Vivek Ramaswamy Is Drowning

Here is Vivek Ramaswamy. Do we know how he's doing in the polls? He's running for governor. I don't know how he's doing, but he's, he's, you know, it's an uphill battle for him because his party like almost officially refuses to elect anybody who is not white to any high office. Amy Acton edges them out in recent polls apparently. But we'll see. But here he is and he is saying something. There's a difference between correlation and causation. For many years, we had a lot of education folks on for years on this program, particularly during the Obama years as the Obama administration was sort of like picking up the mantle from the Trump admin, excuse me, the Bush administration and corporatizing our education largely because Bill Gates foundation poured a billion dollars plus into and dangled a lot of like prize money essentially and was looking to sell a lot of computers and their experiment about education went awry as their own Rand Corporation assessment said. But one of the things I learned from would start off every interview with, if you tell me the area code of where they live in, I can look up what the, or the zip code rather, I can look up what the median income is there. And I will tell you what education outcomes are. And so understand that education outcomes are tied to living in poverty. He is trying to make an argument of a, that is, there is a correlation, but he's trying to make a causation. He's got the causation backwards, but here he is. Well, I think one place to start. So there's not a one size fits all solution, but I believe in practical solutions. One place to start positive. We should also say he's at a food drive in Dayton and somebody asks how you deal with combating childhood hunger in Ohio. Well, the first thing that I would do is I would ask the president to see if we can get a waiver for the cuts to snap in our state. That's what I would do if I was a vagrant. That would be the first thing, because 40% of people who get snap are children and they're going to be big cuts to snap eligibility going forward. But nevertheless, go ahead. One place to start is actually school. You think about school, chronic absenteeism is now a major problem. It's hitting 25% in certain parts of our state, childhood hunger and getting a better education and feeding those kids all go together at the same time, physical education, health and childhood health. And so I'm not saying fixing the schools solves everything, but it solves a lot. And if we're able to use the infrastructure we already have, including at the public schools across the state, including in Dayton, boy, are we going to make a lot of progress on improving health outcomes, improving childhood hunger, but also childhood educational achievement. If you're thinking in the long run, if everyone wants it for one second, I want you to go back. This is what you say when you have no answer for the question of what would you do to combat childhood hunger in Ohio. The Republican party has been against free lunches as a bedrock moral principle for, since the idea of free lunches in schools, if you want to fight childhood poverty, one of the ways you ensure that every kid gets at least one meal and maybe two, because you can give free breakfasts as well as free lunches, um, is to provide free lunch and free breakfast and free, not just free for kids who are hungry, free for everybody. So you do not stigmatize kids who are getting a free lunch at school, but he doesn't know what he's talking to. So this is bullshitting. I get news for you. Physical ed is not necessarily going to really impact, um, poverty outcomes. I mean, the fact that he's saying that, why is he so condescending? He sounds like Michelle Obama, right? Well, isn't that what they were so upset about now that Maha is all about like personal choices, shaming people into, you know, making healthy choices instead of addressing it substantively. The Michelle Obama thing was at the very least focused on like the quality of the food in schools, not just like let's cut programs. And it's interesting because I was on his Wikipedia just to see like, he apparently identifies as an American, like conservative nationalist, but wouldn't be a Christian nationalist. Uh, we played that clip of the Christian nationalist kid essentially saying you don't belong here, but Christian nationalists want schools not to have things like free lunches because they want the only place in communities to be churches that provide services to people. If there are public centers of community that provide services, that's a genuine threat to their vision of America. But for a guy like him, he doesn't even have that added element on top. He's just a really, really rich guy, capitalist that doesn't want you to have social services. That's it. All right. So let's go back to him now. Uh, just sort of like meandering around the question until he lands on something that is, uh, ostensibly, um, insightful, but really just sort of more bullshit. Improving childhood hunger, but also childhood educational achievement. If you're thinking in the long run, if every one of those kids is able to read by the age of third grade, by seven or eight years old. Okay. By the end of third grade, if you're reading, you are basically statistically near impossible to end up in poverty. So if we can solve that on the front end, a hundred percent third grade reading guarantee, which by the way, we used to have in the state, but they got watered down and got rid of, I'm bringing it back. That's the kind of example where not just in the next 20 months, but over the next 20 years, that's how you end childhood hunger and poverty. If you can read by the end of third grade, you're basically not going to end up in poverty. That's what we're going to make sure of when I'm governor. And I hope people can understand that's not about right versus left. That's about right versus wrong. And we're talking about bringing standards back to. Okay. Here's the point is that we have looked to our schools to fix social ills for the past 40, 50 years. And the fact of the matter is that it's not the failure of schools that inhibits people's ability to read by third grade. It is the failure of society to provide a basic level of subsistence for its people to give them room for people to learn by third grade. Like I say, if you, if you live in a zip code, if you, if your parents are living at poverty, if your parents need two or three jobs each, there's no opportunity for you as a baby to be exposed enough that you wouldn't have a massive listening vocabulary deficit. The listening vocabulary deficit of children living in poverty is somewhere close to like somewhere between half a million and a million words that they have not been exposed to in some fashion. They're speaking vocabulary. Also, you're at a deficit in the tens of thousands of words, possibly largely because A, you're left, you're more likely to be in a daycare situation where you're not getting any one-on-one time. B, your parents are probably exhausted because they've been working multiple jobs and they don't read to you at bed. C, you're simply not exposed to stuff. Like, okay, I take my kid to the country. My kid now knows all the words that you see in the country that you wouldn't necessarily see in the city. Like there's a llama maybe one time, or there's a chicken, or the, you know, there's a, there's a, you know, a robin or an eagle. And what does that do? Like on and on and on. And so he's looking at what is an indication of a failure of society to provide for its citizens as causation. And it's the opposite. School cannot make up for people living in poverty. School cannot make up for potential malnutrition. Kids are hungry. They don't perform as well in school. Everybody knows this. So he is looking for schools outside of being able to provide lunch and meals. They're not going to make up for that deficit. That has to be universal childcare. That has to be universal pre-K. I'm quite convinced that in New York City, we're going to see once we get past the generation from COVID, as they filter out of the system, because the first year of universal pre-K, that child, I know this, would be in seventh grade right now. And we're going to see the eighth grade results, but they all dealt with COVID. When we clear COVID from the education system, we're going to see a market improvement, I would bet, in reading comprehension by those kids living in lower income, getting just pre-K. But yeah, I mean, it's good to point out that this is a pattern of conservative obfuscation and how they try to push forward austerity politics. They will defund social programs or schools, create failures, and then use those failures as justification to further defund and deprioritize social services or things like schools. And he's just doing a version of the same argument. But I wonder where we're like in this moment of incredible flux and deep income and wealth inequality that's at Gilded Age levels. If people hear this guy saying, as long as you read at the third grade level, it's impossible for you to fall into poverty, and they laugh their asses off at the absurdity of that statement. Yeah, this is, I don't know where this specific third grade thing comes from, but this is sort of an argument Matt Bruning has been dealing with for almost a decade, it seems like now, called the success sequence. Success sequence is following its latest mark. He writes, the success sequence is presented as a series of steps individuals can take that will ensure they have a very low poverty rate. Supposedly, one, finish high school, two, get a full-time job. Once you finish high school, three, get married before you have children. You can read Bruning's takedown of it, but I think anybody should say that- It's reversing causation and correlation. Exactly, very obviously. It's very stupid, well-off people that believe stuff like this. And the Millrind on IM says, that answer Vivek gave could have come just as easily from a mainstream Democrat, without a doubt. Certainly, a large cohort of Democratic politicians bought into that same stuff. And the Democratic Party has fallen down when it comes to education as much as, well, has fallen down on education. I mean, the Republican Party has specifically wanted to destroy public schools. Democratic politicians have looked for, for lack of a better term, a neoliberal solution, some type of market-based solution, some type of implication of corporate standards on schools when that is not what education is. Cory Booker wants to run for president. He was in New Hampshire, I think, over the weekend and sucking up to them saying, I think you should still be the first state, blah, blah, blah, first primary state. I don't know if there's a Democrat who has higher aspirations right now, who has been more involved in the privatization of schools and being pro-charter schools in that way. As a guy who is focusing so much of my effort on ending human suffering on the planet Earth. In Newark, the charter school problem was like, I mean, it was a big part of, it was harmful to the education system there. And Cory Booker was a big proponent of that. It's poisonous for people's political education too. Like this idea that Democrats are out there saying that, well, maybe charter schools could be good and they could help my kid. It's just poisonous for a coalition. The idea of charter schools was first pushed by teachers unions because the idea was we, it makes sense to have like almost like a laboratory where you would try pedagogical techniques that can be scaled up. And then of course, like so much in the context of our society, it became a way of, and there's, listen, I'm sure there are some good-hearted people within the context of charter schools, and I'm sure there are some charter schools that are good. But at the end of the day, more often than not, Massachusetts has some pretty good reforms that make this money accountable. I don't think New York state does. It is draining money from the public school system and it is not developing anything that is scalable and usable for the public school system. What it's doing is it is just basically exploiting their teachers more. It is also cherry picking. And who is it? Guy from the Manhattan Institute. I interviewed somebody who embedded themselves in success academy. And I got him finally to admit in the interview that, okay, they're not cherry picking students, although they will keep problem students out and public schools have to educate everybody. And by problem students, I mean, ones that create problems for them. That could mean, you know, kids with behavioral issues, but also kids with learning challenges. They just don't want to have to do anything that is not sort of like conveyor belt because that's the way that they save money. But this guy from the Manhattan Institute, I can't remember his name, but he wrote a book about he was embedded in the success academy. What they do do is they cherry pick the parents. Because again, if you have the resources, and that may be just a good social infrastructure, it could be money, to be able to show up at a school meeting at 9am likely that your kids are going to perform well in school because you have the ability to set aside whatever else you're doing to go there. That's the way that they sort of like cherry pick the parents as a surrogate for cherry picking the kids. And public schools have a responsibility to educate everyone. And so these charter schools pull money out of the system and inhibit the ability to educate everyone. Some people cost a little more to educate than other people. Hey, folks, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and check out our daily show. We do it every day at 12pm Eastern for about two and a half hours. We even take phone calls. 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