The day. Coming of age in american poverty. Nick nikhil goyal is a sociologist and policymaker who served as a Senior Policy Adviser on education and children for chairman. Senator bernie. Senator Bernie Sanders on the u. S. Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions are in committee on the budget. He developed education child care and Child Tax Credit, federal legislation as well as a Tuition Free College program for incarcerated people and correctional workers in vermont. He has appeared on cnn, fox and msnbc and written for the new york times, washington post, wall street journal, time, the nation and many other publications. Goyle earned his b. A. Goddard college and a master of philosophy and ph. D. At the university of cambridge. The kill will be joined today in conversation tonight by Binyamin Appelbaum applebaum writes about economics and business for the editorial page of the new york times. From 2010 to 2019. He was a washington correspondent for the times covering Economic Policy in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. He previously worked for the charlotte observer, where his reporting on subprime lending won a george polk award and was a finalist for the 2008 pulitzer prize. Hes local. He lives in washington, d. C. , with his wife, two children and a dog. So please join me in welcoming tonight politics and prose, nick nikhil goyal and Binyamin Appelbaum. Good evening on. We are going to talk about this book, which i when i went to kill asked me to do this and sent me a copy of it. I knew the topic was of interest. To me, its stuff i care a lot about, but i didnt expect to the quality of the storytelling. For those of you havent read it, what makes this book important and powerful is how he gets into the lives of his characters, portrays them with empathy and in detail, helps you to understand the challenges that theyre facing and and helps us to understand both whats wrong and perhaps what we might do about it. So were going to do this in two parts. The first part is going to be about that storytelling, and then were going to talk a little bit about some of the policy lessons, the takeaways from that story. But i do want to begin with, with that remarkable storytelling and perhaps the place to begin is just to have you talk a little bit about how you found these kids, how this all began for you. Sure. And thank you so much for being here. And thank you for being conversation. So i first started visiting kensington and in 2015 it came actually very by chance. I reached out to a friend, andrew, freshman, who runs an Organization Called big picture learning, and i was interested in examining the High School Dropout crisis across the united states, and id asked him to suggest schools for me to visit. And he suggested i go to el centro de studio and an alternative last chance high school in kensington and i started going to kensington, visiting the school. I thought i was going to a story interview, you know, a couple dozen kids spent a couple of weeks there. And then over time it snowballed into a much larger project. I spent some time there, went off to grad school, made that my, conducted a full length ethnographic study in the neighborhood and then turned that study into this book. You know, the the process of writing it was i mean, it was it was exhaustive in various respects. You know, as an ethnographer and ethnography is essentially a study where you immerse yourself in the lives of your Research Participants to provide a systematic analysis of something, a concept, an issue, a community. And i followed a number of these young people who had attended el centro. I met them when they were at the school. They had dropped out of school previously, and tried to come back to finish their High School Diplomas. I learned about their educational experiences, their families, their loved ones, their aspirations. You know everything about them as human beings and and additionally, as a sociologist, it was very important for me to not just provide an account of their lives, but to examine and structure them in a way to show that they are embedded within a larger political economy, that, you know, the conditions we see in kensington, you know, the poorest neighborhood and the poorest large city in america are our conditions that did not come about by accident. Theyre the result of policies and histories and political and economic decisions over the course of generations. And so i tried to bring those two things together. And as part of the research, i would interview the young people. I eventually they introduced me to their families and friends and just shatter them at their homes, would just hang out after school, go on, go on walks, walking tours in the neighborhood, asking them to show me places where they frequented with their friends and important landmarks in their lives, really trying to get a full on sense of, of, of their social of kensington. I also spent a lot of time conducting research at other schools in the neighborhood to make sure i was getting a representative understanding of alternative education in the city. I mean, a lot of young people who had been pushed out of schools tend to go to the alternative school system, whether it is a last Chance School like kensington, like el centro, or you know, a Virtual Charter School or even a more formal disciplinary school. They have a variety of options. And i want to understand that at at large. So, you know, thats thats a little bit of of the kind of Research Process and, you know, took on about a over eight years of reporting. Well, so the core of this story, its the lives of three young men in this philadelphia neighborhood, kensington, struggling to get through school, to get started on their adult lives against all of the challenges of their environment and their social situation and and those three lives dont exactly they dont intersect. Exactly. They touch a little bit, but theyre three distinct stories and talk a little bit about those stories. Why these three stories seemed meaningful to you. Tell us a little bit about who these young men are and and what about their stories made you say these are the three that i want to tell . Sure yes. The three main characters in the book, ryan karam, emmanuel neff, now now known as kareem and john carlos and i met them, you know, just around the time of 2015, 2016. You know, ryan starred with ryan. You know, ryan had he starts off the book with the story of how he started a fire in a trashcan in his middle school and that incident gets him arrested. He gets sent to juvenile detention and then eventually gets expelled from grover washington. His middle school, and gets transferred to an alternative for profit. This very School CalledCommunity Education partners. And i follow his life during that time by drawing on an enormous trove of records and that his mother had kept for many, many years, you know, all the way from School Records to her notes, where he would come home every day from sleep. And then she would record his own experience or his experiences. And then even the videotape of ryan starting the fire that the court had given to her, you know, in 2009, she had kept that. And i was able to use that to provide a really, i think, intimate and fully narrative story of what that young person was enduring. And so i felt i eventually meet ryan. He this is a second tour of el centro, as he would like to call it. He had dropped in and out of the school and i follow his life during that time. You know, he eventually gets arrested as an adult for for selling drugs. And then goes to el centro and i wont spoil the entire story, but its time after el centro and his and his and his career, emmanuel when i, when i met him was, was dealing and grappling with his sexuality. You know, he had been he had grown up in a pentecostal christian household. His mother was deeply religious, religiously conservative, and did not approve that he had come out as bisexual to her. And so he was dealing with a very unstable home life. And the fact that they had been dealing with addictions almost single year, multiple evictions, a year for for several, several years. And so i traced that period of his time, of his childhood, and later when he comes to el centro and all of those issues come into full picture, because now hes trying to graduate high school. He has just come out to his mother. Hes dealing with housing insecurity and and and all the other things that teenagers have to confront. And i you know, i think his story really illustrates a number of the failings of the social safety net, whether its from the lack of public assistance like the program called temporary assistance for needy families or the insufficient amount of money that people who are disabled get through the ssi program. Or just the fact that if youre dealing with a family, if youre in a family dealing with Domestic Violence and your family has to break apart and a single mother has to then take care of that child, how the state does not give anything to that single mother to make sure that child is taken care of. You know, all this kind of harrowing predicaments that that confront low income families in this country. And then finally, john carlos, you know, he was very fascinating in particular to me because as part of the book, i was following their lives, talking about the School Giving this history. But he illustrated and and represent the resistance to neoliberal, market based School Reform in particular. You know, philadelphia, i would say, has been a guinea pig in a in this market based experiment, whether its from privatize in Public Schools to opening up Charter Schools to zero tolerance discipline to massive budget cuts, to shaping the Public School system in the face of the market. You know, all of those practices have existed in the in the city for the past. You know, 20, 25 years. And john carlos came of age in the during that time, he began protesting against the school closures. In 2013, philadelphia closed 24 Public Schools, one of the largest mass School Closings in american history. He joined an Organization Called youth night change, which was a youth Led Organization in resisting against these these policies. And i followed his trajectory as an activist that helped tell a broader story about Public Education in the city. So in some, you know, each of them illustrate some history or some policy or institution and i think i hope hopefully give voice to that and humanize them by connecting agency with which structure. One thing i really admire about the book is that you told the stories as they were in all of their complexity, even when that didnt necessarily serve the policy conclusions. And i wont spoil brians story for those who havent read the book yet, but his his initial disastrous encounter with the law turns out to have, you know, a little bit of a Silver Lining at the end. Thats school that you focus on is arguably an example of, you know, what happens when you allow capitalists to get involved in education, right. The guy who founds it is the scion of one of the industrial families that formerly employed the people of kensington and he comes back with this vision of, a way to help educate these kids. So i guess talk a little bit about maybe lets focus on the school and tell us a little bit into policy here, but talk a little bit about the example that school and what you take from it because that is not an institution that was created by the philadelphia Public School system or ever could have been, i wouldnt think. Sure. So in philadelphia, in the early 2000s, paul vallas becomes a superintendent. Some of you may know that the name paul vallas, because you just ran for of philadelphia mayor of chicago against brennan johnson. And hes been a kind of a kind of a villain figure in various of these School Reform stories, whether its in new orleans or in chicago or in philadelphia. And so he takes the helm of the philadelphia schools at that time. And there was an interest to solve the dropout crisis. And so they began this district began issuing contracts to alternative school providers, not some of them, or nonprofit fits for profit companies. And one of the schools that i mentioned, cpe Community Education partners, was one of the schools that was given a contract and then so the person youre referring to is his name is David Bromley, and he, you know, grew up just out of feel outside of philadelphia. His ancestors were had run the largest textile firms in kensington. Its just a fascinating story because, you know, going back to methodology for a second, i didnt know any of this, you know, going in. You know, i hadnt known the bromley family or or the history of industry in kensington. And its only a couple of years into my research where i was reading a history of industrial life in enfield off i think it was philips grant and one of the great historians of philadelphia. And i noticed bromley kept coming up and i was like, wait a second. Like this . The same guy, you know, that ive been writing about for all these years. And i went to be david was like, hey, david, like, are you, you know, are you bromley . You know, are you what is your family part for ancestors or were were how organized these textile companies . And so he tells me a little the history that i went on this kind of goose, goose search, where im going all over kansas ten and trying to find the old factories. And i learn quite remarkably. The school was located on dauphin street when i was there and literally, you can stand you can be on the third the top floor of the school and you can see an old bromley textile mill just next to the dolphin station, which is kind of remarkable. And actually something david shouldnt even know. And so go you know, i uncover a lot of this history over time and even the first location of the school, which is in north square, just two blocks south of dolphin street in philadelphia. Noor square used to be a a place where many of the the bosses of the Companies Used to live. And i learned davids family members actually lived in the brownstones, literally across the street from the school, the first school building. So, you know, its just in fuzed with this great history that i just became insanely curious about uncovering. So long story short, david, i, you know, grows up in and outside of philadelphia, goes to private schools, moves to california and then gets into education. All of a sudden by design, a tutor at a at a local high school in l. A. And i get, you know, inspires them to go into teaching. He goes on to start a big picture learning model school in oakland and big picture learning for you know for those of you not familiar is you know, Nonprofit Organization that has a network of were called progressive or Student Center schools. The idea is that the school should fit the needs of the child. And we shouldnt we should you know, there should be a divorce between the community and the classroom. So students spend several days a week in internships and what they call real World Learning experiences, among other activities. There, theres a structure of advisories where students in those advisories throughout the day and and the idea is that each child should be known by at least one adult in the school, which helps produce more social cohesion, reduces bullying, and also just make sure that students are heard and felt responsive to. So david comes back to philadelphia, starts el centro. The scientists, gets a contract by the district. It was quite funny because he was telling me about his you know, his experience coming to kensington and it wasnt deliberate that he decided to start this. The school in that neighborhood. He only learns later on when he was looking for real estate for the school that people would tell him like, are you a bromley . Like, are you, you know, is are you part of that family . And he you know, he tells me this funny story where he know he met this guy and hes like similarly, hey, i dont mean to be offensive, but like, are you bromley . And hes like, yeah, you know, im just want to let you know, like, i used to be in a union organized and the bromley were the worst people i guess workers. And so david you know kind of gets into this situation and you know, ive talked to him a number of times. Ive asked him to kind of reflect upon starting a school and ill talk to school for some, the poorest children and families in the city, in a neighborhood that was sucked dry of the enormous wealth that these factories produced for decades. You know, how do you kind of reconcile with that . And, you know, i pose them some pose some of these kind of difficult questions. And and, you know, you recognize the kind of irony of that and and, you know, felt that he was doing some good on behalf of these children living in very deep poverty and, you know, even though many them may not have graduated. And but he was providing them with a safe, nurturing place for at least a couple of hours during the day. Yeah. I mean, its interesting that that sense of that neighborhood sucked dry. I mean, it feels like the description of it feels a little bit like, you know, the high plains with all the nutrients gone, you cant really have a productive farm there anymore. You also spend a lot of time on on not just the stories of these young men, but on their family histories, on the traumas that their mothers in particular, but also their fathers and their grandmothers and grandfathers endured. And it starts to feel pretty bleak, honestly. It starts to feel like, you know, here they are traumatized for generations stuck in this place where its awfully hard to imagine anyone prospering, where wheres the hope in the sto