January 29, 2025 • 31 mins
In this episode, Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children, shares his journey into education advocacy, emphasizing the importance of school choice and the challenges posed by teachers unions. He discusses the impact of COVID-19 on education, the need for systemic reforms, and the role of mindset in personal growth. Schultz highlights the urgency of empowering parents and the moral imperative to improve the education system for all children, particularly those in low-income communities. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Wednesday & Friday.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hi, Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
I got an email from a listener and she wrote
in this, Hi, Carol, you talk about the importance of
finding a relationship, but I'm thirty six. I'm not sure
that's of interest to me anymore. I sustain myself, I
make myself happy. I can't see what anyone would be
(00:26):
able to add to that. I'm not bitter or angry.
I haven't had bad men in my history. I just
don't see the importance of it. I wanted to have children,
but even that want has waned. What's so good about
being with someone? Then I heard this interesting exchange between
podcaster Jen Cohen and professor Scott Galloway. I'll play it
and then discuss it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
If you are a woman who is capable and competent
and can do all those things on your own, they
don't want a man because the men out there are
there's very few few that there are are going to
be wanted by every single girl, so then they're going
to go right. So it's like, what do you do?
And that's basically what's happening. I know more single, great
(01:11):
girls than I've ever had in my life. And very
few eligible great guys, very few. And the guys I
know who I'm friends with, they have the pick of
the litter. They can go out with girls who are
like literally more than half their age, and those girls
are like buying for them and dying to go out
with them.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
So we have.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
But both parties are blame. Okay, men young men for
a variety of reasons, some societal some is on them.
Are economically and emotionally unviable. They're less mature, they literally mature.
The prefrontal cortex matures are the soler rate. They're not
going to college. They're in there. They've been told by
(01:52):
the wealthiest, deepest pocketed companies in the world. They can
have a reasonable facsimile of life online with an algorithm.
Why go out and make the effort to get friends
when you can go on discord a reddit. Why get
a job when you can make money trading crypto on
coinbase or stocks on Robinhood. Why go through the effort
and the rejection and the humiliation and establishing the skills
and getting your mom or your gay friend address you
(02:15):
working out, taking the risk, going to a place, putting
up the bullshit in the rejection, of finding a romantic
or sexual partner when you just have YouPorn and so
you have an entire code of men who have sequestered
from society. They don't get those skills. They go down
a rabbit hole and they become almost sort of just
non viable mates.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Now, they don't include the age of these people in
the clip, but if the guys who refers to or
dating girls more than half their age, I have to
assume they're at least forty hopefully. So like my letter writer,
these people are set in their ways and wondering what
the point of being with someone is. I don't have
(02:55):
a great answer for that. I can tell you that
it's a different level of happiness being cared for by
someone and caring for them rather than not having that
and all that warmth that comes with it, the family life,
the security. It's all very good. And of course falling
in love is amazing and magical. And you know, the
(03:15):
woman who wrote in didn't say whether that's ever happened
her before. But if it hasn't, it still could it
should You should try to find it. But if you've
reached a stage in your life where you think relationships
just aren't for you anymore. Fine. What I would say
to these people is make sure you're not just using
(03:36):
a defense mechanism to try to make excuses for why
you haven't met someone. It's okay to not have met someone.
There's a lot of luck involved. Like I always say,
don't take your ball and go home. If you really
are happy, great, But I don't even think the men
in that clip are happy. If there's a tiny part
of you that thinks maybe you're not happy, don't give
(03:57):
up on the idea of meeting someone, and don't assume
that there was no one out there for you. Thanks
for listening. I love getting your emails. I love all
your questions. I'm going to do a few episodes on
family issues in the next few weeks because I've gotten
several emails about that. If you want something answered, email
me at Carol Markowitz Show at gmail dot com. Or
(04:19):
I post a form occasionally on x where you can
email me anonymously. I think people seem to like that,
so if you catch that form, send in your questions
there or Carol Markowitz Show at gmail dot com. Coming
up next and interview with Tommy Schultz. Join us after
the break.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
Welcome back, to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My
guest today is Tommy Schultz. Tommy is CEO of American
Federation for Children. Hi, Tommy, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Hey, thank you for having me Carol.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
So, did you always want to be the CEO of
the American Federation for Children? How did you get into that?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Well, that's a funny question.
Speaker 6 (05:00):
I didn't always know, because I didn't know the American
Federation for Children existed untill probably about ten years ago.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
It's an interesting story.
Speaker 6 (05:09):
I was, you know, initially, I went to college wanting
to be a doctor. I had this sort of high
minded notion that I wanted to help people. Long story short,
that we could maybe get into later. I felt that
wasn't the right path for me. A lot of challenges
sort of did fall in love with this notion of
fixing some of these societal problems or things that I
felt were hindering our ability to be a great country.
(05:33):
There were a few moments in college that really kind
of woke me up to that. And along that journey
I was working in politics, and then in between one
of the political campaign cycles, I had heard that this group,
the American Federation for children was really great. They were
looking for somebody on the team, and the timing was right,
the location was right.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
I said, I'd love to join that.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
And I only had this high minded notion around, you know,
school choice, school vouchers. I think I had read the
Builton Friedman essay from back in the nineteen fifty that
he had written, But it was really this particular moment
in time where I had suddenly started visiting schools, these
incredibly high performing just jewels of schools that were at
(06:13):
that time in Memphis, Tennessee, that were high performing but
with a high poverty kind of student body. And it
was really crippling to know and understand that, like, gosh,
if we didn't pass a school choice program, this school
in particular was really benefiting from anonymous donors who had
given some gifts that were essentially running out.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
And you get to think.
Speaker 6 (06:34):
About, how, my goodness, we have this education system that
we've designed that is designed this way that basically you
really need this golden ticket to get out and to
get a good education, or you need to be really
lucky and born into the quote right zip code to
go to that quote good school. And so it was
just this really personally humbling experience that I had that
(06:54):
I said, oh my gosh, like, we have to fix this.
There is urgency because if we didn't pass that school
choice program at that time I'm in Tennessee, those kids
would be going to some of the worst schools in
America just down the road, and you when you multiply
that at scale across the entire country. I really had
this almost spiritual awakening that I said, this is my
life's mission, this is what I want to focus on.
(07:14):
And so that led to me eventually kind of taking
over the company a couple of years ago, and we've
had a lot of success since. And I know you've
been following the school choice issues. Yeah, and you yourself
had a lot of personal experiences with education, so you
know how important it is, especially at the K through twelve.
K through twelve level can be such a vector change
for your kid's life. So that's how I again, I
didn't know I wanted to do this, but I think
(07:36):
God kind of smacked me over the head at some
point in my life.
Speaker 5 (07:39):
So you're going to go back and go to medical
school or absolutely not.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
I mean the story there was you know, I probably
wasn't thinking too far ahead when I was jumping fully
into this and didn't realize I mean, and especially at
this time, they were, you know, Obamacare is being debated,
and I talked to so many doctors at that point
who said, physicians, you name it that were like, look
the paperwork, the administrative burden it's getting. It's already bad enough,
(08:03):
and we're quite worried for what's down the road. I
wasn't liking the you know, the chemistry and the hard
sciences aspect at the college level with it, especially at Stanford.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
So yeah, not going back to medical school, that's for sure.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
I also actually was going to be a doctor, but
that's only because my parents are from the Soviet Union.
And you know, that's one of three careers you were
to choose.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So lawyer, a doctor or something like that.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
You got, you got two out of three. How'd you know?
So what does the American Federation for Children focus on
other than school choice? Or is it mostly a school
choice organization?
Speaker 6 (08:37):
We are a singleish organization at least kind of what
the policies that we pass seek to give families the
best opportunity to go send their child to the school
of their choice. So public private charter we're agnostic on that,
but a real thing that is just needed in the
marketplace and has been needed for the last forty years
or more, is that we really do need a vibrant
(08:58):
kind of diet yamic set of options within each kind
of local community, and that charter schools took off in
the nineties and then early two thousands had a lot
of bipartisan support, but there were only kind of there
was a slower, longer tail when it comes to know
the growth of voucher programs, you know, any kind of
program or mechanism that allows a kid to go to
(09:20):
a private school. And so our team had been focusing
on that for quite a long time in various forms,
and in the last ten twenty years we've really accelerated
the pace of growth of voucher programs or ESA programs
or tax credit scholarship programs. These are all different mechanisms
that allow a student to go to a private school.
AFC is unique in that we do political elections at
(09:40):
the state level, because that's how you change these laws
at the state level. That creates a permanent change to
the education system. Whereas you know, many of our founders,
board members and many people who are especially in the
last few years, getting into the world of education, they
feel the only way to change things is to go
to your local school board. And that is indeed an
important factor in all this, but it doesn't do systemic
(10:01):
change right. You're making changes on the margins to certain
kind of budgetary decisions or certain kind of curriculum decisions
here and there. But when you're talking about systemic change,
you have to change laws right at the state level
in particular, because ninety percent of education and K through
twelve at least in this country, it's really dictated by
the state level dynamics. And so when you pass these
laws that allow families to go and take their funding
(10:21):
to the school their choice, such a difference maker, and
we've seen that in Florida in particular for the last
twenty years.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
You can go in depth about that.
Speaker 6 (10:28):
But AFC would do the elections to help kind of
change the makeup of the state legislature. We do the
lobbying and advocacy during the legislative sessions, and then we
also help families and role in these programs.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
So those are the kind of three legs of the
school How we do our work.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
One of the biggest roadblocks to the kind of systemic
changes you want to make.
Speaker 6 (10:46):
Oh, that's usually a pretty easy one. The biggest roadblock really,
it's the teachers' unions, their power, their money. You know, Carol,
if you had AFC, we've raised about thirty three million
dollars last year and deployed that across the country.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Carol, how much do you think the teachers unions brought
in in.
Speaker 6 (11:02):
Terms of their revenue four times that you were close?
I mean they bring in about three billion dollars in revenues. Yeah,
I mean, yeah, I was gotten by about, you know,
more than one hundred times. It's that and people just
don't understand the scale of what that means, right, because
if they're deducting right out of every teacher's paycheck, right,
(11:23):
hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars a year, you multiply
that not only to teachers. It's almost a misnomber to
call them the teachers unions. Schooling unions is probably the
better term, because they'll take any employee that is part
of the school system. And that's why you notice when
they're fighting at the state legislatures and they're lobbying and
putting so much money, they're always wanting more personnel, right,
and they'll find any sort of personnel to do it.
They'll say, you know, during COVID, we need more counselors, right,
(11:46):
And it's like, well, maybe let's discuss that. But then
all of a sudden you realize, no, no, it's all about
the dollars for them. It's every new employee is a
new paycheck going into the conference of the unions. And
so when you have this three billion dollar machine, I mean,
I mean, I don't know what the final tally was
for this year in the presidential elections, but for the
last couple of decades, I mean, that's the amount of
money that was spent at a presidential campaign level. And
(12:06):
they're doing that year over year at the school board level,
at the state level, at the federal level. And so
their influence on politics, particularly in democratic politics, really a
stranglehold on things. Whereas if they weren't able to you know,
collect that money, and there's all these kind of state
laws that are trying to push for that that you
can't automatically deduct the dues from you know, employees in
that fashion. If you took that money element away, I
(12:29):
think that's probably, you know, the biggest it would have
the biggest downstream effect in terms of our kind of
ability to get good reforms in the education system, because
especially on the you know, the democratic side of the equation,
there is such this fear that a Democrat, they tell
us this privately off.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
And they're like, look, I'm with you.
Speaker 6 (12:45):
Maybe when it gets to the vote, I'll be with you,
but I cannot stick my neck out or else they
will wipe me out into primary, right, And that's that's
really harmful to the politics because it's also this nefarious
I mean, it's a taxpayer funded initiative essentially, right, because
our tax dollars are going to the school employees. Their
money is then getting shuffled over to the teachers unions automatically.
Not that's not a good sign dynamic here. And so
(13:08):
but aside from that, the last couple of years, parents
have really made their voices heard. They got to see
what happened during COVID. We've been much more effective at
getting our message out there to those parents directly. So
we've been able to actually beat them, even though we're
well under resource relative to them. As we kind of
talked to.
Speaker 5 (13:24):
What's step one in fighting their dominance and actually ending that,
you know, taking money out of every teachers and every
employees paycheck. I mean, is there a way to stop that?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (13:34):
I think there are a number of states of past
laws where you know, you had the voluntary contributions have
to be voluntary and they can't be automatic, right, And
there are a couple of Supreme Court cases that kind
of dealt with this at the federal level that made
it such that you couldn't just you know, automatically take
money out of, you know, the teacher's paychecks. Jana's decision
was pretty notable in that regard. But then of course
(13:56):
the unions had already been seeing that the writing was
on the wall here, so they have their thous of lawyers.
They had worked out different ways to say, sure, you
won't be automatically joined into the teachers unions, but the
way that you have to like opt out is there's
this one Saturday at this random time and you have
to have your original teaching certificate that you got to bring.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
So they created all these kind of.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
Artificial ways to keep keep the doors from like you know,
them flooding for the exits. So there's a lot of
really good groups other folks that you should certainly talk
to in your podcasts that are working on that issue
in particular. But for us, you know, it does actually
go back to the school choice laws in that if
you are giving parents total control of their child's education
funding and they're able to kind of freely choose the
(14:37):
location or the type of setting home, you know, brick
and mortar, you name it, suddenly you know the power
of the unions and the power of the blob, all
the bureaucratic elements of this that has been just rising
dramatically over the last thirty years.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
When parents are in.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Control, suddenly there becomes a marketplace. Florida we've seen this
the most where they've embraced all of the options right, public, private, charter,
all of the public schools have gotten better in that
regard because of it.
Speaker 5 (15:02):
Right.
Speaker 6 (15:03):
So again, when parents are in charge, that's usually the
biggest lever. And then there is this kind of element
on the margins. I think that is an important part
of it, but where it's like, hey, we need to
really rethink how the teachers' unions and these kind of
public sector unions are able to operate in this you know,
unlimited fashion in a lot of ways within our kind
of public discourse, in our politics, so a lot of.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
The time, and I admit that this is true for me.
People only start to care about things like what they're
teaching at the local school, or school choice or any
of this when they have kids in the system. You
mentioned before we started, you have two small kids, so
this isn't actually personal for you yet. How did you
become so passionate about this?
Speaker 6 (15:44):
Yeah, again, it goes back to that story where I'm
you know, touring these beautiful schools with these in these
like high poverty areas that are doing so well for
these kids. You're talking to the teachers about the student
body and their challenges. The teachers are saying, roughly fifteen
percent our kids are homeless, or you know, you have
all these other ailments. You know, parents that you know,
(16:05):
single parent households that are really in deep poverty, but
they are getting their kid into this great school, which
is their ticket to end generational poverty in many ways,
and you're thinking about the fact that the unions are
trying to essentially either close these schools make sure they
don't get any state funding.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And it's just when you're.
Speaker 6 (16:22):
Looking at the kind of dichotomy here of how enough
farious it is that there are people that they do
not actually care about the student's success, especially of these
kids in deep poverty. And you know, lower income families
have been screaming about this for generations, and lawmakers and
others will say, well, no, you know, the schools I
went to, they were good, and we just need to
do do like we did in the seventies and eighties.
(16:43):
It's like, you know, there are really deep, deep cracks
within our kind of public education system that we need
to fix, and there's this sort of moral imperative that
we should all have about that. And to your point
about parents not really you know, understanding this or paying
attention to us until their kids are going into it.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
Too late, it's like too late to make changes once
your kids are in it.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (17:03):
No.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
And thankfully there were visionaries kind of a people that
founded AFC who were you know, both philanthropus. They were
giving out lots of scholarships, but they felt at that
time in the nineties they're like, look, we could give
out the entire fortunes of every kind of major family
in the world here, but we're not changing the system. Right,
we're giving a lot of you know, we're giving out
a lot of proverbial lifeboats. But the system remains unchained
(17:26):
and actually was only growing, and it's kind of power
and influence. And so therefore thank God for the people
like you know, Betzy to Voss, even the John Walton
Bill Obendorf, who at the early stage of this said
we need to fix this American education system or else
it's going to be too late for the future country
and everything. I mean, we could have a long debate
about poverty, right, but it's so much of it stems.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
From a poor education system. Right.
Speaker 6 (17:49):
And for parents at the individual level again, I almost
I love when a parent really kind of comes to
this with like the zeal of a you know, convert,
where they go, oh my gosh, I didn't realize how
it was you. And again, this is the nature of
our system, where if you grew up in this system
that just said, hey, it's your zip code and this,
I mean, when the game is sort of set that way,
(18:09):
you're not really thinking could this be different and should
we change it? And I think again COVID really had
this seench of sketch moment on the American consciousness that wait,
all these other countries aren't doing it like we do, right,
and we can actually have a free and open system
where we control our education funding. Especially when we're spending
about twenty thousand dollars per kid per year in American
kind of education, we should be getting a little more
(18:32):
for that money and we can probably improve outcomes make
parents happier. And again we're seeing that in places like Florida,
and you know it's soon to be Texas once we
get that across the finish line next year.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
For this year, rather, it just impresses me so much
when people don't have skin in the actual game, and actually,
like the wealthy people you mentioned who have donated, they
could have just kept their money and done something else
with it, or you know, they clearly could live in
the best zip codes and send their kids to private
school and just move on with their lives. With the
fact that people get involved in this way, it just
(19:02):
gives me a lot of hope and optimism for our country.
I think there's a lot of places where I don't
think that philanthropy works like that, and that people make
differences in the lives of people that you know aren't
in their world or in a completely different sector of society.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
I'm just I'm impressed with all of that.
Speaker 6 (19:21):
So now well and it's I think again they felt
that moral paying right that unlike I mean, it's probably
a bad analogy, but unlike healthcare, where it's like, look,
we're talking about a lifetime of decisions and a lot
of you know, a lot of factors that key into
how we're thinking through you know, having a healthy you know,
make America healthy against kind of situation. Whereas education is like, look,
(19:43):
you've got this essentially depending upon the kid, but you
know this twelve to fifteen year window where you only
get this one shot to do it right. And some
of these early decisions, I mean a lot of people
got captivated in the nineties and two thousands when they
started seeing the research that like, look, if you're unable
to read by third or fourth grade, you're really not
going to you know, get that back over the years,
(20:04):
and that's going to just you know, put you into
this pipeline of poverty.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Or worse the rest of your life when.
Speaker 6 (20:09):
You go when you kind of start factoring in all
these facts, all these ideas around education, how important of
a vector change it can be with these sorts of
early internet. You know, how many people do you know, Carol,
in your life to talk about that one great teacher, right,
or that one kind of even if it's just a
social setting of like the right students in your kind
of cohort, that one grade where it's like, you know,
(20:29):
that's when everything changed for me and I really propelled
through middle school and then high school because of it. Right,
So all these things like gosh, education is the silver
bowl to all of these things in life, and we
got to get this right. And where it's too great
a country to have, you know, minimal dreams or kind
of mediocre kind of notions around education is fine, we'll
fix it. You know, so many of these students that
(20:51):
we bring into our team, who they themselves benefited from
a school choice program, they often have a very similar
story that you know, their mom, dad, we're fighting tooth
and nail to get them into that better school. The
local terrible public school was telling them, no, no, no,
We've got this ten year plan. We're going to fix it.
It's like ten years is too late for almost everything, right,
(21:12):
and lo and behold, Carol, they never got that ten
year plan in place. They got a lot more money,
they didn't fix the situation. So again, this is where
it's like, if you can put your kid into a
great school tomorrow, their whole life can be changed, Their
whole family's life can be changed, especially if they're in
dire poverty.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
What do you worry about, Well, I think we've been
talking about it.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
I mean I do worry, you know, I tell you know,
I often reflect upon when it's like graduation time, you
know it's May June. You know, you really do reflect upon, like, gosh,
the urgency of this issue, and that if we didn't
pass that school choice program, how many more graduating classes
of kids, especially you think about like a freshman or
sophomore where it's like, if you could have put them
into a better educational environment, maybe that's what actually propels
(21:51):
them into college for the first time in their.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Family or so that kind of that moment where we're thinking.
Speaker 6 (21:57):
About the losses that we have in terms of the
state legislative fights where it's like we weren't able to pass
that program. I do always worry about kind of those
kids that fell through the cracks that we know we
could have helped, We know we could have put them
on a better life path. And I mean, we're talking
millions and hundreds of thousands of kids, and what does
that mean for society ten twenty years down the road?
And I remember at the early outset of COVID and
(22:20):
the kind of the lockdowns of the teaching union started
to orchestrate, and as you know, in some places they
locked schools down for two years. There were studies that
com yep, exactly right. And then when you look actually
right across like the proverbial street, at how ninety percent
of private schools were opened by October twenty twenty, you
started to go, wait, what's going on there? Right?
Speaker 5 (22:39):
That's that's unjust where's the science? How is the science working?
How are the private school kids safer than the public school?
Speaker 6 (22:46):
Right? Political science was ruling the day in that regard.
But when you looked at how in particular, and this
is getting back to your question about what I worried
about at that time, there was a study to come
out saying there's basically three million kids that we don't
really know where they are, particularly in these kind of
blighted communities, high poverty situations. And it's just devastating because
(23:07):
when you really think about the long tail of that.
We have roughly three million people going through our kind
of prison system. And if you think that, like Gosha
down the road, of some higher percentage of those kids
that are on the proverbial streets or are not getting
a great education and they're relegated to these kind of
terrible life paths, you just really think about the impact
(23:27):
on our welfare system, right and the quality of life
overall for a society.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
And again, it's.
Speaker 6 (23:32):
Such a simple thing that we can have the best
education system in the world. We should for some populations
within America. We really do. We can bring that at
scale if we just made some of these systemic reforms.
And again, I think COVID was really that slap in
the face for so many families, and I'm so glad
it is. Even so many politicians got up to it saying, oh, yeah,
we were our assumptions about our education system were incorrect.
(23:55):
We need to implement school choice right now. And thankfully
we said, look, we've got the plan in the drawer.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Here's how you do.
Speaker 6 (24:00):
Here's the lessons of mistake that we've learned of how
to create a really successful, thriving type of program.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
So the things I worry about again. It always comes
back to the kids.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
More coming up with Tommy Schultz. But first January twenty
seventh was International Holocaust Rememberance Day, a day to remember
the great evil of the Holocaust, when millions of Jews
were slaughtered during the Nazis reign of terror. Today, the
rise in global antisemitism and the constant attacks on Israel
show us that it's more important than ever to remember
(24:30):
the atrocities of the Holocaust to ensure it never happens again.
That's why I've partnered with the International Fellowship of Christians
and Jews. They provide food, shelter, and safety to Jews
in Israel and around the world, including those remaining Holocaust survivors.
Your donation today will help provide food, water, medicine, and
(24:51):
other basic necessities to Jewish communities, and through your gift,
you'll stand with the Jewish people and against this growing
antisemitism and give a gift to show your support of
the Jewish people by visiting SUPPORTIFCJ dot org. That's one
word support IFCJ dot org or call eight eight eight
(25:13):
for eight eight if CJ that's eight eight eight for
eight eight if CJ eight eight eight for eight eight
four three two five.
Speaker 5 (25:28):
What advice would you give your sixteen year old self
other than you're not going to be a doctor.
Speaker 6 (25:32):
Yeah, it's it's interesting because I feel I have lived
a twenty different lifetime since my sixteen year old self. Again,
when I was moving all around across the country, you know,
working on political campaigns, that was a different subset of
my life when I was sixteen, you know, still in
high school, but I was really I was working. They
were spending a lot of time as a competitive trapshooter
(25:54):
going around the country, and so I was really focused,
even potentially on making an Olympic run at that point,
should I even go to college and all these things.
So I feel like my life advice of my sixteen
year old self wouldn't be that much of a difference
maker because everything in life there were so few variables,
So you know, you're so singularly focused on just a
few things like school and athletics. But I think if
(26:16):
I were to give general advice to my younger self,
and I think to anybody, in some ways, it's mindset
really matters. How you kind of talk to yourself about
your goals, your dreams, how you're evaluating your life path
against something I didn't do as well when I was
thinking I'll just go and be a doctor, you know,
not really evaluating that and thinking through, hey, maybe are
(26:37):
all my assumptions correct, but everything else too. That There's
a great book called The Luck Factor where I don't
know if you've read it, but they talked to They
were kind of these longitudinal studies around people who are
they view themselves as lucky, right, and some people and
the more that these people viewed themselves as lucky, it's
low and behold lucky chances seem to come their way
more and it's less about like some mystical notion that
(26:59):
the universe like tips the scales in favor of them.
But they'll do these scientific studies where it's like, are
you walking by this, like this dollar bill or something,
and we did that person.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
Pick it up?
Speaker 6 (27:08):
And the unlucky people always view themselves unlucky, like they
will miss that dollar bill because they're not looking at
and their brains just aren't subconsciously kind of thinking through
these issues. And this again goes to every day decisions
around you know, goal setting and am I making the
right goals and do I have a dream and ambition
or something that I want to work on that is
actually exciting. And then that goes to the negative end
(27:29):
of it two, where how many people do you meet
in your lives that are so down on themselves or
they have this negative script or nothing's going to work
And it's like, well, lo and behold, I things aren't
going to work out if you're always looking at it
the wrong perspective. And there's plenty of other great books,
you know, mindset Carol dwack All, the kind of other research.
I really wish I'd stumbled upon this stuff earlier, and
I think more young people would benefit from that type
(27:50):
of you know, that kind of psychology and training around mindset,
and even the studies when you look at young children
in their education where you know, telling someone you're so
smart versus telling someone you worked really hard at that, right,
and then you kind of all these amazing interventions that
show like, yeah, actually your mindset is almost the most
important thing versus these kind of having this belief around
(28:12):
like immutable traits that you just can't control, and there's
these factors always outside of your outside of your decision framework.
So I think in general, with my younger self. I
whish I had stumbled upon some of this earlier.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
I love that.
Speaker 5 (28:23):
I definitely consider myself lucky, and I think that I
could see how it perpetuated itself. Absolutely, you know the
fact that I got to be American just starting right
from there and moving on to the rest of my life.
I think I feel like I've walked between rain drops
the whole time.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
So I'm going to.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
Read that book.
Speaker 6 (28:42):
Yeah, And in this matter of luck, I mean, this
is what I hate about our education system, right, where
so much of it is predicated on luck. Are you
born into the right zip code right the last five
arbitrary digits of your home address? And we've built this
because of partly the Jim Crow era where there's segregating
communities based upon race, and therefore, like we've just sort
of kept a version of that system where hey, again,
(29:04):
your home madres dictates your entire educational pathns.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
There's some of these communities where you.
Speaker 6 (29:09):
Know, from elementary then to middle then to high school,
some kids, every single school they will go.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
To is one of the worst in their state or
even the country.
Speaker 6 (29:17):
It's like, gosh, I think about even you had that
one one outlet even at any point in that chain
of elementary school you went to a great school, or
middle school you went to a great school.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
All of a sudden that just I mean.
Speaker 6 (29:28):
Luck should not play a factor in our education system,
especially how much we're spending, how important it is to
the future of our country.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
Absolutely well, I've loved this conversation. This has been really
eye opening in a lot of ways. I've enjoyed it
very much. And here with your best tip for my
listeners on how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 6 (29:47):
Yeah, I think you know, we were just talking a
lot about mindset. I think really people both understanding the
mindset plays such an important role in your day to
day life right personally. It's hard to give general so
the entire population of your listeners, but I think that
will be you know, that's the importance of understanding both.
(30:07):
If you're setting these really ambitious goals, exciting goals for
yourself personally, for your family, for kind of your work
as well, I mean, you're going to get so much
more out of life. Our country needs that kind of
you know, type of spirit alive and well today. Whereas
if people are you know, if their mindset and if
they're hopeless they feel everything's going to be a dead end,
and some of this is being driven by the government's
(30:28):
bad policies, whether it's in education or otherwise. Again, having
that ambition, having those big dreams, having the mindset that
we can actually do this, we can actually your day
to day existence, you can be you know, light the
spark that changes the world. You know, I'm Catholic, and
if you really look at the lives of saints and
how like even you know, people as humble and as
poor as you know, Mother Teresa's the world, how they
(30:49):
can truly change things by individual action.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
This is what this all comes down to.
Speaker 6 (30:53):
So I hope more people understand just how important their
lives can be and that they can really make a
difference in their day to day their families at the localist,
you know, the most local level, and then with their
work that they're doing on a day to day basis.
And so a lot of gratitude you for kind of
putting this out into the world with your own work
where you've kind of had these positive enough lifting conversations.
(31:14):
I know you're focused at big on education, You've written
books on these things. So thank you so much for
thank you being such an important kind of I think
vector change for a lot of other people's lives.
Speaker 5 (31:23):
If he's Tommy Schultz, he's the CEO of American Federation
for Children. Check out that group. They are fantastic.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
Thank you so much, Tommy, Thank you, Carol, talk to
you soon.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcowitz Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
I got an email from a listener and she wrote
in this, Hi, Carol, you talk about the importance of
finding a relationship, but I'm thirty six. I'm not sure
that's of interest to me anymore. I sustain myself, I
make myself happy. I can't see what anyone would be
(00:26):
able to add to that. I'm not bitter or angry.
I haven't had bad men in my history. I just
don't see the importance of it. I wanted to have children,
but even that want has waned. What's so good about
being with someone? Then I heard this interesting exchange between
podcaster Jen Cohen and professor Scott Galloway. I'll play it
and then discuss it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
If you are a woman who is capable and competent
and can do all those things on your own, they
don't want a man because the men out there are
there's very few few that there are are going to
be wanted by every single girl, so then they're going
to go right. So it's like, what do you do?
And that's basically what's happening. I know more single, great
(01:11):
girls than I've ever had in my life. And very
few eligible great guys, very few. And the guys I
know who I'm friends with, they have the pick of
the litter. They can go out with girls who are
like literally more than half their age, and those girls
are like buying for them and dying to go out
with them.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
So we have.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
But both parties are blame. Okay, men young men for
a variety of reasons, some societal some is on them.
Are economically and emotionally unviable. They're less mature, they literally mature.
The prefrontal cortex matures are the soler rate. They're not
going to college. They're in there. They've been told by
(01:52):
the wealthiest, deepest pocketed companies in the world. They can
have a reasonable facsimile of life online with an algorithm.
Why go out and make the effort to get friends
when you can go on discord a reddit. Why get
a job when you can make money trading crypto on
coinbase or stocks on Robinhood. Why go through the effort
and the rejection and the humiliation and establishing the skills
and getting your mom or your gay friend address you
(02:15):
working out, taking the risk, going to a place, putting
up the bullshit in the rejection, of finding a romantic
or sexual partner when you just have YouPorn and so
you have an entire code of men who have sequestered
from society. They don't get those skills. They go down
a rabbit hole and they become almost sort of just
non viable mates.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Now, they don't include the age of these people in
the clip, but if the guys who refers to or
dating girls more than half their age, I have to
assume they're at least forty hopefully. So like my letter writer,
these people are set in their ways and wondering what
the point of being with someone is. I don't have
(02:55):
a great answer for that. I can tell you that
it's a different level of happiness being cared for by
someone and caring for them rather than not having that
and all that warmth that comes with it, the family life,
the security. It's all very good. And of course falling
in love is amazing and magical. And you know, the
(03:15):
woman who wrote in didn't say whether that's ever happened
her before. But if it hasn't, it still could it
should You should try to find it. But if you've
reached a stage in your life where you think relationships
just aren't for you anymore. Fine. What I would say
to these people is make sure you're not just using
(03:36):
a defense mechanism to try to make excuses for why
you haven't met someone. It's okay to not have met someone.
There's a lot of luck involved. Like I always say,
don't take your ball and go home. If you really
are happy, great, But I don't even think the men
in that clip are happy. If there's a tiny part
of you that thinks maybe you're not happy, don't give
(03:57):
up on the idea of meeting someone, and don't assume
that there was no one out there for you. Thanks
for listening. I love getting your emails. I love all
your questions. I'm going to do a few episodes on
family issues in the next few weeks because I've gotten
several emails about that. If you want something answered, email
me at Carol Markowitz Show at gmail dot com. Or
(04:19):
I post a form occasionally on x where you can
email me anonymously. I think people seem to like that,
so if you catch that form, send in your questions
there or Carol Markowitz Show at gmail dot com. Coming
up next and interview with Tommy Schultz. Join us after
the break.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
Welcome back, to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My
guest today is Tommy Schultz. Tommy is CEO of American
Federation for Children. Hi, Tommy, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Hey, thank you for having me Carol.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
So, did you always want to be the CEO of
the American Federation for Children? How did you get into that?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Well, that's a funny question.
Speaker 6 (05:00):
I didn't always know, because I didn't know the American
Federation for Children existed untill probably about ten years ago.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
It's an interesting story.
Speaker 6 (05:09):
I was, you know, initially, I went to college wanting
to be a doctor. I had this sort of high
minded notion that I wanted to help people. Long story short,
that we could maybe get into later. I felt that
wasn't the right path for me. A lot of challenges
sort of did fall in love with this notion of
fixing some of these societal problems or things that I
felt were hindering our ability to be a great country.
(05:33):
There were a few moments in college that really kind
of woke me up to that. And along that journey
I was working in politics, and then in between one
of the political campaign cycles, I had heard that this group,
the American Federation for children was really great. They were
looking for somebody on the team, and the timing was right,
the location was right.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
I said, I'd love to join that.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
And I only had this high minded notion around, you know,
school choice, school vouchers. I think I had read the
Builton Friedman essay from back in the nineteen fifty that
he had written, But it was really this particular moment
in time where I had suddenly started visiting schools, these
incredibly high performing just jewels of schools that were at
(06:13):
that time in Memphis, Tennessee, that were high performing but
with a high poverty kind of student body. And it
was really crippling to know and understand that, like, gosh,
if we didn't pass a school choice program, this school
in particular was really benefiting from anonymous donors who had
given some gifts that were essentially running out.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
And you get to think.
Speaker 6 (06:34):
About, how, my goodness, we have this education system that
we've designed that is designed this way that basically you
really need this golden ticket to get out and to
get a good education, or you need to be really
lucky and born into the quote right zip code to
go to that quote good school. And so it was
just this really personally humbling experience that I had that
(06:54):
I said, oh my gosh, like, we have to fix this.
There is urgency because if we didn't pass that school
choice program at that time I'm in Tennessee, those kids
would be going to some of the worst schools in
America just down the road, and you when you multiply
that at scale across the entire country. I really had
this almost spiritual awakening that I said, this is my
life's mission, this is what I want to focus on.
(07:14):
And so that led to me eventually kind of taking
over the company a couple of years ago, and we've
had a lot of success since. And I know you've
been following the school choice issues. Yeah, and you yourself
had a lot of personal experiences with education, so you
know how important it is, especially at the K through twelve.
K through twelve level can be such a vector change
for your kid's life. So that's how I again, I
didn't know I wanted to do this, but I think
(07:36):
God kind of smacked me over the head at some
point in my life.
Speaker 5 (07:39):
So you're going to go back and go to medical
school or absolutely not.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
I mean the story there was you know, I probably
wasn't thinking too far ahead when I was jumping fully
into this and didn't realize I mean, and especially at
this time, they were, you know, Obamacare is being debated,
and I talked to so many doctors at that point
who said, physicians, you name it that were like, look
the paperwork, the administrative burden it's getting. It's already bad enough,
(08:03):
and we're quite worried for what's down the road. I
wasn't liking the you know, the chemistry and the hard
sciences aspect at the college level with it, especially at Stanford.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
So yeah, not going back to medical school, that's for sure.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
I also actually was going to be a doctor, but
that's only because my parents are from the Soviet Union.
And you know, that's one of three careers you were
to choose.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
So lawyer, a doctor or something like that.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
You got, you got two out of three. How'd you know?
So what does the American Federation for Children focus on
other than school choice? Or is it mostly a school
choice organization?
Speaker 6 (08:37):
We are a singleish organization at least kind of what
the policies that we pass seek to give families the
best opportunity to go send their child to the school
of their choice. So public private charter we're agnostic on that,
but a real thing that is just needed in the
marketplace and has been needed for the last forty years
or more, is that we really do need a vibrant
(08:58):
kind of diet yamic set of options within each kind
of local community, and that charter schools took off in
the nineties and then early two thousands had a lot
of bipartisan support, but there were only kind of there
was a slower, longer tail when it comes to know
the growth of voucher programs, you know, any kind of
program or mechanism that allows a kid to go to
(09:20):
a private school. And so our team had been focusing
on that for quite a long time in various forms,
and in the last ten twenty years we've really accelerated
the pace of growth of voucher programs or ESA programs
or tax credit scholarship programs. These are all different mechanisms
that allow a student to go to a private school.
AFC is unique in that we do political elections at
(09:40):
the state level, because that's how you change these laws
at the state level. That creates a permanent change to
the education system. Whereas you know, many of our founders,
board members and many people who are especially in the
last few years, getting into the world of education, they
feel the only way to change things is to go
to your local school board. And that is indeed an
important factor in all this, but it doesn't do systemic
(10:01):
change right. You're making changes on the margins to certain
kind of budgetary decisions or certain kind of curriculum decisions
here and there. But when you're talking about systemic change,
you have to change laws right at the state level
in particular, because ninety percent of education and K through
twelve at least in this country, it's really dictated by
the state level dynamics. And so when you pass these
laws that allow families to go and take their funding
(10:21):
to the school their choice, such a difference maker, and
we've seen that in Florida in particular for the last
twenty years.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
You can go in depth about that.
Speaker 6 (10:28):
But AFC would do the elections to help kind of
change the makeup of the state legislature. We do the
lobbying and advocacy during the legislative sessions, and then we
also help families and role in these programs.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
So those are the kind of three legs of the
school How we do our work.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
One of the biggest roadblocks to the kind of systemic
changes you want to make.
Speaker 6 (10:46):
Oh, that's usually a pretty easy one. The biggest roadblock really,
it's the teachers' unions, their power, their money. You know, Carol,
if you had AFC, we've raised about thirty three million
dollars last year and deployed that across the country.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Carol, how much do you think the teachers unions brought
in in.
Speaker 6 (11:02):
Terms of their revenue four times that you were close?
I mean they bring in about three billion dollars in revenues. Yeah,
I mean, yeah, I was gotten by about, you know,
more than one hundred times. It's that and people just
don't understand the scale of what that means, right, because
if they're deducting right out of every teacher's paycheck, right,
(11:23):
hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars a year, you multiply
that not only to teachers. It's almost a misnomber to
call them the teachers unions. Schooling unions is probably the
better term, because they'll take any employee that is part
of the school system. And that's why you notice when
they're fighting at the state legislatures and they're lobbying and
putting so much money, they're always wanting more personnel, right,
and they'll find any sort of personnel to do it.
They'll say, you know, during COVID, we need more counselors, right,
(11:46):
And it's like, well, maybe let's discuss that. But then
all of a sudden you realize, no, no, it's all about
the dollars for them. It's every new employee is a
new paycheck going into the conference of the unions. And
so when you have this three billion dollar machine, I mean,
I mean, I don't know what the final tally was
for this year in the presidential elections, but for the
last couple of decades, I mean, that's the amount of
money that was spent at a presidential campaign level. And
(12:06):
they're doing that year over year at the school board level,
at the state level, at the federal level. And so
their influence on politics, particularly in democratic politics, really a
stranglehold on things. Whereas if they weren't able to you know,
collect that money, and there's all these kind of state
laws that are trying to push for that that you
can't automatically deduct the dues from you know, employees in
that fashion. If you took that money element away, I
(12:29):
think that's probably, you know, the biggest it would have
the biggest downstream effect in terms of our kind of
ability to get good reforms in the education system, because
especially on the you know, the democratic side of the equation,
there is such this fear that a Democrat, they tell
us this privately off.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
And they're like, look, I'm with you.
Speaker 6 (12:45):
Maybe when it gets to the vote, I'll be with you,
but I cannot stick my neck out or else they
will wipe me out into primary, right, And that's that's
really harmful to the politics because it's also this nefarious
I mean, it's a taxpayer funded initiative essentially, right, because
our tax dollars are going to the school employees. Their
money is then getting shuffled over to the teachers unions automatically.
Not that's not a good sign dynamic here. And so
(13:08):
but aside from that, the last couple of years, parents
have really made their voices heard. They got to see
what happened during COVID. We've been much more effective at
getting our message out there to those parents directly. So
we've been able to actually beat them, even though we're
well under resource relative to them. As we kind of
talked to.
Speaker 5 (13:24):
What's step one in fighting their dominance and actually ending that,
you know, taking money out of every teachers and every
employees paycheck. I mean, is there a way to stop that?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (13:34):
I think there are a number of states of past
laws where you know, you had the voluntary contributions have
to be voluntary and they can't be automatic, right, And
there are a couple of Supreme Court cases that kind
of dealt with this at the federal level that made
it such that you couldn't just you know, automatically take
money out of, you know, the teacher's paychecks. Jana's decision
was pretty notable in that regard. But then of course
(13:56):
the unions had already been seeing that the writing was
on the wall here, so they have their thous of lawyers.
They had worked out different ways to say, sure, you
won't be automatically joined into the teachers unions, but the
way that you have to like opt out is there's
this one Saturday at this random time and you have
to have your original teaching certificate that you got to bring.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
So they created all these kind of.
Speaker 6 (14:15):
Artificial ways to keep keep the doors from like you know,
them flooding for the exits. So there's a lot of
really good groups other folks that you should certainly talk
to in your podcasts that are working on that issue
in particular. But for us, you know, it does actually
go back to the school choice laws in that if
you are giving parents total control of their child's education
funding and they're able to kind of freely choose the
(14:37):
location or the type of setting home, you know, brick
and mortar, you name it, suddenly you know the power
of the unions and the power of the blob, all
the bureaucratic elements of this that has been just rising
dramatically over the last thirty years.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
When parents are in.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Control, suddenly there becomes a marketplace. Florida we've seen this
the most where they've embraced all of the options right, public, private, charter,
all of the public schools have gotten better in that
regard because of it.
Speaker 5 (15:02):
Right.
Speaker 6 (15:03):
So again, when parents are in charge, that's usually the
biggest lever. And then there is this kind of element
on the margins. I think that is an important part
of it, but where it's like, hey, we need to
really rethink how the teachers' unions and these kind of
public sector unions are able to operate in this you know,
unlimited fashion in a lot of ways within our kind
of public discourse, in our politics, so a lot of.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
The time, and I admit that this is true for me.
People only start to care about things like what they're
teaching at the local school, or school choice or any
of this when they have kids in the system. You
mentioned before we started, you have two small kids, so
this isn't actually personal for you yet. How did you
become so passionate about this?
Speaker 6 (15:44):
Yeah, again, it goes back to that story where I'm
you know, touring these beautiful schools with these in these
like high poverty areas that are doing so well for
these kids. You're talking to the teachers about the student
body and their challenges. The teachers are saying, roughly fifteen
percent our kids are homeless, or you know, you have
all these other ailments. You know, parents that you know,
(16:05):
single parent households that are really in deep poverty, but
they are getting their kid into this great school, which
is their ticket to end generational poverty in many ways,
and you're thinking about the fact that the unions are
trying to essentially either close these schools make sure they
don't get any state funding.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And it's just when you're.
Speaker 6 (16:22):
Looking at the kind of dichotomy here of how enough
farious it is that there are people that they do
not actually care about the student's success, especially of these
kids in deep poverty. And you know, lower income families
have been screaming about this for generations, and lawmakers and
others will say, well, no, you know, the schools I
went to, they were good, and we just need to
do do like we did in the seventies and eighties.
(16:43):
It's like, you know, there are really deep, deep cracks
within our kind of public education system that we need
to fix, and there's this sort of moral imperative that
we should all have about that. And to your point
about parents not really you know, understanding this or paying
attention to us until their kids are going into it.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
Too late, it's like too late to make changes once
your kids are in it.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (17:03):
No.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
And thankfully there were visionaries kind of a people that
founded AFC who were you know, both philanthropus. They were
giving out lots of scholarships, but they felt at that
time in the nineties they're like, look, we could give
out the entire fortunes of every kind of major family
in the world here, but we're not changing the system. Right,
we're giving a lot of you know, we're giving out
a lot of proverbial lifeboats. But the system remains unchained
(17:26):
and actually was only growing, and it's kind of power
and influence. And so therefore thank God for the people
like you know, Betzy to Voss, even the John Walton
Bill Obendorf, who at the early stage of this said
we need to fix this American education system or else
it's going to be too late for the future country
and everything. I mean, we could have a long debate
about poverty, right, but it's so much of it stems.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
From a poor education system. Right.
Speaker 6 (17:49):
And for parents at the individual level again, I almost
I love when a parent really kind of comes to
this with like the zeal of a you know, convert,
where they go, oh my gosh, I didn't realize how
it was you. And again, this is the nature of
our system, where if you grew up in this system
that just said, hey, it's your zip code and this,
I mean, when the game is sort of set that way,
(18:09):
you're not really thinking could this be different and should
we change it? And I think again COVID really had
this seench of sketch moment on the American consciousness that wait,
all these other countries aren't doing it like we do, right,
and we can actually have a free and open system
where we control our education funding. Especially when we're spending
about twenty thousand dollars per kid per year in American
kind of education, we should be getting a little more
(18:32):
for that money and we can probably improve outcomes make
parents happier. And again we're seeing that in places like Florida,
and you know it's soon to be Texas once we
get that across the finish line next year.
Speaker 5 (18:41):
For this year, rather, it just impresses me so much
when people don't have skin in the actual game, and actually,
like the wealthy people you mentioned who have donated, they
could have just kept their money and done something else
with it, or you know, they clearly could live in
the best zip codes and send their kids to private
school and just move on with their lives. With the
fact that people get involved in this way, it just
(19:02):
gives me a lot of hope and optimism for our country.
I think there's a lot of places where I don't
think that philanthropy works like that, and that people make
differences in the lives of people that you know aren't
in their world or in a completely different sector of society.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
I'm just I'm impressed with all of that.
Speaker 6 (19:21):
So now well and it's I think again they felt
that moral paying right that unlike I mean, it's probably
a bad analogy, but unlike healthcare, where it's like, look,
we're talking about a lifetime of decisions and a lot
of you know, a lot of factors that key into
how we're thinking through you know, having a healthy you know,
make America healthy against kind of situation. Whereas education is like, look,
(19:43):
you've got this essentially depending upon the kid, but you
know this twelve to fifteen year window where you only
get this one shot to do it right. And some
of these early decisions, I mean a lot of people
got captivated in the nineties and two thousands when they
started seeing the research that like, look, if you're unable
to read by third or fourth grade, you're really not
going to you know, get that back over the years,
(20:04):
and that's going to just you know, put you into
this pipeline of poverty.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Or worse the rest of your life when.
Speaker 6 (20:09):
You go when you kind of start factoring in all
these facts, all these ideas around education, how important of
a vector change it can be with these sorts of
early internet. You know, how many people do you know, Carol,
in your life to talk about that one great teacher, right,
or that one kind of even if it's just a
social setting of like the right students in your kind
of cohort, that one grade where it's like, you know,
(20:29):
that's when everything changed for me and I really propelled
through middle school and then high school because of it. Right,
So all these things like gosh, education is the silver
bowl to all of these things in life, and we
got to get this right. And where it's too great
a country to have, you know, minimal dreams or kind
of mediocre kind of notions around education is fine, we'll
fix it. You know, so many of these students that
(20:51):
we bring into our team, who they themselves benefited from
a school choice program, they often have a very similar
story that you know, their mom, dad, we're fighting tooth
and nail to get them into that better school. The
local terrible public school was telling them, no, no, no,
We've got this ten year plan. We're going to fix it.
It's like ten years is too late for almost everything, right,
(21:12):
and lo and behold, Carol, they never got that ten
year plan in place. They got a lot more money,
they didn't fix the situation. So again, this is where
it's like, if you can put your kid into a
great school tomorrow, their whole life can be changed, Their
whole family's life can be changed, especially if they're in
dire poverty.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
What do you worry about, Well, I think we've been
talking about it.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
I mean I do worry, you know, I tell you know,
I often reflect upon when it's like graduation time, you
know it's May June. You know, you really do reflect upon, like, gosh,
the urgency of this issue, and that if we didn't
pass that school choice program, how many more graduating classes
of kids, especially you think about like a freshman or
sophomore where it's like, if you could have put them
into a better educational environment, maybe that's what actually propels
(21:51):
them into college for the first time in their.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Family or so that kind of that moment where we're thinking.
Speaker 6 (21:57):
About the losses that we have in terms of the
state legislative fights where it's like we weren't able to pass
that program. I do always worry about kind of those
kids that fell through the cracks that we know we
could have helped, We know we could have put them
on a better life path. And I mean, we're talking
millions and hundreds of thousands of kids, and what does
that mean for society ten twenty years down the road?
And I remember at the early outset of COVID and
(22:20):
the kind of the lockdowns of the teaching union started
to orchestrate, and as you know, in some places they
locked schools down for two years. There were studies that
com yep, exactly right. And then when you look actually
right across like the proverbial street, at how ninety percent
of private schools were opened by October twenty twenty, you
started to go, wait, what's going on there? Right?
Speaker 5 (22:39):
That's that's unjust where's the science? How is the science working?
How are the private school kids safer than the public school?
Speaker 6 (22:46):
Right? Political science was ruling the day in that regard.
But when you looked at how in particular, and this
is getting back to your question about what I worried
about at that time, there was a study to come
out saying there's basically three million kids that we don't
really know where they are, particularly in these kind of
blighted communities, high poverty situations. And it's just devastating because
(23:07):
when you really think about the long tail of that.
We have roughly three million people going through our kind
of prison system. And if you think that, like Gosha
down the road, of some higher percentage of those kids
that are on the proverbial streets or are not getting
a great education and they're relegated to these kind of
terrible life paths, you just really think about the impact
(23:27):
on our welfare system, right and the quality of life
overall for a society.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
And again, it's.
Speaker 6 (23:32):
Such a simple thing that we can have the best
education system in the world. We should for some populations
within America. We really do. We can bring that at
scale if we just made some of these systemic reforms.
And again, I think COVID was really that slap in
the face for so many families, and I'm so glad
it is. Even so many politicians got up to it saying, oh, yeah,
we were our assumptions about our education system were incorrect.
(23:55):
We need to implement school choice right now. And thankfully
we said, look, we've got the plan in the drawer.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Here's how you do.
Speaker 6 (24:00):
Here's the lessons of mistake that we've learned of how
to create a really successful, thriving type of program.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
So the things I worry about again. It always comes
back to the kids.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
More coming up with Tommy Schultz. But first January twenty
seventh was International Holocaust Rememberance Day, a day to remember
the great evil of the Holocaust, when millions of Jews
were slaughtered during the Nazis reign of terror. Today, the
rise in global antisemitism and the constant attacks on Israel
show us that it's more important than ever to remember
(24:30):
the atrocities of the Holocaust to ensure it never happens again.
That's why I've partnered with the International Fellowship of Christians
and Jews. They provide food, shelter, and safety to Jews
in Israel and around the world, including those remaining Holocaust survivors.
Your donation today will help provide food, water, medicine, and
(24:51):
other basic necessities to Jewish communities, and through your gift,
you'll stand with the Jewish people and against this growing
antisemitism and give a gift to show your support of
the Jewish people by visiting SUPPORTIFCJ dot org. That's one
word support IFCJ dot org or call eight eight eight
(25:13):
for eight eight if CJ that's eight eight eight for
eight eight if CJ eight eight eight for eight eight
four three two five.
Speaker 5 (25:28):
What advice would you give your sixteen year old self
other than you're not going to be a doctor.
Speaker 6 (25:32):
Yeah, it's it's interesting because I feel I have lived
a twenty different lifetime since my sixteen year old self. Again,
when I was moving all around across the country, you know,
working on political campaigns, that was a different subset of
my life when I was sixteen, you know, still in
high school, but I was really I was working. They
were spending a lot of time as a competitive trapshooter
(25:54):
going around the country, and so I was really focused,
even potentially on making an Olympic run at that point,
should I even go to college and all these things.
So I feel like my life advice of my sixteen
year old self wouldn't be that much of a difference
maker because everything in life there were so few variables,
So you know, you're so singularly focused on just a
few things like school and athletics. But I think if
(26:16):
I were to give general advice to my younger self,
and I think to anybody, in some ways, it's mindset
really matters. How you kind of talk to yourself about
your goals, your dreams, how you're evaluating your life path
against something I didn't do as well when I was
thinking I'll just go and be a doctor, you know,
not really evaluating that and thinking through, hey, maybe are
(26:37):
all my assumptions correct, but everything else too. That There's
a great book called The Luck Factor where I don't
know if you've read it, but they talked to They
were kind of these longitudinal studies around people who are
they view themselves as lucky, right, and some people and
the more that these people viewed themselves as lucky, it's
low and behold lucky chances seem to come their way
more and it's less about like some mystical notion that
(26:59):
the universe like tips the scales in favor of them.
But they'll do these scientific studies where it's like, are
you walking by this, like this dollar bill or something,
and we did that person.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
Pick it up?
Speaker 6 (27:08):
And the unlucky people always view themselves unlucky, like they
will miss that dollar bill because they're not looking at
and their brains just aren't subconsciously kind of thinking through
these issues. And this again goes to every day decisions
around you know, goal setting and am I making the
right goals and do I have a dream and ambition
or something that I want to work on that is
actually exciting. And then that goes to the negative end
(27:29):
of it two, where how many people do you meet
in your lives that are so down on themselves or
they have this negative script or nothing's going to work
And it's like, well, lo and behold, I things aren't
going to work out if you're always looking at it
the wrong perspective. And there's plenty of other great books,
you know, mindset Carol dwack All, the kind of other research.
I really wish I'd stumbled upon this stuff earlier, and
I think more young people would benefit from that type
(27:50):
of you know, that kind of psychology and training around mindset,
and even the studies when you look at young children
in their education where you know, telling someone you're so
smart versus telling someone you worked really hard at that, right,
and then you kind of all these amazing interventions that
show like, yeah, actually your mindset is almost the most
important thing versus these kind of having this belief around
(28:12):
like immutable traits that you just can't control, and there's
these factors always outside of your outside of your decision framework.
So I think in general, with my younger self. I
whish I had stumbled upon some of this earlier.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
I love that.
Speaker 5 (28:23):
I definitely consider myself lucky, and I think that I
could see how it perpetuated itself. Absolutely, you know the
fact that I got to be American just starting right
from there and moving on to the rest of my life.
I think I feel like I've walked between rain drops
the whole time.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
So I'm going to.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
Read that book.
Speaker 6 (28:42):
Yeah, And in this matter of luck, I mean, this
is what I hate about our education system, right, where
so much of it is predicated on luck. Are you
born into the right zip code right the last five
arbitrary digits of your home address? And we've built this
because of partly the Jim Crow era where there's segregating
communities based upon race, and therefore, like we've just sort
of kept a version of that system where hey, again,
(29:04):
your home madres dictates your entire educational pathns.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
There's some of these communities where you.
Speaker 6 (29:09):
Know, from elementary then to middle then to high school,
some kids, every single school they will go.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
To is one of the worst in their state or
even the country.
Speaker 6 (29:17):
It's like, gosh, I think about even you had that
one one outlet even at any point in that chain
of elementary school you went to a great school, or
middle school you went to a great school.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
All of a sudden that just I mean.
Speaker 6 (29:28):
Luck should not play a factor in our education system,
especially how much we're spending, how important it is to
the future of our country.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
Absolutely well, I've loved this conversation. This has been really
eye opening in a lot of ways. I've enjoyed it
very much. And here with your best tip for my
listeners on how they can improve their lives.
Speaker 6 (29:47):
Yeah, I think you know, we were just talking a
lot about mindset. I think really people both understanding the
mindset plays such an important role in your day to
day life right personally. It's hard to give general so
the entire population of your listeners, but I think that
will be you know, that's the importance of understanding both.
(30:07):
If you're setting these really ambitious goals, exciting goals for
yourself personally, for your family, for kind of your work
as well, I mean, you're going to get so much
more out of life. Our country needs that kind of
you know, type of spirit alive and well today. Whereas
if people are you know, if their mindset and if
they're hopeless they feel everything's going to be a dead end,
and some of this is being driven by the government's
(30:28):
bad policies, whether it's in education or otherwise. Again, having
that ambition, having those big dreams, having the mindset that
we can actually do this, we can actually your day
to day existence, you can be you know, light the
spark that changes the world. You know, I'm Catholic, and
if you really look at the lives of saints and
how like even you know, people as humble and as
poor as you know, Mother Teresa's the world, how they
(30:49):
can truly change things by individual action.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
This is what this all comes down to.
Speaker 6 (30:53):
So I hope more people understand just how important their
lives can be and that they can really make a
difference in their day to day their families at the localist,
you know, the most local level, and then with their
work that they're doing on a day to day basis.
And so a lot of gratitude you for kind of
putting this out into the world with your own work
where you've kind of had these positive enough lifting conversations.
(31:14):
I know you're focused at big on education, You've written
books on these things. So thank you so much for
thank you being such an important kind of I think
vector change for a lot of other people's lives.
Speaker 5 (31:23):
If he's Tommy Schultz, he's the CEO of American Federation
for Children. Check out that group. They are fantastic.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
Thank you so much, Tommy, Thank you, Carol, talk to
you soon.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcowitz Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Karol Markowicz
Popular Podcasts
Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Betrayal: Season 4
Karoline Borega married a man of honor – a respected Colorado Springs Police officer. She knew there would be sacrifices to accommodate her husband’s career. But she had no idea that he was using his badge to fool everyone. This season, we expose a man who swore two sacred oaths—one to his badge, one to his bride—and broke them both. We follow Karoline as she questions everything she thought she knew about her partner of over 20 years. And make sure to check out Seasons 1-3 of Betrayal, along with Betrayal Weekly Season 1.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.