Why California Students Are Falling Behind in Math | David Jackson

About two-thirds of California kids can't do math in grade level in public schools. Imagine a class of 30 students, about 20 of them can't do math at grade level. At the same time, Californians are very committed to public education, and they vote for any ballot initiative that has to do with funding public schools. So what's happening? Why is there a disconnect? Our guest today is Dr. David Jackson, who operated very successful private schools in California. At the same time, he had access and discussed with principals of public schools what's going on behind the scenes. We walked into one classroom in particular, and as we got in, there was about 35 students in there, and the teacher had his feet up on the desk, reading a newspaper, and the kids were kind of horsing around, not doing much. I saw, as we walked into the classroom with the principal, he looked over the newspaper, saw us, and went back and was reading the newspaper. I was shocked. If any of my teachers would have done that, they'd face most likely losing their job. I said, are there other teachers like that here? Oh, you'd be surprised how many of us have just given up. I'm Siamak Khorrami. Welcome to California Insider. David, it's great to have you on. Welcome. Thank you very much. I really look forward to this. You're an expert in education. You have had your own school operating for many years in California. We have some numbers from EdSource that are saying about one out of three kids on the fourth grade, they are not proficient in math. There is a lot of effort and funding goes into public schools in California. What's happening? To be frank, I feel like it's even worse than what some of the statistics are showing. One, I don't want to blast or say all kinds of negative things about the public schools, especially about teachers and administrators. I know many, many of them, and they're really good people. The system is not good. The system has gotten even worse over the years, and there's just so many different problems. One, the bureaucracy of anything that's large. And of course, California is a huge state, and the bureaucracy is what runs the schools. They're run out of Sacramento, often by people that they don't spend the time in the classroom. They don't come in to see what's really going on. They don't sit down with the teachers and really listen to them and hear what problems that they have. It's a real crime what's going on. One of the statistics that I've seen over the years, and it hasn't changed much, it goes up and down, that within five years, 50% generally, sometimes it gets better and it's maybe 44%, 45% of all new teachers within five years, leave teaching because they're not paid enough, because of the bureaucracy, because of the fact that they're working really hard, and somebody else that has maybe a doctor's degree or something that is doing a terrible job, and they're being paid more, and they're tired of getting kids from their... I'm a fifth grade teacher, and I have a fourth grade teachers that are doing a terrible job. Their kids come to me, and they're so far behind. Now all of a sudden, I look bad, because I've got students that are not prepared for my class. And of course, let's talk about what happens in college. They leave the schools, and they go to our colleges, and I know you've had some programs on about that. Totally unprepared for college, and they're wasting their time. Many of them end up dropping out. They end up dropping out after they've incurred huge expenses. They're in debt, and now not only did they not get a great education, they don't believe in themselves anymore, and they're in debt. And so our public system is really hurting a lot of students. They passed the law quite a few years ago. They gave teachers tenures in three years, and then the unions pushed for more, and they ended up giving teachers tenure for one year. And then they got some pushback a little bit from principals and superintendents saying, one year is not enough. It means we have to go ahead and assess a new teacher within the first year, and the first year for most of them is a really challenging year. We need more time. So in their brilliance, they gave them another six months. So in a year and a half, the principal, superintendents, others, they have to go ahead and assess whether I'm going to let you teach another year. If I do, now you're locked in. You have tenure. And in this state, with the union and tenure, it's virtually impossible to get rid of a bad teacher or even a mediocre teacher. And that's one of the biggest problems that we have. And some of the teachers, they had it in their heart. They really wanted to do great, but they found that this is not the classrooms. They don't really enjoy the fact that the students are misbehaving, and they don't have the power to really do something, and they get burned out. David, you mentioned the issue with teachers getting tenure, and then it will be very hard to fire them if they're not doing a good job. Are there a lot of not good teachers in the public schools from what you've seen? Unfortunately, I think there are a lot more than you would want to think. I kind of have an example. Quite a few years ago, I went to local public schools. I went to elementary school, junior high, and high school in the public system, and ended up with my first year of college in public junior colleges. And I went back as a school head to my junior high to visit schools. I visit hundreds of schools over the years, both accrediting and just visiting, because I want to find what they're doing is good, and I want to learn things. I invite those principals and superintendents to visit our school. In many relations, I have a good relationship with them. We have five campuses in Southern California, and we had actually up to 10 campuses overseas in Asia. I had invited the principal of my former junior high to come and visit our school. I toured him around. He invited me to come and visit his. I said, that's fantastic. I went to junior high here. I went three years, seventh, eighth, and ninth grade. I haven't been back since then. So he toured me around the school, and I got to say, I was not very impressed. He took me into quite a few different classrooms, and what I saw was not what I would hope to see in any school. But that's the nice thing of having a principal that we're sharing. We're showing everything. He's showing me the good, the bad, and the not so good. And we walked into one classroom in particular, and as we got in, there was about 35 students in there. It was an eighth grade class, and the teacher had his feet up on the desk reading a newspaper, and the kids were kind of horsing around, not terribly, but they were still horsing around not doing much. I saw, as we walked into the classroom with the principal, he looked over the newspaper, saw us, and went back and was reading the newspaper. I was shocked. If any of my teachers would have done that, they'd face most likely losing their job. That's not the way you are. I walked over. I was pleasantly surprised that the principal went ahead and continued. We walked over, and I thought, okay, I'm going to see what this principal's going to say. As he got closer, as we got really close, he lowered it again, and he looks and he goes, David, what are you doing here? And I said, George, what are you doing here? It was my wife's best friend from church, husband, and I knew him pretty well at church. He wasn't one of my friends or anything, but he was a great guy, I felt like. And it was a little uncomfortable. The principal didn't quite know what to say, and so we left. And as we got out the door, the principal apologized. He said, I'm really sorry, I don't know what to say. He said, he's been here a long time. He has tenure. I can't do a thing. And to be frank, he's a terrible teacher. But you know him? And I said, well, yes, I do. That weekend, I saw him at church, and I knew him well enough that I went up and I said, George, I saw you at school. What's going on there? And he says, I've given up on them. They don't give me the materials I need. They don't give me what I need, and there's just not much I can do. I said, but what about the kids? Oh, they're all a bunch of brats. Their parents don't really care, and his attitude just blew me away. I just thought, you've got to be kidding me. And I said, why don't you quit? Are you kidding? I'm being paid really good, and I just got my doctorates, and I got a big raise, and I've got five years before I retire, and I'll get 80% retirement. And I just, I was shocked about that. I said, Bruce, are there other teachers like that here? Oh, you'd be surprised how many of us have just given up. And that's the kind of story that I've heard many times, unfortunately, from even principals and others, that the system is just, it's really harmful to a lot of teachers that they just, they give up. They should get out of the industry. They shouldn't be teachers any longer. But the pay isn't right for teachers. I feel like good teachers should be paid much more, and bad teachers and mediocre teachers should not be in the industry. They do so much harm to kids. And that's the thing that I've just, I've seen that a lot. There's a lot of good teachers in the school. There's a few great teachers and excellent teachers, but there's way too many that are mediocre, have given up, and just there to get a paycheck. I hear that from students all the time. They feel like they're just there to get the job done. So from what you're saying, the way the system works here, if you're a great teacher, you're treated the same as if you're just not putting any effort. You're a really bad teacher. The treatment is pretty much the same. Unfortunately, there's virtually no merit pay. It's strictly on what degree you have and how many years you've been teaching. When they've had some of the downturns where they have to go ahead and lay off a bunch of teachers. If I have that problem, I keep the best teachers. The way the system is, if you've been here a long time, you can't be touched. If you're brand new, you're new, even though you're fantastic, you're the first ones to go. It has nothing to do with merit. It has to do with how long you've been there and what degrees you have. And that's just, that's wrong. And what about the principals? You know, most of the principals, public school superintendents and principals, it's hard for them to come and explain these things to the public because they're in the system. And there are a lot of good people in the public school system. What do they tell you behind the scenes? The ones that I've become, you know, acquainted with, friends with, and many of them have their kids going to our school, which they don't want the public to know that. And they've said, please, you can't tell anybody as a superintendent that my kids will go to school here. I may lose my job or something. But in private, I've had quite a few of them that have shared with me some of the stories. Some of the things that I've seen, there's even some programs that it's called the Dance of the Lemons. It's about how public schools handle the really bad teachers, the ones that even they know. These are teachers that are just doing a terrible job. They're the lemons of the group. And you ought to watch it. It's basically set up to where, and this happens a lot all over the United States. I've talked to several principals that said, yes, it does happen here. We don't talk about it. We're not allowed to. But where each year at the end of the year, I get to go ahead and give you, the principal of one of the other schools, two or three of my worst teachers. You give your worst teachers to this other school. They give them to the other school and they go around. And my hope is that the ones that I get are better than the ones I gave. And I know of teachers that sometimes, as they pointed out, they don't even go into the classroom. They're so bad. They're still on the payroll because it's almost impossible to get rid of them. It costs so much to fight the bureaucracy, California, the unions and tenure. They're told you can't get rid of them. So they're so bad that they have some of them that end up going to a room and they spend the day there with some others and they just pick up their paycheck. That sounds impossible. It sounds weird, but I've heard that many times. Do you think that if we had really good teachers, the education system would change significantly in California? Yes. And I'd like to go ahead and share this. When I took over, I had been running businesses and I'd been involved with the school for years. I was given the opportunity to take over as the business manager for six months and they ended up promoting me to be the campus director of the one Fairmont school that we had then. And I realized then and I was told, your most important job is to hire the very best teachers and other administrators and give them everything they need to be successful and hold their feet to the fire. And I really took that seriously and I recognized to do that, I needed to find out what were great teachers. So I talked to the teachers that everybody agreed at our school were the top teachers, fantastic. And I started asking them questions and one of the ones that came up that was most helpful was, and I'd like to ask this of anybody to think about it. Tell me about those teachers that you had that were exceptional in your life from as far back as I remember, preschool, kindergarten, all the way through college. And then my next question was, what was it about them that made them so exceptional? My first shock was when they came back and they said, yeah, I can think of one, two or three. And that was pretty much it. I felt the same way. I did that and I realized I could think of three teachers that I had and all the way through college. I had one college, one high school and one junior high teacher, one sixth grade teacher actually. And I thought, this is terrible. And when I asked the question, what was it about these fantastic teachers, these exceptional teachers? They had all kinds of everything, but it was caring. It was, they went the extra mile for me. They had high expectations. They would not let me get away with mediocre work. They showed me I could do things. That's what I found for me that really turned my life around as a sixth grade student. And there's so many different attributes and I've created 13 attributes of a Fairmont teacher, I call it, of what it really takes. I would then ask some of them, are you one of those? I was shocked at how many would say, oh, I could never be a Mr. Hawkman or I could be that. I said, that's nice. Okay, there's the door. If you don't believe you can, there's no way I'm gonna even take a chance with you. And I then determined, I made a huge big jump and I said, what if I could take this school and have nothing but exceptional teachers? People that I talked to about it really quick said, are you kidding? That's impossible. I said, what if I could? And I put together with my team a hiring practice and we worked on it for many years to where we were only hiring exceptional teachers. And that was part of the thing of talking to them about, you tell me what an exceptional teacher is and then are you one of those? Or are you capable of being one of those? And we give them about three years to go ahead and see. If the first year we see that they're not even good, we don't keep them. We very seldom hire somebody that we have to get rid of even before the year's out. We're pretty darn good at that. But if they don't meet up the muster, we let them go. And if they don't meet the muster after two years or three years, I've let teachers go that worked for us for 25 years. Broke my heart a little bit, but they no longer were good or great. And they've just kind of slipped and they got careless and they didn't really care as much. They felt like they're already that good. And it's hard, but we don't have tenure. And we want great teachers. I don't want anybody to have a teacher that's not great. But could I really do that? And then one day, several years after I did it, I met a young lady named... No, I won't say her name. She'll embarrass her a little bit. But I met her in the hallway. She was in her senior year at our high school. And I stopped her. I had a couple of colleagues with me that I was touring around the school and they were actually education colleagues. One of them, I think, was a principal of one of the public schools. And I stopped her and asked her if she could share just a little bit about her experience at Fairmont. Oh, yes, I'd love to. And she went on and she talked about all of her teachers at Fairmont Prep for high school teachers and how outstanding they were and how much they really cared and how much they really helped her. And she ended up telling us that she'd been receiving fives on all of her AP exams for the last three years and that she'd been accepted to one of the top medical schools to go to early because of how well she was doing. We asked her if she was getting straight A's. This was just amazing. Then I asked her, how long have you been here? It was a little embarrassing. She looked at me, Mr. Jackson, I've been here since preschool. Don't you remember? I said, of course I do, but I was just testing you. And she then talked about her preschool teacher and her kindergarten teacher, her first grade teachers, and just raving about it, all the different things. And it was just one of the most fantastic experiences I'd had. And I thought, and we talked about it with my two colleagues and saying, this kid's just brilliant. She had to be one of those kids that just born that way. I wanted to talk about her at high school graduation. So I've had her CUME folder brought in and I went through all of her records. I was shocked. In the lower elementary and even upper elementary or middle elementary, she didn't have any A's. She was getting mostly C's, a few B's. The teacher's comments were, she needs to work a little harder. She needs to apply herself a little bit more and this and that. But they all had some positive things. She's a dream to have in the classroom. She's such a sweet girl. She just needs to apply herself more. And they believed in her. As time went through, I saw that in upper elementary, she started getting a few A's and more B's. And by junior high, she was getting all A's and B's. And then by high school, she was straight A. And then she graduated. And I saw, we took an average kid that was struggling and she became a superstar. She was just amazing. I've followed her since then. She ended up, after getting her doctorate degree and becoming a doctor and practicing for a while, she ended up being hired by Stanford University Medical School. And she became a fellow there and one of the top trainers there. She's been extremely successful. She didn't believe in herself at first and she struggled. But that's what it's all about. And that's what I keep telling people. We need to focus mostly on helping you to learn everything you can, but mostly to believe in yourself. I've had way too many students and people I've run into that they are brilliant. They get a degree. They got all this knowledge, but they don't believe they can do things. They're afraid to try. And saying, we want you to, I'd rather have you leave the school not quite as bright, but believing in yourself that I can do anything. And that's what I see. We give the kids such a great background and so much knowledge and believing in themselves and the teachers all help them out so much that they're super successful. That's what we need to be doing in all of our schools. And it's just, it's not happening. Unfortunately, there's a lot of negativity and anxiety right now. Even in a beautiful place like California, I'm constantly running to people that are facing depression. Even they have a lot of things materially. No matter what you and your family are going through right now, there is still hope. Imagine surrounding yourself for two hours with pure beauty, amazing music, colors that we don't see in this world anymore and a message of hope and inspiration. Shen Yun is coming back to California. I've been going to the show for the last 14 years and every time I go, I see smiles on the people's faces when they're leaving the theater and the expressions are in a way that it's hard to explain. But there is this joy coming from inside and I want you guys to experience that. If you want to take a break from all the negativity and anxiety that's out there, make sure to give yourself this experience. It will really lift your soul. Shen Yun is currently performing in Northern California and soon will come to LA area Make sure to get your tickets right now before they sell out. David, you started this career in education and you were struggling yourself. I read your book in school. Can you tell us about that? How did you get into the education space? I was born with double vision. Nobody figured it out until my mother figured it out probably by the time I was in about second or third grade and I couldn't read because everything was a blur. So I was marked as a really behind dumb kid and I had surgeries. I ended up having two surgeries to get it corrected. By then they weren't teaching reading anymore so I just really struggled. That's where I said the first teacher I remember that really believed in me was my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Frodsheim. He was an amazing guy. He had an encounter with a grenade and lost part of his arms and that in World War II and he was tough. He wouldn't let me get away with things but he showed me I could do things. He showed me that I could really believe in this but I still didn't enjoy school. I went to junior high. I didn't like it there. It was a tough time. Kids wanted to beat you up if you even tried to do anything. It wasn't cool to be smart and then a high school it was a little better but not much. By the time I got out of high school I ended up going to eventually to Brigham Young University but there I was more focused on skiing and I was on a race team and I wanted to be an Olympic skier and I hated school and actually I ran a ski lodge in my early 20s and then I ended up running a couple other businesses and starting an aircraft business because I got a pilot's license when I was 16 and I did all this but I worked around the school because my stepfather had started Fairmont schools and I didn't like working there. I was a janitor. I did a lot. I actually for a while was even asked to sub a couple of times in teaching which that part was a little better than the others but it was a terrible situation and then I had an experience where I needed to sell my business. It had gotten way too big. I was never home. I had it for 10 years and I sold it and went and visited the school and my parents had already left to go on a mission for our church in South America and my aunt was running the school and she shocked me when she said, what are you going to do? And I said, I have enough money because I sold my aircraft washing business. I'm going to go out and do something that I really love and she said, you should run the school. Your oldest son is starting kindergarten. You'll get to see him all the time and she gave me all this sales pitch but instantly, God just told me this is what you're supposed to do and I called my parents in South America. They were overjoyed because they'd wanted me to do this because they saw I knew how to run a business and when I talked to my stepdad and I called him my dad at that point, I said, Dad, I haven't run a school before but I run these businesses. That's it. I know you know how to run a business. Your job is to, as I said earlier, find the very best teachers, hire them, get them everything they need to be successful and hold their feet to the fire and we have some good administrators there and you do that business-wise and so on. I did that. I fell in love with it and I've become quite an educator now. I've been taught by some of the best and I love what I'm doing and I love to see the change in these kids' lives and to be able to help them and so it's amazing. Part of my book said, how can you take a kid that started off, couldn't read, didn't like school and then ended up kind of blossoming but then found that he loves, of all the things I've ever done, school is what I love the most. I'm 81 now and I am not going to retire yet. I've got the energy and I love what I'm doing. I've sold the schools but I'm still involved as a chairman and I want to make sure that more kids get a great education and that's where I'm working with. I'm trying to find things to help the public system out to get a lot better. That's where choice in education though is the only answer I see. We've got to give all of our families a real choice. You got involved in this business, in a sense, from the business side. You got into education. What was it like for you to do this and at the same time, there's a lot of public schools around you, right? I wanted to learn a lot more about what was going on in the school systems and I knew the best was to meet with principals, superintendents and talk to them about what did they do that's really successful. So I reached out. There are 27 superintendents, 27 school districts in Orange County. I found, unfortunately, that many of them wouldn't even see me because I was a private school person but I did find some that would see me and they weren't very friendly but then I also found a handful of probably about five or six that were very open and very open to wanting to improve their schools too. And so I started visiting with them and I learned quite a bit. I got a lot of help there but I did find out that it was hard to work with the public system. From one of them, I heard about the academic pentathlon which was a competition that had started in Orange County by the superintendent of schools in Orange County back in the early 60s. It was a competition that really made sense to me. You had three A students, three B students and three C students from each school that would compete and they would put together a team on an academic and you would compete on five different levels in math, on literature, in social sciences, in science and in a super quiz. I thought that sounded fantastic and so I said, do private schools participate? And they said, yes, private schools can participate. We have all the different schools. We have hundreds of schools that are competing but the first thing they said was, keep in mind Mr. Jackson, you're a small private school. Private schools don't really do that well because you have very few students to choose from and you're competing against high schools that have five, 10, 20 times the number of students you have and it does take quite a few years to build the culture to be able to have a winning team. That's fine. I just want my kids to go ahead and compete. I went back and I talked to my teachers. I struggled a little bit because that's extra work but I was able to convince one seventh grade teacher to go ahead and take this on as a project to go ahead and get the kids together and to practice and do all the things. So we went to the competition and the kids competed and then when we had the awards, it was notified that the awards are coming up and it was going to be held at Anaheim High School which was my alma mater where I went and I thought this is great. I definitely want to go there. I talked to the teacher and he said none of the kids want to go. They know they're not going to win so they don't want to go. So my wife and I went and as we got there, one student showed up with his mom and that was the only one of us from Fairmont that was there and he sat next to me and at the beginning, he sat there and he looked up at me and he said, oh Mr. Jackson, I'd give anything if I could win just one medal. I've never won anything in my life. I felt like, oh God, please help this kid to at least win one medal and they gave first through six places in 10 different areas for the team and then they had individual awards too. So there was quite a few awards. The very first award that was given, he got sixth place. He was ecstatic. I felt like I had to peel him from the ceiling. His mother was in tears. She was so excited about it. Before the night was out, he had taken home six medals and the one that blew us all away was, because I heard Fairmont's name quite a bit more as they were doing and wishing those kids had been here, I started thinking maybe we could medal as far as one of the top schools because they had top eighth grade and top seventh grade school overall and they had top in each of the subject areas too and I'm a big dreamer. They called the sixth place. We didn't get it. We called fifth place. We didn't get it. We called fourth place. We didn't get it. Third place. I'm going, okay, there's no way. They called second place and it was Fairmont got second place out of 138 schools. I was shocked. I went up there and the woman that I had talked to that told me all the things about it, she was shocked. She said, this has never happened before. It was so neat. I and that one kid stood up there proud as all heck as they gave us a second place overall medal and of course that was one of the most wonderful times in my life. I went back to school. We celebrated. We gave all the awards to all the other kids at an assembly and then I talked to the teachers and said, we got to keep this going. So I got, we put together a seventh and eighth grade team that next year. They worked pretty hard and everything. We came home with two third place overall medals and a lot of other medals. Everybody was shocked again. We were really gung-ho. So we worked even more. We had a seventh and eighth grade team for the next year. We went to the awards thing and it was unbelievable. You heard Fairmont all the time. Everything was Fairmont. By the time we finished, I mentioned they had for seventh grade and for eighth grade, they had 10 team awards, the top math team, the top literature team, each of the five subjects. They had then the top school. They had the one that won the super quiz and they had the top A student, B student and C student in the county. We ended up taking first place in 19 of the 20 available and second place in the 20th one. It was, they were just, everybody was just in shock. The district in that, they were just, couldn't believe it. I was ecstatic. But Fairmont has placed first place for something like 36 years now since then in the academic pentathlon for sixth grade, seventh grade and eighth grade. It's just been an amazing thing. How did you guys make this happen? Because you had a lot less students and you're competing against the whole county. How are you guys able to win these awards? As in my earlier story about hiring nothing but great teachers, that's the number of things, of everything I've done at Fairmont over 45 years, that's the one I'm most proud of that I've been most successful with is really hammering down on only hiring good teachers and helping them to become great teachers and that we have a lot of great teachers and we have a lot of good teachers and we try to make sure that we don't have any mediocre and especially bad teachers because those will hurt kids instead of helping them. That is what helps us the most. The part that I've seen is we've created a culture also where it's cool to be smart. Our kids come there and they all want to learn and they help other kids that come there that maybe they're not as into wanting to learn as much. They're Joe Cool. They get there as a junior high kid and they got kicked out of their other school or something and we didn't know about it and they come into our school and we don't even have to police them that much because the kids themselves, everybody wants to be accepted and they come in to this environment and the kids will say, why aren't you doing your homework? Why aren't you doing this? Why are you causing problems? That's not the way we do it here. If you want to be part of the in crowd, you got to be a hard worker and I call it now, frankly, we're a school of nerds but it's really cool to be a nerd because everybody is a nerd. They all work hard. They all want to work hard. The teachers all help them out and they help one another. Our C students are really successful when they get into college. We have a lot of students that are struggling to get grades in our schools because it is hard. Our expectations are high but we help them to really believe in themselves enough and even if they just get Bs and Cs, they're so much more prepared than their other students out there that they get into some of the top colleges that are successful. That's one of the things that I hear all the time. I have been for what, 30 years or more, I've been calling our high school graduates in particular on their birthdays to just say happy birthday and to follow up and see how they're doing. I ended up first just doing it for one year and I realized this is so great so I started calling them for six years after they graduate and I hear some incredible stories. One, they're really touched that Mr. Jackson calls them on their birthday. It's really hard. It takes a lot of time but I love doing it because I hear some incredible stories and the stories that I hear over and over again is whether they got to Harvard or whether they got to UCLA or whether they got to Cal State Fullerton, they're there and they're surrounded by the kids. They said, I am being asked by most of the others to tutor them and help them. I'm a freshman at Dartmouth and I have seniors and juniors come in and ask if I would go ahead and tutor them in science or math because I'm so good at it and I'm so much more prepared and I'm seeing that so many of the kids there, and that's just part of the story that you guys have reported too, so many kids get into the colleges and they're not prepared and that's what I'm most proud of that we really prepare the kids. It's a lot of work but they can do it and we show them they can do it and I see that it's possible for all these kids unless they have a very severe and strong learning disability, all kids can learn if they have a great exceptional teacher especially. I've reached a point where I wanted to help more kids even as I'm getting of age and not able to work 100% with kids. I decided to write a book to share with our students and as I got into it, I realized this can help anybody about believing in yourself and not listening to people that say, oh, you can't do that. The book called Landing at the Top and I'm very pleased that it's become a bestseller in Amazon and I hear fantastic stories from a lot of people that it helps them to see and make choices. I want to do something that I've always wanted to do that I felt like I couldn't. I had recently a 65-year-old instructor that told me he found out when he saw my book that he got a picture of me flying a MiG jet inverted over Russia which is one of my highlights of my life and he said, you're a pilot. I said, yes. He said, I've always wanted to be a pilot. I said, why haven't you? Well, it just was too hard and everything and I just never got around to it. He came back about two weeks later. He says, I've read your book. I've got an appointment tomorrow to start my pilot's license. I've decided I'm going to go for it and I said, that's what I want. I want people to realize, find your dreams, your passions and then go for it. Don't let people tell you you can't do it. If it's at all good, go for it and that's what the book is all about. How to do that and it's all the different stories to motivate you and I'm really excited about that. Now, David, the principles that you put in place in Fairmont, in your school, can the state of California use this? What does it take for California to apply those principles in the public education system? I think one of the biggest problems with the public education system, it's a monopoly. They have 90% of all the students in the country go to public schools and it's, you live here, this is the school you go to, this is where your tax money and everybody's tax money goes. If you don't like it, you can leave and go to a private school or homeschool or whatever, but your money stays there and we need to go ahead and break that up and I think the easiest way is you hear of choice in education. That's so important and I think people should really look into it and see that choice in education can really help. It's helped us in other industries. You look at that in the airline industry, they deregulated the airlines and opened it up where they could go ahead and compete more and that lowered prices. It made it much more available for a lot more people. It helped the airlines. It helped the whole industry. That way with Ma Bell, AT&T, and as a young man, AT&T was it. They had a monopoly. You wanted telephones, you could have it. One of the things that people didn't realize is just before they broke it up and said, okay, we broke it into like nine different smaller ones and opened it up for competition, they saw about smartphones, about little phones, they didn't want to do it. They thought that's crazy. If they hadn't have broke it up, we might not have our iPhones and others. That really helped that industry. Look at what happened with the post office. They had a monopoly and all of a sudden now you have FedEx, you have UPS. What did that do? That helped open up the market. It lowered the price of what it cost. It helped give much more competition and it made a mail service much better. Why not do that with education? Especially education to me is the most important industry that we have. If we don't educate our kids and our families, what do we got in the future? That I think is the biggest problem that we have in the world is that too many kids are leaving school, coming out of school and they're not prepared for the world. They don't have a great education. They can't get a great job because they don't know how to read that well. It's shocking how many kids leave high school that have a third or fourth grade reading level. They can't compete and we have to go ahead and improve that. And if you give them choice in education, you can do that. It then puts the pressure on the schools. If they don't do well, they're not going to have the students there and that's where they have a choice. You should have a choice as a parent. Everybody should. You can pick and choose which good public school you go to, good charter school you go to, good public private school, good faith-based private school, even vocational schools. You can choose and the competition always helps. Choice is really big in a lot of states and it's moving along and in some states like California, they just continue to fight it. Why are they fighting it? What are they afraid of? They're afraid of competition. They don't have any real incentive to be better because they have all these kids that live in this area that they have to go there because they can't afford to go anywhere else and too many wealthy families that could choose, they don't realize the huge difference between what is going on in their public schools and in private schools and in others. They need to know that and that's what we need to get the word out there. I think during COVID, for the first time, some parents got a chance to see a lot more of what was going on in their schools and they didn't like it. They saw at home, their kids were at home watching on their TVs and so on and they weren't very happy. Private schools and charter schools and especially home schools really popped up because they saw that but most people still aren't seeing that. There's far too many families that I hear this all the time. I can talk to 100 people that have kids and ask them, what do you think about the public system? Is it really good or not? They'll say, 80% at least of them will say, no, the public system is not good. However, my kid's school is great and I hear that from almost all of them and how do you know that? You don't get a chance to really visit a school, that's almost impossible. They won't let you in to really see what's really going on and you talk to your realtors, they'll tell you, oh, the schools in this area are really good or you talk to some of the neighbors, that's what they've heard but none of them really know. You need to know and find out and that's what the problem is, you don't realize the huge difference. They need to know because there is a big difference. If your kids are doing really well, sometimes that's because you're pushing them and they're just naturally really smart but you look at the statistics and it's 40, 50, 60% of the kids aren't even reaching basic level in math and in language skills and in English and reading and that's just, it's a tragedy and we have to fix it and it's getting worse, it's not getting better. After COVID, things have gotten even worse. Hopefully, things will get better. Dr. David Jackson with Fairmont Schools, it was great to have you in California Insider. I appreciate it and I'm praying that more of us were going to do something to help our school system. It's got to get better. What are your thoughts on this interview? Do you think California should reform the education system completely? Let us know your thoughts. You can always reach out to us at siamakacaliforniansider.com or comment. We read all of your comments and emails. I'm Siamak Khorrami. This is California Insider. We'll see you next time.