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
It was like, are you kidding?
Speaker 3 (20:52):
Man?
Speaker 1 (20:52):
These kids just to get up and show up at school.
There's an enormous conquest every single day they had food
or not they're in school. Like, how in the world
do you talk about act scores when I mean there's
just chaos around the situation.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Alex has encouraged me not to pontificate too much, but
too bad. It's my show. I know about what you're
about to say. We've already said it in like five podcasts.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
I want to hear it.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
I want to share it with you. We interviewed our
Shae Cooper and do you know our se I do not.
We interviewed our See Cooper from Chicago. He long story short,
he started a rowing team in the inner city.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Ye just imagine that.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Yeah, we've got one to Actually, ours has been big
in Oklahoma City, so I think it's been Urche helping.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
He actually was just in town last week with the
mayor with the rowing.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Yeah, yeah, we've got to connect with our Anyway, he
grew up in the projects, and he grew up going
to school passing prostitutes, starning tricks and alleys which he
could see as a child literally stepping over pools of blood,
hearing gunshots, watching drug deals rampant. And that was before
(22:08):
he got out of his building, before he was then
able to only walk three blocks to school. That was
a gauntlet of danger every single day. And he said,
you know, Bill, if you walked into the neighborhood right
now and saw that, you would be absolutely floored and shocked,
and rightly so, he said, in our apartment, we had
(22:31):
a fan to keep cool with and one of the
blades was out of balance and so it ticked. And
he said, and if you walked into our apartment, it
would have driven you nuts because of been tic issue.
Just driven you nuts. He said, But you know what,
after living with that fan for a while, we didn't
even hear the tick. And he said, what ends up
(22:53):
happening is after living in that environment as a child
for a while, you begin to think that's just normal. Yeah,
And that is how generational poverty, generational crime, and generational
all the things that are destroying a large percentage of
our population starts. It's because the unthinkable, the wicked becomes common,
(23:17):
and it becomes so common, yeah, you don't even recognize
it as inconceivable and wicked. Any longer.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
As you talk about that, a story, I mean, an
image just came to my mind. Was something that taught
me that probably my second or third year as a teacher,
was by the main office on the bottom floor of
our building, and there was this sort of rush of kids.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
You know, when something's going on, kids all run toward it.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
That's usually a fight.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
It's usually a fight. So I'm like, I've got another
fight going down to break this up.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
In my mind, I'm a hooker, got breaking up a
fight all the time. I love.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
These teeth are false. That's another story. But it was
from breaking up a fight. They all got knocked out.
So my hope was, I hope it's not girls, because
girls are really hard to they're trying to kill each other.
The boys they're just posted. They claw and they're over you. Girls.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Girlfights are way worse than boy fights are.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
They are way worse. But I was thinking it was
a fight, hoping it wasn't a girl fight, and that rose.
The kids are not stopping in front of the officer,
They're they're going out the doors to the street next
to the school and it's walker in forty four, so
people in Okama City will know exactly what I'm talking about.
And a fight had happened, has sort of spilled out
(24:32):
into the street, which was unusual. They'd gone out into
the street, and uh, these two kids were squaring up.
I see at the corner of my eye another young
person runs around with a brick in their hand and
strikes one of the kids in the at the base
of the skull with this brick and he falls right
(24:55):
to the asphalt and begins to convulse. And and this
is an absolutely surreal moment for me. This is again,
this is the United States of America. This is the
most powerful, wealthy, affluent, educated nation it's ever existed in
the history of mankind.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
And this is in the street. These are children.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
This child is laying there in his blood, beginning to pool,
and I'm like, somebody should be doing something right now.
This is like, this is wild that this is occurring
in the street. And I'm sort of standing over the kid.
As the other kids beginning to realize this is pretty
serious day, they just sort of back off, and I'm
standing in the middle of the street trying to stop
(25:41):
traffic from rolling up on this young person's laying in
the street. A car comes up real fast, stops. A
couple of kids get out, their fellow gang members throw
this kid in the back seat, and then drive off.
And I'm literally standing in the street looking at blood
in the street, going, what has just happened here?
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Somebody should be doing something.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
I turned around, the kids just sort of walked slowly
back in the building and we go back to school.
I have no idea what happened to this kid, even
to this day. It never showed up in the news.
No administrator was talking to me about it. There were
no police involvement. It was just like literally blood in
(26:27):
the street, and I'm like, I just could not wrap
my mind around, as you meant, the normalization of this
type of just catastrophic violence, barbarism, This is base humanity
at and nobody was there stopping this from a kirky.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
We'll be right back. People not from that areas have
heard these stories before, and we've become My belief is
(27:09):
we've become desensitized to it because so long and we're
just like, what can you do about quote these folks,
and they've made their bed, they're going to lie in it.
And we have a free country, and we have a
free education and we have all these opportunities, and if
people choose to live that lifestyle, why should I be
concerned about it? And all of these other things that
(27:33):
I would say is equally apathetic and evil.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
When people ask me the sort of broad question what's
wrong with with education in Oklahoma, we managed to languish
around fiftieth sometimes up to forty seven to forty eighth
in the nation in almost all indicators, what's wrong with
education Oklahoma? And I say something that kind of it
(27:58):
kind of pisses some people off. Sometimes. What it is is,
I say, I don't think we love kids in Oklahoma.
What do you mean we don't love kids in Oklahoma?
I said, well, I don't think we love I think
empirically I can prove to you that we don't love
children in Oklahoma. I think we love our kids, right,
and those, Yeah, I'm not saying you don't love your kids,
or those who played football with your kids, are soccer
(28:19):
your or go to church with your kids. I mean,
you might even like some of those kids, but there
is a mountain of evidence to so we do not
love those kids. So to your point that those are
not my responsibility, those those children are not something that
I should be doing something about And I mean, I'm
I am, I'll be honest with you, coach, I'm sort of.
(28:43):
I don't mean I don't like growing ups very much.
I think we have made we made our bed, we're
lying in it. I mean, we've grown at this point.
But kids, right there should be a collective agreement that
children should be at least held harmless for what their
parents or grandparents.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Have done or not done for them. We should be
doing something about those.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
So I begin to assert early on, no matter what,
we should be caring for children, like y'all sort this
political thing out, but at least the children should be
able to start fresh. And that's been the real challenge,
trying to sort of convince people that that kid is
our responsibility.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Those children are ours.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
I've said this as well a thousand times, and I'm
gonna keep saying it because I don't think people hear
it enough. If you don't care from a spiritual or
social or cultural viewpoint about that kid, if you just
don't have a heart for it, well then you need
(29:45):
to be a pragmatist because that kid is going to
become an adult, and that kid is either going to
contribute to the tax space, or take from it that
kid is either going to have a job and be
a productive membversus society, or be a drag on society,
either having to rely on sustenance or be a homeless
(30:08):
person or continue to fill our jails. So, either, as
a pragmatic viewpoint, do you want our children becoming part
of a productive citizenry, creating jobs, filling jobs, and contributing
to a tax space, or do you want them detracting
(30:28):
from our entire culture and society. So we from a
pragmatic standpoint.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
That is so true. I mean economically, why can we
not look at that data set?
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Just look at it economically if you don't care about
it socially.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
And make legislative decisions around that.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
That's the when you said the politics thing, I'm not
caring about right left anything. What I'm saying is there's
a political economic data driven point here that I don't
see how policymakers don't care.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
I was talking to a lobbyist about this.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
I said, look, here's the economic result of this good policy.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
He goes, you don't understand it. So what do I
not understand? This is a numbers thing?
Speaker 1 (31:09):
If I look at this, it makes fiscal sense for
these conservatives to make this choice. He goes, good policy
isn't always good politics.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
So explain that to me.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Well, the people that are electing these people don't necessarily
care about the policy. They care about the politics, and
those being elected need to pay attention to the politics
even if it's not good policy, or if it is.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
So I have to find some sort of perfect blend
between policy and politics to get something passed.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
And said, yeah, no, ideally.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Policy, policy, politics and culture. Yeah, it's a tough blend. Yes,
So it is chronologically back to you as a teacher.
I think I read that at some point you just
got fount up.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, six years in I said, I'm quitting.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Six years is a lifetime in that environment and that
environment trying to coach it was there was no I mean,
there was no pathway to a win. I mean, I'm
all about tactics and strategy. I want to get to
a goal, but I couldn't see any There wasn't an
avenue forward, and I was just frustrated, like I can't
spend my one precious live doing this thing.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
I've got to do.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
It was torn up about it a little.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah. Yeah, it was aks ridden, like I think I'm
supposed to be here.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
I got to be doing this work, but I was
just anxious.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
I can't.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Ed.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
I mean, you're stuck.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
You're doing everything every day and seeing there's no long
term light at the end the there's just no no hope.
I guess it is about hope. When you see hope,
you can if there's some agency right to attain that,
you'll move forward. But when you stop seeing that you
have a path forward, it's like.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
I'm going to do something different.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
John will Fong is a very good friend of mine.
I don't know if you're all a basketball fan, but
he was the shooting guard back when mephis state was
always in the Final four and sweet sixteen.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
At some point, you're going to talk about the Grizzlies,
aren't you.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
I will if you would like to.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
We don't have to go that well.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Honestly, I don't need to speak to anybody from a
city about the Grizzlies. We just need to keep our
mouths shut.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
This year.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
I'm happy to tell you that your your barbecue is
minor league and our league.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
But you get that win.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Oh you give me the wink. Very much. We don't
have to do another We're going to go like that.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
We're going to go verify that later today.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
He coached a you bought his son and when after
the games in fifth grade, they would go to Appleby's
or whatever in between games and then they'd take the
team and some of the kids on the team were
didn't have any money. He would buy lunch or dinner,
and every single time, a guy named Frank would order
exactly what his son did. His son would or chicken fingers,
(33:54):
Frank say, I have that his son would or cheeseburger Franks,
they have that his son would order a strawberry milk
shake with sprinkles on top of it. Frank would have that.
And John finally realized that the reason Frank was ordering
everything a Sun did is because he couldn't read the menu.
He has since started a thing called coaching for Literacy.
If you ever see college football coaches, basketball coaches, baseball
(34:16):
coaches with a little lime green ribbon on their lapel,
those coaches are supporting financially coaching for literacy. What John
found out is, and I'm going to re telling the stories,
I'm gonna let you take it, is if a third
grader is not reading on grade level by third grade,
(34:40):
there are data pointscalore that says that he is like
five times more likely to not have a job or
be in jail by his twenty first birthday than he
is third grade. We can predict, the data has proven
that we can predict really, really, really well that outcome
(35:03):
of a human being's life simply by if they're reading
on grade level about third grade.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
That's correct.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
How then are we not, as a entire society hammering
down on making sure every child reads on grade level
about third grade? Because we could empty our jails, we
could fill our coffers full of earned tax dollars yep,
and we could fix society and culture in a generation
(35:35):
if we would just look at the truth and the data.
Yet we continue to look at the inner city and
the poverty and stuff our nose at them and think
you can't help these people.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I really don't know why.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I mean, to me, the natural like instinct or response
to that is, let's teach kids to read. That would
be I mean, it's it's not. I don't want to
over complicate this, but we know now through the science
of reading, exactly how humans acquire the ability to read.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
We can train teachers to do this.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
We've got the curriculum resources and the school public school
structures to do it. There really is no reason, no
reason that we cannot teach children to read. Now, all
kinds of other good things happen. Right then, you read
to learn after age through third grade, you learn to
read prior to that, All of a sudden, all of
the actual learning, the content knowledge begins to accrue. We
(36:32):
start to make tremendous gains. But I mean, as an educator,
I know we pour into our early childhood programs in
our schools focusing on math and reading and not equivocating.
It is essential so those kids are positioned to be successful.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Beyond that, I don't know why.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
And that concludes part one of my conversation with Chris Brewster,
and you don't want to miss part two. It's now
available to listen to it together. Guys, we can change
this country, but it starts with you. I'll see imparts
it
Host
Bill Courtney
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