Ep. 1388: Ross Greene Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

My guest today is Ross Greene. He is a clinical child psychologist. Greene's research has been extensively published in academic journals and he and the CPS model have been mentioned in popular media. He advocates against punitive, exclusionary disciplinary practices, including detention, suspension, expulsion, corporal punishment, restraint, and seclusion. The topic is his book The Kids Who Aren't Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: American education system challenges Meeting kids where they are Meritocracy vs equity Behavioral issues and classroom disruption Nature vs nurture in learning Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel https://twitter.com/covel Facebook: @trendfollowing https://www.facebook.com/trendfollowing/ LinkedIn: @covel https://linkedin.com/in/covel/ Instagram: @mikecovel https://www.instagram.com/mikecovel/ Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  My guest today is Ross Greene. His new book, The Kids Who Aren't Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools. Ross is a very positive guy. But unfortunately, he met in me a skeptic. A skeptic with data. A skeptic with understanding. What follows? Is that optimism and that skepticism meeting head on? Look, we all understand education, or many of us do. I did K through 12. I did college. I did grad school. I have a keen understanding about the system and the process. And I also understand

• 0:44Speaker 00

  the data that exist for today. Something like education is highly political in the United States of America. It's not just about educating. But let's jump right into it because Ross does bring a hopeful message. And I try to counter him every step of the way. I hope you enjoy.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Let me give you an introduction about myself. I think you might find it interesting. I grew up in Northern Virginia. I went to O'Connell High School. I'm sure you had some students at Virginia Tech that went to O'Connell. I can only guess. I mean, it's a small world, right? I was a terrible student. Completely terrible. I did not like the idea of, "Michael, memorize this and you will have a successful life because someone will take care of you." I didn't like that idea. I was at O'Connell. But I had family members that did the Fairfax County School System. And they had experience with the GT program and the LD program. You know, in my family, I saw all kinds of interesting things. And of course, I'm Gen X. Fairfax County has changed tremendously, even from the 90s. I don't think there's probably a county in the country, maybe Loudoun County, that's changed more than those two counties

• 2:03Speaker 00

  for an assortment of reasons. So that's a little bit of a backdrop for me. I happen to be in Asia now. Call that home primarily. There has been a lot of interesting lessons for me learned. And a lot of my friends and I, especially Western friends, will talk about this. The advantages that we see in a culturally homogeneous country, especially when it comes to things like education, when it comes to things like, a side tangent like violence or behaving badly. So anyways, that's a little bit of the backdrop of where I'm at. Your background is quite deep and all kinds of perspectives. I think the thing that I would love to lay out with you and at least agree to it,

• 2:42Speaker 00

  or at least come to some understanding is where we are today with the educational system. And we're primarily talking about America, but I'm sure people around the world will listen also, find some commonalities in what we talk about. But as I look at it, and again, as I mentioned, being in Asia, I look at a place like America and I say, we've got this hot pot, this melting pot, and we have very different groups of people often put into school systems. And these people, we can look at the broad statistics, everyone knows that there are differences. Generally speaking, if there wasn't, I don't know what the phrase would be necessarily, affirmative action, DEI, that most Asian kids would have been dominating the IVs for decades.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  And there's probably been quite a bit of discrimination against them for being too successful at taking the test or just being smart. And so I look at this landscape and I don't know what to do with it. There are so much politics in the American educational system and America is so divided. I don't even think at the end of an hour long conversation, we're going to necessarily say, oh yeah, there's a solution. So anyways, that's my setup before we get into the details. Broadly speaking, how do you see the American educational system today?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Depends on where you live, depends on who you are as a kid, depends on what kind of support for education you're getting at home. It depends a great deal on whether you have behavioral challenges. It depends quite a bit on whether you have other challenges. So there's no singular, here's how we're doing these days. There's how's this kid doing? And there's certainly kids. Profiles who are doing less well than others. That said, we know that a fourth of American kids are not showing up at school regularly. That trend was in motion pre-COVID, so we can't blame COVID for that.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Something isn't right, and of course, I have some ideas about what isn't right. But it's a pretty complex issue, and you're right, in an hour, it would be hard to do it complete justice.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  We might not find justice in general, ever, in the current state of America. You know, here's an opening salvo for you that gets into the deep end very fast. You are, I don't know if I want to use the phrase famous, but I think very well known for talking about meeting kids where they are. And conceptually, I can't have any disagreement with that at all. However, if I happen to be in a school system where there are kids that are outside the norm, either for an assortment of reasons, cultural, we'll get into this, but whether it's just an IQ issue. If I'm one of those kids that's stuck in a classroom with the instigator, so to speak,

• 5:31Speaker 00

  and whether that instigator is there with all kinds of issues, not necessarily of his or hers own fault or culpability. I really struggle with this idea that we have this system in America that says it's the public school hot pot, and everybody gets dumped in, and we have this belief in equity that everybody is the same. And it's clearly not true. If I can agree with you on the idea that meet kids where they are, but if you're one of those kids that has to be in a classroom with somebody who's being met where they are, and that person or that group of people, or whatever, are completely a disruption,

• 6:12Speaker 00

  that's the part that I don't get, and that does seem to be the American educational system.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Disruptions usually occur when we're not meeting a kid where they're at. So if I'm invited into a school to consult on a kid who's disrupting, or as you're saying, instigating, I'm immediately looking for how we are not meeting them where they're at. Because I find that when we do meet kids where they're at, they're not disruptive, they're not instigating. The disruption and the instigation is a byproduct of them not having been met where they're at. So now I'm doing a deep dive on what are we missing? How is that kid not getting what they need? You're absolutely right. The American education system does say that we need to educate every kid.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  I think that's a good thing. I think that makes it very hard to do. My definition of equity is not that everybody's the same. It's exactly the opposite. Equity means everybody's different. There's a ton of developmental variability walking through the door, which is just a psychologist's fancy way of saying, every kid is different. That is the art of teaching, meeting every kid where they're at. By the way, it's not unprecedented. There's all kinds of initiatives in education. Differentiated instruction, personalized learning, special education. All are right in that exact same vein, meeting kids where they're at. That's the challenge. I don't think it's impossible.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  I think it's very doable, and I see lots of educators doing it very well.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  So my background, I tell you K through 12, a Catholic school. I then went to Randolph-Macon for a year. I graduated from George Mason. I went to Florida State for an MBA. I spent a semester in grad school through Boston University in London, studying international relations. I do not recall any situations in those classrooms where there were situations that would require my having to understand or witness other students having some issue. And I think that's where I'm trying to go is, I don't think it's fair. For students to have to be observant of the system, meeting students that are outside

• 8:34Speaker 00

  the norm and being observant to meeting them in their situation. Look, I've seen, for example, might as well get stark about it because I think one of the things that also bothers me here is the mixing up of statistics. Because when you take America and you say, okay, here's white, Asian, black, Hispanic, and you throw it all into the hot pot and mix it up, you're going to get statistics. If you start to segregate by group, you're going to get other statistics. So I guess the big picture for me is, why does a student have to be in a situation where their learning and their life is messed up by some other student who is not being met at where they are?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  They shouldn't have to. The fact that they often are in that position, once again, tells us something's going on with that kid who's messing it up. That something is often not very well understood, especially in schools. That's the type of kid I've been working with for over four decades. So I don't find them hard to understand at all. I also don't find it that hard to help them, believe it or not. This is not like rocket science. I don't consider myself a rocket scientist. But the fact that a kid has to sit through a class with a kid who's being disruptive tells us, for whatever reason, somehow we

• 9:50Speaker 01

  are not meeting that kid who's being disruptive where they're at yet. We don't want to let that stand. I don't have a great explanation for why you never had to deal with that. I don't know your history well enough to know why you never were exposed to that level of what you might call developmental variability. But there's developmental variability all over the place. And sometimes when kids are struggling, the way they express that they're struggling is through their concerning behavior. And there are concerning behaviors that I would refer to as lucky, crying, pouting, sulking, whining, and concerning behaviors that are unlucky, screaming, swearing, hitting, spitting, kicking, biting, throwing, destroying,

• 10:35Speaker 01

  running. You were lucky in that you didn't get very much exposure to unlucky. But here's what's interesting about lucky and unlucky frustration responses. They're all communicating the same thing. That kid is having difficulty meeting certain expectations. There is an excellent chance that what people have been primarily focused on is the concerning behavior and trying to modify it rather than the unmet expectations, what I call unsolved problems that are causing the frustration response in the first place. That's a radical change that needs to occur. Every place where kids with concerning behaviors end up,

• 11:20Speaker 01

  we've been focused on the wrong thing. We've been focused on their frustration responses rather than the problems that are causing them. If you happen to be exposed to a kid who was struggling and communicating that they were struggling in ways that were quite maladaptive, something's missing. Us adults are missing something. That doesn't mean we should live with it. Educators shouldn't get hit or spit on or kicked. Kids shouldn't have to watch that going on. But all of that is a sign that we might be focused on the wrong thing. We've missed something and we haven't addressed it yet. That's what's going on.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  How much of this is in America that some of this decision making where these issues don't get addressed? How much of this is directly related to the politics of teachers and the gender of teachers? Because let's be frank about it. We all know, everybody knows, it's not controversial. It's a primarily female driven. You are an exception these days. It's primarily a female driven world when it comes to education. And it's primarily to one political persuasion to a very high degree that should cause everybody to say, whoa, with a very divided country, a lack of male teachers and a very highly political female branch of teachers,

• 12:43Speaker 00

  how can we expect to have the best of decisions across the board? Unless so many people have already said, we're just going to go private school. We're going to choose what we want. We're just going to steer clear of the public schools.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Some people do make that decision, mostly those who have the money to do that. That's an important piece. But the education workforce has always been predominantly female. It was predominantly female when I was in school.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  For me too. I don't remember it being primarily female with politics on the sleeve. I don't remember that.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And I think that there's no question that politics are more on the sleeve than they have ever been. Whether that is a gender issue or not is another story. But it's always been predominantly a female educator workforce. That's always been true. And yet, we haven't seen this level of behavioral issues. Suicidality in kids, depression in kids, anxiety in kids. I would have trouble making the case, given my reading of the research, that's predominantly about gender. Would it be great if there were more male teachers?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  No, I'm not attempting to put the blame. Look, if young boys are in an environment where they are constantly told, "Sit down, shut up," and you basically act like a little girl, and I'm generalizing here, but not really. You're gonna get people like me in Gen X age who look back and say, "Hey, none of this is a surprise to me."

• 14:16Speaker 01

  I agree with that, and that's something that people do talk about in the literature. Why are so many boys, for example, diagnosed with ADHD? Because we're expecting them to sit still for very long periods of time, when that isn't necessarily what boys do. So that is something that's been talked about in the literature, no doubt about it. Whether that's a male versus female teacher issue is another question. Whether that has to do with how we're expecting kids to conduct them in some thousands of schools, that might be more where it's at. Yeah, we're expecting, I don't know if I would go quite as far as you did. We're expecting boys to act like little girls.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  But we may be expecting things of boys who mature less quickly than girls do, to look like something that they aren't, getting them off to a very bad start right from the get-go. I'm just not sure that's gender of teacher issue.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Let me get some more big picture out there about education in general right now. And getting back to this idea of students have to be judged. Look, me, I was a bad student, maybe like low B, whatever. The teachers did not expect the low B guy to write eight books. That was not expected, right? And a good friend of mine became an emergency room surgeon. And that guy worried about his grades like no tomorrow. Now, I always had a different perspective. I was like, I don't want to pursue that profession. So I don't feel like I'm going to be judged that way. But you know what? He was so focused and he was going to get those grades. And from a merit standpoint, he deserved it. He went out and he got it. And I'm curious your perspective when it comes to something like merit. Because here we are in this age of not merit.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  We're in an age of not merit. If we were allowed to, and I've got a nephew and a niece currently in Virginia colleges. If we were allowed to see the admissions criteria and how admissions are decided. For example, at a place like Virginia Tech where you taught. If we were allowed to see all this information, I think people would be floored as to how much merit doesn't play a role in whether a student gets into a particular school. And this often extends past school as well. But speak to me about your perspective on this idea of grading on a curve in terms of letting kids into school. Because for every kid that gets into a program that he did not get into based on merit.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  There was another kid that did have the merit who was left out. How do you feel about that?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  I see both sides of that issue. I feel for both ends. There is the sentiment that we need to uplift those who have been historically pushed down. And that can work to the disadvantage of a meritocracy. But in the trenches, here's what that looks like grading on a curve. You have a teacher who is in a classroom, a bunch of kids and a bunch of developmental variability. That teacher is under pressure to get every kid over the same bar by the end of the school year. That teacher knows that every kid is not going to get over the same bar. By the end of the school year. If that teacher's meeting kids where they're at,

• 17:26Speaker 01

  then that teacher is giving the work to the high achieving kids that challenges them and the work to the other kids that is challenging them. Because meeting kids where they're at works a whole lot better than not meeting kids where they're at. But now it comes grade time. Do we grade kids based on the exact same reference point? Or do we take kids as their own reference point? Given the amount of developmental variability that's walking in the door. Meeting kids where they're at works a whole lot better than not meeting them where they're at.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  But it used to be, okay, if you took a test, it was pretty objective. I'm hearing that the test is no longer objective than what you just said.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Depends what test you're giving.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Generally speaking, if we've got a classroom, whatever the topic, you give the test. It's the same test for everybody, just like my friend who became the ER surgeon. Same test for everybody. The more you study, an objective merit thing, the high score wins. Is that not how it works these days?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  It is not.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  I don't know what to say. I really don't know what to say. You're a brilliant guy, all kinds of books. You've got more experience in education field than I'll ever have in my life. And you've basically just said, there's no more objectivity.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  No, that's not what I said.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Okay, we're back to the classroom. One classroom full of kids, they're taking a calculus test. I failed calculus my first semester and got an A the second semester. So I didn't study, I didn't know what I was doing, whatever. But for a classroom, how can there not be one test for everybody? And you take the test.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Because fair doesn't mean equal. It's lofty thinking to think that you're going to be able to give the same test to every kid if they're not in the exact same spot.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  I need to wrap my arms around this as a Gen X guy living in Asia. You are the calculus professor. There's 30 kids in the classroom. It's finals. You've got to take the calculus exam. Everybody wants to pass. You seem to be mapping out a scenario to me that it's not the same for everybody in that particular classroom.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  You're talking about probably a middle or high school level.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  College, anything, I don't care.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  That's right. But why is the kid who can't even come close to doing calculus in the calculus class? And where did it begin that kid started falling behind? And why did that kid start falling behind?

• 19:52Speaker 00

  You asked a lot of questions.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  I did. But I like to go back to the beginning because that's where it starts. Right? I like to go back to the beginning when that kid is in pre-K or kindergarten. And it is quite clear that kid is going to have difficulty meeting a lot of expectations. For whatever reason. Do we want to say, kid, this is a meritocracy? Purely a meritocracy. Three, four, five-year-old kid. You have to get over the exact same bar as the kids who may have been more fortunate in their life experiences and in the educational opportunities that they had when they got here. Same bar. That's a good recipe for losing a kid who otherwise could have done, if we had met them where they're at.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Now, if we project that forward and you have a kid who experiences continued failure. You have a kid who continues to express that they're struggling through big frustration responses. And is experiencing over time, tons of punitive and exclusionary discipline because of their big frustration responses. And by the way, what kind of frustration response you have is luck of the draw.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Does that mean DNA?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Everything's 100% nature and 100% nurture, so it always means both.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  I have that argument with friends. I've written a book that speaks to the nurture part a lot in the trading world. But there's no doubt that some people are clearly born with more horsepower.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  No doubt. As somebody who works in the field of psychiatric disorders, there's no doubt that there is a genetic component. But there's also no doubt that there is an environmental component. It's always both.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Can I keep you at that for a second, though? Because we do know that going back several decades, if you brought the phrase IQ, that was enough to get your career ended. That was when I was a kid, when I saw the way the Fairfax County system judged kids. It was back in the day through IQ. And that was how you got slotted. If you were judged in like fourth or fifth grade, whatever it was, to have a certain IQ in the Fairfax County Public School system, you went to the GT program.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  These days, base our assessments of what kids can do based on what they can do and meet them where they're at and give them challenging work that is where they're at so that their trajectory continues upward. Boy, do I like that a whole lot better than saying, this kid can't meet this expectation. But because of high stakes testing, for example, where we're judging teachers based purely on how many kids get over the same bar by the end of the school year, that is the perfect recipe for losing a kid. That's not selling anybody short, but it is saying, let's meet every kid where they're at.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Let's have every kid be their own reference point for progress. That's actually how you get the most out of a kid.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  You know, it's a competitive world. So the system that we have gets you to age 18, and this is a global thing. It gets you to age 18. And generally, by age 22, you're supposed to go out there and make it. There's no doubt that some kids could, if college was a six-year program or an eight-year program with a lot less pressure, they'd probably do a lot better. Okay? But meeting kids where they are becomes expensive to not have one system that kind of works on this one scale of 18 to 22. Look, I was longer than four years on that undergrad degree. So I think it was four and a half. But that becomes challenging if you do that. And it gets back to my example with the classroom. If you're going

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Put the children in the classroom, the kids in the classroom, whatever, the college students, the classroom. It does seem like to me that if we're at a point that you're in the classroom and you're taking the test and there's not one way to judge the test only, it does seem like we've gone in a very bad direction.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  I would argue that meeting kids where they're at is actually cheaper. Because going back to four and five year olds, if we don't meet those kids where they're at, they start failing. They start becoming very expensive kids. They start needing special education services. If that doesn't get the job done, they start getting placed in special purpose schools. Now we're talking a boatload of money. If that doesn't get the job done, they start getting placed in residential facilities. Boatload of money. If that doesn't get it done, especially in the case of the ones with behavioral challenges that never got addressed, they end up in prison. Here in the state of Maine where I'm sitting, it costs $120,000 a year to put a kid in a bed

• 24:35Speaker 01

  in a juvenile detention facility. I think meeting kids where they're at is comparatively cheap.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  If I'm the kid in the classroom and I'm taking the test and it's a competitive thing, and I do remember taking tests. And there were some times in various classes I would do as good as anybody. And you're excited and you're proud and you want to push. But if you start to understand that the system is set up in such a way that everyone's not being measured in the same way, then we are back to another situation of like, how did the admissions process even happen to begin with? It sets a lifelong trajectory of people saying, there is no merit in society. We've got people that are trying to fix whatever situation. And it just seems like to me, ultimately, if merit goes away.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  I hear what you're saying in terms of costs and whatnot. But look, like everybody, I can see the broad macro statistics from the Chicago school system, from the Baltimore school system. It's an absolute disaster of kids graduating high school on.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Able to read. I seriously doubt that I went to high school with anybody that graduated without the ability to read. I don't think I'm saying anything too controversial. I think I'm saying the things that a significant part of the population thinks and observes, and is just not talked about at all.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  I think it does get talked about, but we are faced with this dilemma that we do have kids who do have advantages other kids didn't have. And the dilemma becomes, how do we uplift everybody? Let's face it, there are legacy admissions that get kids into Harvard who aren't necessarily the right people to be there. Can't do that curriculum. That's not a meritocracy of academics. That's a different type of system.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Harvard's not an educational institution. It's a hedge fund.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  But going back to something you said earlier, you were a barely a B student. You've written eight books. I was barely a B student and have written six. I was not the best student in elementary school. Probably didn't get the help I needed in middle and high school. Got to college, floundered a little bit in different majors, then finally found one, psychology, that made sense to me and kicked in. If you talk to a lot of preschool teachers where we're teaching reading at ever earlier ages, they're saying, you've raised the bar too high. When do we let development occur? You are pushing things too fast. And how do we uplift everybody?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  And that's the big dilemma. Meritocracy is great. How do we uplift everybody?

• 27:25Speaker 00

  So that's the aspirational statement. I really don't think that anybody, and I say this rightly speaking, I don't really think anybody would disagree with the aspirational comment. But then when you get back down to earth, it's impossible.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  I don't think that's true.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  If we were to look at life, the human condition, the way people behave through life, whether it's the jobs they pursue, the continued education they pursue, the crime they do commit or don't commit, the getting married or not getting married, being a single parent or not, there are so many issues here. To think that we can somehow or another get everybody to be at the same place when clearly parents and individuals are choosing very different choices in their life. They're choosing very different choices.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  You don't hear me saying get everybody to the same place. Actually, I think that's what we've been trying to do with high stakes testing where we're saying, get everybody over the same bar by the end of the school year. That's not what I mean by lifting everybody up. I think meeting kids where they're at, I don't want to beat a dead horse here, is the way to do it. The reason that so many kids who don't have a lot of the advantages, you or I might have had not knowing your background, I have no idea, but I know my background, solidly middle class, but I've worked with a lot of kids who came up that very difficult route, whose preschool teachers were pointing at them and saying,

• 28:57Speaker 01

  that kid's going to end up in prison someday. And what was it about that kid that made the preschool teacher say that? The kid had behavioral challenges, the kid was behind academically, the kid did not have necessarily the protective factors some of us might have in their families. It all starts there, but what a commentary that a preschool teacher is pointing at a kid and saying, that kid's going to end up in prison someday. I think that's a preschool teacher saying, I know what's out in front of this kid where we're going to try to get everybody over the same bar by the end of the school year. That kid's in trouble already. What I'm saying is it doesn't have to be that way.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  And meeting kids where they're at is a huge part of the solution. It's not the only part of the solution. You're right, it's complicated out there. We can't address everything in a school. This is what I say to educators all the time. There's a lot of things you can't do anything about. What can you do something about? Make sure that you are lifting up every kid by meeting them where they're at. That doesn't mean every kid's going to be in the same place. That's actually what we're pressuring educators to do to their detriment. We're losing teachers like there's no tomorrow and to detriment of kids, 25% are showing up. It all goes back to the beginning.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Let me put the shine on the even more controversial, living in a Asian country, very high IQ, smart kids, education is pursued. In Vietnam, for example, during holidays, they will close the streets down and erect temporary bookshops on the streets. So during a holiday, it's bookshop time. That is, that tell you something, that's not something we see in America. So you ask the question, where does an advantage come from? And I start to think, okay, my father's family is 100% Lithuanian. They came over to America in the early 1900s. His great uncle, my father's great uncle, went to work at the coal mines in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He ended up becoming a prosecutor.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  The pictures are on Google Images, which crack me up. My great, great uncle, maybe there's three greats in there, face to face with Al Capone during the trial. Anyways, this great, great uncle paid for my grandfather to go to Penn State and several of his uncles, the first in the family, once they got to America to go to college. And so when I talk with my father now, it's pretty obvious to me, even though you're not allowed to say this, I know where I got my advantages from. Yeah, it's under the skin. I made some good choices. I've made some bad calls. I've not worked hard at certain times. I've worked hard in certain times. My ancestors, and I'm assuming yours did as well. My ancestors, your ancestors, worked very hard to allow us to get to this place.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  That's not necessarily a topic that, for example, the Fairfax County School System wants to talk about.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  There are those who would argue, and they would have a point, though not completely, that your advantages were not just beneath your skin. We do live in a society where skin color still matters and bestows certain advantages. You were talking about the homogeneity of the Asian society in which you are currently living. You know, there are homogeneous academic communities in the United States. Most of them relatively wealthy, a lot of them relatively white. So you can find homogeneity, and those might be the communities in which you would find book stalls pop. Up on the streets during holidays.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  But what if Timmy can't read? And what if people were asking Timmy to get over the exact same bar as those who couldn't read? Is it to the advantage of those who can read? To treat Timmy like he can, even though he can't? Or is it better to have Timmy be his own reference point? Get him up on his feet? Save society a boatload of money? I think that a homogeneous society has tremendous advantages over the United States, and I wouldn't trade places.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  When you lay it out like that, it makes me think of the term outlier. And there's going to be left tails and there's going to be right tails for any particular population. And that's going to apply to

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's going to apply to individual countries. It often applies to races. A good friend of mine is an American guy married to a Chinese lady. Okay, that's going to be something. They've got some wonderful kids and they're both very smart. But that becomes different than, let's say, too black or too Caucasian. It is something that I think America is very uncomfortable with because we've told ourselves the melting pot story for so long. But then when you start to look at America in terms of groups and populations, it does express interesting data that you don't see if you do one big average.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  No question.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  But that's what we do.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  But what the data tell me is that we're losing a lot of kids unnecessarily, that they're costing a ton of money. A school that I was in this past Friday, I'm in schools a ton. This is an elementary school up here in Maine. Eight, 10, 12 kids who have behavioral challenges, usually accompanied by academic challenges. The school is acknowledging that we haven't met the needs of those kids. We haven't met them where they're at. We don't even know what they need. And I'm consulting to those schools because those eight, 10, 12 kids are taking up 70 to 80% of the energy. Now, the first thing people would say is, why do they get 70 to 80% of the energy? They don't have to. They don't have to get even 10% of the energy if we're doing the right thing. And that's why I write the books that I write.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Because the right thing, according to my definition, works really well. And for those eight to 10 kids in that school is about to start working really well. And then they don't take 70 to 80% of the energy anymore. We just saved every kid, not only the ones whose learning might be being disrupted and detracted from by the ones who are acting up, but also the ones who are acting up that a lot of people don't know what to do with.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Everybody is well versed in the TikTok and X videos of American school systems these days. I would hate to be a teacher. It looks like a quite stressful, often violent place to be, quite insane, frankly. Let me ask you in terms of very specifically your solutions. You didn't say yet, me, if I listen, if I hear, okay, there's a dozen kids at a school that are taking 70, 80% of their resources. First off, and I think this is probably going to go against your prescription. And I want to hear more why the other kids should be burdened with it, but I would not have them in the general population. Why should the kid that's not a part of the problem have to deal with the problem? And that's back to my first question tonight, almost.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Because number one, they're going to cost a heck of a lot more money if you boot them out, either the school system or to society.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  But they get out eventually. They get out of the school system eventually, typically at 18. Then it's off to the races on something else. So the babysitting can only take so much time, right? I mean.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  They actually are the ones who are most likely to drop out. They're the ones who are most likely to end up incarcerated. These are the most expensive kids in our society. No kid should have to be in a classroom where they have to tolerate this. This is a matter of expertise. This is a matter of training. So let me get into the weeds a little bit on this because we've more been at the 10,000 foot view here. One of the things schools spend tens of thousands of dollars on every year is teaching educators what to do. This is almost every school system. This is a hundreds of millions of dollars a year industry. Teaching educators how to restrain kids when they're out of control, which means pinning them to the ground.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Now you're in a TikTok video, throwing them into a locked. Or blocked door seclusion room. Now you're in a TikTok video. Now you might have even made the news. You'll definitely make the news if you are the teacher of one of those two or three kids a year who die being restrained. So this is high stakes stuff, right? We're teaching educators how to restrain and seclude kids, which is crisis management. What we should be teaching them is crisis prevention. How to be early rather than late. Something that applies to the financial industry just as much as any other. We don't want to be late. We want to be early. But what are we training educators to do? We're training them on what to do when it's already late.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  When a kid is already exhibiting the types of behaviors that you're talking about. Let there be no doubt restraining and secluding a kid isn't going to solve any of the problems that are causing the behaviors that are causing adults to lay hands on them in the first place. We have got to be early. We've got to train educators differently. It's actually not that hard. But we've got to stop being late. We've got to stop teaching educators. Here's what you do once a kid is already frustrated because that's not going to solve anything. That's a good example of getting into the weeds on how we go about fixing things.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  You admit in your writing that the teacher has only so much control. There's no control of the home life. There's no control of what's said at the home. There's no control of the attitudes at the home. There's no control of what the family structure is. There's no control of any of that. Literally every day, it could be a ticking time bomb, a live hand grenade individuals showing up to a classroom. And I guess the part I'm going to keep pushing back on because I think I saw in some of your background that you don't like the idea of expulsion exclusion. So let's put aside restraint for sake of argument. I'll say, yeah, okay, let's just avoid that. But it does seem like to me that if you've got a dozen kids causing 80% of the problems.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Back to my very first question, it doesn't seem fair that the other kids in the classroom should have to tolerate it. And as a Taxpayer, it doesn't seem fair that I should have to pay for it. I would like to understand more why if you've got this minority, I'm saying minority in terms of the number, but if you've got this minority of students that are causing problems, I don't see what the expulsion. I need to understand more about why that's such a bad alternative.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Just to make sure we're clear, I'm not saying we should tolerate it. I'm not even saying it's fair. I'm saying we should have the expertise to know what to do about it. That's why I write books, so that educators and parents have the expertise to know what to do.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  You're a very optimistic man.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Well, I've got 40 years of changing things for the better under my belt.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Okay, I understand that, but like for people that can look at the big statistics of the American sociological experiment, it's not a pretty sight these days. It's a lot of bad behavior. Again, these various issues that we've talked about today, whether it's merit or D E I. I guess to me, it just seems like we're in a situation where you're a very optimistic guy. You've got experience over this in 40 years, but just for the life of me, we don't seem to be having the long-term success. Maybe there's something that you can measure in the moment during the window of school for this particular student. And I'm sure you've got success stories that if you weren't involved, they would have gone a very bad direction. I'm sure of that, right? Yeah, I'm sure.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  But not just individual kids, schools. Next time you're in the States.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  I am every year.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  You and I've got to go on some tours together. So I can show you some schools in some very low socioeconomic status areas, in some high socioeconomic status areas that are meeting kids where they're at, that are collaborating proactively with kids on solving the problems that might be causing their concerning behaviors, or at the very least, solving the problems that are having them struggle, solving the problems that are causing them to be expelled. Back to your question a few minutes ago, how does expulsion, pushing a kid out, solve any of the problems that are causing the behaviors that are causing us to push the kid out in the first place? I would love. Love to introduce you to some principals who used to think in a more traditional way

• 41:18Speaker 01

  and have changed things around completely for their schools and for the students who were doing poorly. So it's not just individual kids. It's schools and school systems. I would love to have you talk to some of those people, not just me. These are educators that have turned things around and not just in their buildings, but for kids who would have been on a very difficult and expensive path for a very long time. But they've also made it better for the other kids. No one should have to tolerate that concerning behavior. Every educator should have the expertise to know what to do about that concerning behavior.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  How do we deal with resentment? And when I say resentment, how do we deal with the idea that these days in America, you really don't know if anybody is qualified in a merit standpoint. You don't know if somebody got into X, Y, Z school. And again, there are plenty of billionaires that legacy, whatever, they slide right into Harvard and they give a hundred million bucks and get the name on the door or whatever. I get that. I think that's probably a more narrow issue. And I think the larger issue is just if the state schools and whatnot, kids being excluded in the name of diversity. And I think this is causing resentment on top of resentment. I really didn't know how bad it was until the last handful of years.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  And I would say in the last decade, it's become something even more prevalent. And if it was such a great thing ultimately, then we would not have hidden admissions processes. So the admissions processes at the schools are basically top secret. It's all buried, cloak and dagger. You don't know any of the details. You don't know if somebody with a certain political persuasion is sitting back there going, oh, this person feels disadvantaged. Oh, this person's advantaged. And that's what goes on. That is creating an undercurrent of resentment in the country that I think can best be typified. And I'm sure some people will think this is controversial, some won't. But if they listen to what I say, They would say, well, gosh, that is kind of a little bit different.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  I recall the Supreme Court Justice, the most recent one that got put on the Supreme Court. They asked the nice lady, they said, can you give us the definition of a woman? And she refused. All these things are connected, as you know. Look, I'm very lucky. I've had a chance to talk to, if we went down the list, I've had a chance to talk to so many of your peers in this podcast. From Anders Ericsson to Daniel Kahneman, I've been a psych student for the last decade, right? So I'm very lucky, but I also am a truth seeker. And so it causes me great frustration regardless of the background of anybody. It does seem like that the taking the test or having the score, having some score that you have to meet feels American.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  And if you don't have that, then eventually people lose faith in the system.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  You might be right about people losing faith in this system. You might be right about resentment. Here's what's interesting. When I started my career, I was fairly apolitical. Some of what you're talking about is political. I was apolitical. Then I started working because of my career with a lot of kids who came up a very difficult track. I saw us lose a lot of them. Those kids were sitting in prison. I saw us help a lot of them. We didn't help the ones who got helped by having every kid get over the same bar by the end of the school year. Early on, later on, meritocracy can make more sense.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  You don't have a functioning meritocracy unless you're meeting every kid where they're at along the way.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  That's such a beautiful statement, but it is so difficult to put into operation. I was one of these kids who graduated high school at 165 pounds. If I would have graduated high school at 195 pounds, I would have been an easily D1 baseball player right out of the gate. That wasn't fair. I watched my nephew, who plays, who just finished four years on the UVA football team, is the skinniest white guy on the team. If he would have showed up at 195 pounds with his speed, completely different ballgames. There are elements of life that are just not fair. And so, I don't know, society wants to make something different than the K through 12, than the four years of college.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  I get it, but it does seem like there needs to be some kind of structure, or I don't know how it works.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  How's this for a structure? You meet kids where they're at when they're younger. You don't put academic expectations on kids that you know they can't meet. You don't cause their concerning behavior by doing that. Putting them on a path that is extremely expensive and extremely hopeless. You meet them where they're at.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Do they have to be in the classroom with the kids that don't have these issues?

• 46:10Speaker 01

  You have to do the right thing so if they can be in the classroom, they should be in the classroom. A lot of what we're talking about is not whether or not they should be in the classroom, but whether we have the expertise to include them. You start excluding kids from a very early age, they'll stay excluded. You have the expertise to include them, and that's why I want, next time you're over here, I want to show you kids who were out of control completely, but in schools that knew what to do, and you wouldn't recognize those kids as different from any other kid a year later. That's not optimistic. That's within the realm of possibility. That's not even systemic.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  By the way, you were talking about, just one more point, because I didn't make it earlier. You're talking about kids who come from very awful backgrounds, and that educators can't do much about that. That's right. You've got a lot of kids walking in schools from awful backgrounds who are doing very well. So what's the job of the educator? Make sure that you are addressing what you can address in the school, even if the kid is going home to something that isn't ideal. Because you've got a lot of kids in your building who are going home to something that isn't ideal, who are doing very well in your building. You must be doing something right.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  I give you credit. You are willing to sit here with a tough questioner, and you're willing to stick to your guns. We might have some fundamental disagreements.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  That's okay.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  I'm curious, though. I don't think many would take these kinds of questions from me. I think they would immediately call me names. I think with the way the perspectives I've laid out, if I was to go into all the detail and sit here with a statistics book, and you could do the same thing, you know that the things that I brought up would be very justified in why I say them. I'm not just sitting here spouting off an opinion. We know, everyone listening knows what the detail is. But I do think that there are probably a significant number of people that would not have this conversation.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  I can't speak for them. I'm happy to have a conversation with anybody about how we help kids better than we're helping them now, about how to save more kids, about how to lose fewer kids, how to lose fewer educators. Yes, there are controversies within that, but we should all have our eye on the same ball. How do we stop losing all these kids, costing society a bundle in treasure and humanity? By the way, I think you've been a wonderful person to talk with. I'd talk with you about this stuff for six hours, because this is the important stuff. And I hate to see politics get in the way of that singular question.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  How do we stop losing so many kids? The kids who aren't okay. Schools can do their part, even though there's all kinds of controversies within them. You know me, if you're meeting every kid where they're at, a lot of those controversies go away.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  Fair point. Again, I think everyone will have a perspective on this. When it comes to politics, it's interesting. I don't know what I am these days. I'm probably somebody back in the day who thought, oh, yeah, let's go fight Middle East wars. Bah, bah, bah, bah, weapons of mass destruction. And I don't think that anymore. Even though I probably thought better of the current president than the lady that he ran against, I, for the life of me, don't understand what we're doing now. So I don't know where I fit politically. I think I just try the best that I can to say, what is fair for the broad-bell curve? And what is the truth? And if I try to stick to those guns, I'm going to be better off than not.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  And I've always, and educators have to abide by the mantra, I don't know how you'll feel about this, although I have a feeling, fair does not mean equal. Fair means giving every kid what they need based on where they're at. If we're treating everybody the same, nobody's gonna get what they need.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Well, you know, we get into this nature nurture thing, right? I have a friend here in Vietnam, American guy, and he's just 100% nature. And here I am, I wrote a bestselling book that talked about a famous trader who taught students, which essentially showed that nurture could go a long way. And so I'm torn. There is no doubt horsepower that can come from a set of parents that's better than another set of parents. But there is also no doubt that there is a nurture component, because to say there is no nurture component is to say, okay, we've got our 20 homogeneous kids in the room. They've got the same IQ, and five of them are just lazy, and 15 of them are high achievers. It's more. It's always gonna be a combination of both. I

• 50:55Speaker 00

  do think that a lot of American life doesn't want to talk about the horsepower part, but it's definitely a part of it. I think we concur that there's two elements here. Now, people can have disagreements about whether, to what degree the horsepower, the innate horsepower IQ is important versus the nurture. But, look, I always think back to my watching a family member at a GT program and meeting all of the friends that came along with this GT program. So I was around this whole dozens of kids that were all quote, G in Fairfax County. And you know what? There wasn't a lot of high achievement there. There was not a lot of high achievement there. And I always wonder about that fact. If you tell a bunch of kids that you're brilliant

• 51:38Speaker 00

  at seven or eight years old, do they dial it back some? Do they not push so hard? So now you're probably already hearing a different side from me where you're thinking, oh, I didn't expect to hear that.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  No, but what you'll always hear from me is that everything's 100% nature and 100% nurture. That's a research-based thing to say. And by the way, those who natured you are often the ones who nurtured you. So it's very hard to disentangle them anyways. What I'm saying is, if we have a kid who's behind the eight ball when it comes to nature and nurture, school is nurture. Let's do everything we can to make sure that this kid gets what they need, so that we can kick in with nurture somewhere. Educators have always been among the most important socialization agents in our society. That was true way back when. That was true now.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  If we make that more difficult for educators, we are depriving them of their greatest joy of teaching, and we are depriving a lot of kids of the help they could be getting.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Ross, good stuff. Please keep me posted on future books. I think we're easy enough to have a conversation. Like you said, I do think we could probably get into even more of the nitty-gritty. I think I brought up a lot of different issues, and I think you addressed most of them. I think the one issue that I still struggle with, though, is the problem kid in the classroom of normal kids.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  That's expertise. That is expertise, sure and simple.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  I struggle with that in the sense that the normal kid shouldn't have to put up with it for one second.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  I agree with you. One second, maybe, but most of the kids who are disrupting the learning of others have been doing it for a very long time. That tells you that they didn't get what they needed, that they didn't get the expertise they needed, or it wouldn't have been a very long time. Most of the kids I start working with have been troubled for a very long time, and then they get what they need. They get what they need from me, or they get what they need from their school, or they get what they need from their treatment facility, and voila. And it's not that easy. Voila makes it sound easy, but voila, now they're a kid who's doing well. That's not optimism, that's experience.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  The book, The Kids Who Aren't Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools. Look, I'm one of the most optimistic people. I just, again, I'm gonna keep pushing on what I see is the truth, and that's all I can do. I definitely don't wake up, whether or not it's fair or not, I definitely don't wake up and think that society is better off by saying that kids with subpar grades are actually in some kind of subjective bent curve at the same level. I'm not saying you're saying this, but are the same level with some other kids. And I have a real struggle, and not even a struggle, I think it's terrible, that more qualified kids get turned away from certain

• 54:27Speaker 00

  colleges to let less qualified kids in. This is another original sin of America, in my humble opinion. You can't fix one sin with another sin, so to speak, in my opinion. So that's a whole different issue. Again, I want people to check out the book, The Kids Who Aren't Okay. Ross, is there a website you want to send people to come check you out? I always say, if they can't find my guests, and you're pretty easy to find, if they can't find my guests, maybe you need to try something else other than the internet.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Well, on the internet is the website of the nonprofit I founded, Lives in the Balance, L-I-V-E-S-in-the-Balance.org, where I pretty much give away the model of treatment I originated for free. But I would be delighted to continue this conversation with you anytime, and delighted to give you a tour the next time you're over on this part of the ocean.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  By the way, one that we didn't talk about, and I'm not sure if you were there at the time, was that talk about a situation where they let a kid go, the shooting at Virginia Tech all those years ago. So many people knew that guy had all kinds of whatever, and it just fell through the cracks? Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Let's not let people fall through the cracks, Virginia Tech. My alma mater knows as well as any place that when people fall through the cracks, the cost can be extraordinarily high.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was a terrible situation. Ross, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Anytime.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Whether new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash or just trying to make a lot of money, trend following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times. To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected]. I will send you the right trend following steps to take, along with my free video. But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.