Wake that ass up in the morning.
Breakfast Club.
Morning, everybody, It's DJ Envy Charlamagne the guy. We are the Breakfast Club. We got a special guest in the building, New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks.
Welcome, brother, I'm very happy to be here. Good morning to you both.
Man, happy to have you here. Man.
If you don't know who David Banks is, he founded one of the most successful and first public schools in the country that serves exclusively young men of color, the Eagle Academy.
Right, so we'll talk to us about the Eagle Academy. How did that come to light?
Well, listen, I was a member, been a longtime member of the one Hundred Black Men Organization. It's a national, international actual organization, but started in New York about sixty years ago. And you know, we'd always worked to support our kids in our schools and doing the right thing. But when we started really looking at the data around what was happening with young black men, we realized that
we needed to do so much more. And so many of us had gone to the Million Mare in March years ago, and coming out of that March, we came away with a commitment that we had to go much deeper, and that march is what really gave birth to the creation of the Eagle Academy for young Men. It was the first all boys public school in New York City in almost thirty years. When we open, it's not a
charter school, it's not a private school. It's a regular New York City public school that really had as its mission to try to help to enlighten and transform the lives of our young men. And since that time I was the principal of the school in the Bronx. Since that time, we've opened up an Eagle Academy in every borough in New York. Wow, we've got one in Newark, New Jersey. When Corey Booker was the mayor and Newark, he hassens to come there. So we've got six schools,
over three thousand young men. We graduated over three thousand young men and sent them to colleges and universities all around the country. And it's essentially been a beacon and a blueprint what you can do to transform the lives of young men.
One in Queens Curious, Southeast Queens.
Yeah, it's actually housing the facility that Allenami Church Rev.
Flake's Church.
Uh, north side of Queens.
Then yeah, but it's it's but no, it's Southeast Queens. It's it's it's basically Jamaica Queens. And they used to have a school a few blocks from the church, and we basically took that facility.
And that's where we are the same neighborhood basically that.
I grew up in.
You grew uprom Queens from Queens.
Yeah, I'm a Brooklyn Queen's kid.
I was born in Brooklyn and Crown Heights, lived in Brooklyn ntil I was about twelve years old. My dad was a New York City police officer and uh and moved the family and I'm the oldest of three boys, and we moved out to Southeast Queens Cambria Heights at the Hillcrest High School.
And your story is the same. My dad is from Brooklyn, New York City police officer, moved me to Queens Queens Village, which is the city of the dixt town over.
Same.
It was that same migration almost right in Brooklyn and kind of making their way out to Queens.
And I went to school with Naila, which is Floyd Flake's daughter.
Did you really where'd you go to high school?
St?
Francis Zone school was Andrew Jackson and you aren't going there. My parents would not let me go there. Same here. That was the first, the first public school with metal detectives in the country with Andrew Jackson.
I lived about three or four blocks from Andrew Jackson.
That's why I should have gone to school Zone And think about that envy, right, like the fact that there was most of those kids who lived in the neighborhood. These were like smart, hard work and committed kids. Most of us did not go to the neighborhood school because the reputation was so bad violent. And that's one of the things that I'm trying to do is and now that I'm in this seat as Chancellor, is to say that that it's ridiculous. We've got to transform all of
our schools. So much of the conversation has been about specialized schools and you know, an individual school here or there. I truly believe that you can transform the entire school system. Every neighborhood school should be a good, solid school and the things that we can do to make that happen. And that's that's the reason why I'm here.
Do you think they should take out the I'm sorry, do you think they should take out the quote unquote zone school, right? Because you know, when I was a kid growing up in Queens, you know, usually the resources were in the quote unquote towns with more money, right, right, So that's where everybody tried to go, whether they tried to get a fake address or you know, they wanted
to do to the Catholic school. And I know my parents wanted me to go to Edison or even Van Buren because those schools were better than my zone school. So do you think they should get rid of the quote unquote zone school where they make you go to depending on your zip code.
Well, first of all, right, now we have a lot more choice of movement, particularly at the high school level. Most kids do not have to simply go to their zone school. There's a lot more movement where you don't have to change your address, you don't have to do all the other stuff to kind of sneak around the system.
We offer kids lots of other opportunities, but the reality is that what we have to do is to ensure that every school is a high quality school, so you don't even need to do all of that sneaking around In the first place, and that's where the real work comes in.
I'm very interested in knowing when you say you of exclusively young men of color, what is different about the Eagle Academy than other schools, other public schools around the country.
So when I was heading up the Eagle Academy, you know, you recognize, first of all, you have to start with disaggregating the data.
Right.
Columbia University did a report that said that this was years ago, seventy five percent of the inmates from the entire state of New York came from seven neighborhoods in New York City.
Just think about that.
Fine, you talked about Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Aubany, the whole entire state of New York. Seventy five percent of the prison population for the whole state was not just from New York City. That's a big enough deal of its own, seven very specific zip codes within.
New York City.
I'm just curious you were talking about and somebody says, Shane, since the time of this report came out, but you were talking about the Center Bronx. You're talking about it was South Bronx. You're talking about Central Home, you talked about Southeast Queens. It was the Lower East Side, you know, at the time, it was Ocean Hill, Brown, it was the neighborhoods where our folks are with the greatest concentration of our folks are.
That's where you are for the whole.
State, right, And the problem was that what you had where people were were doing all kinds of analysis about it, and people were having conferences and panel discussions, and I went to so many panel discussions where people just try to play to the crowd and get everybody cheering, but nobody was really offering up any real solutions. We were just talking about how bad the problems were, and it seemed like the most you could hope for was good after school program for maybe twenty five boys.
That's about as good as it got.
That was the reason why we leaned into creating the Eagle Academy. And what Eagle really represented was a culture where young men got to see that we cared deeply about them.
Right. We had a larger.
Percentage of our staff who were men of color, which is important because so many of these young brothers are growing up with our fathers at home and when they're little guys and the lovable, huggable and cute. That's one thing, and they're right up under mammy. But as they start to get older and the streets start to have a greater influence, they need to see strong male role models in their lives. If they do not have that, they are so much more susceptible to the negativity that they
will see in the streets. Black boys, Latino boys are no different than anybody else. They want all the same things, they need the same things. So a lot of it had to do with the way that we trained our teachers. They had to understand first of.
All, about boys.
Boys bring a different kind of energy into a classroom. You know, boys love to compete, but they don't like to compete one on one. They like to compete my group against your group. There are ways for you to affect that in the classroom in a way that's positive, as opposed to seeing some behavior and writing it off as negative. Therefore, kids wound up getting suspended, they wind up getting in trouble, and then the boys themselves start
to give up on themselves. So that's a huge part of what it is that we focus on is the culture that young men need to know. They are people who deeply believe in them. They have to see the power of possibility for themselves as well.
So all the folks.
That we would bring in on a regular basis that would speak into their consciousness. It's not enough to tell kids about what you could do, and particularly boys, you.
Have to show them.
You know.
One of the young men said, it's hard to dream of being an investment banker if you've never met one, right, And so that's what we spend a lot of our time doing. We didn't just talk to them about going to college. Every young man that went to Eagle Academy probably visited twenty to twenty five colleges while they were there. We had them on the role going to colleges on a regular basis because they you have to plant those seeds in their mind. They have to walk that campus.
They got to see the fraternity and Sororita come out and do a little step. They got to go into a classroom and see some folks who look like them. That's what makes it real. If you don't do that, it's just an amorphous notion that adults like to talk about amongst themselves. But you have to help make it play for young men to understand the possibilities for them to one of my problems with a.
Lot of the schools, and since you were a school chancellor,
maybe you can give us some insight on it. I feel like a lot of the curriculums are old, right, And the reason I'm saying that is a lot of you know, when we were kids and our parents were kids, people made money differently, right, But now a lot of these kids are becoming millionaire wealthy, you know, Damn they're billionaires off of things that I don't know if school teaches, whether it's the social media bust and how to do things on social media, whether it's little things as like
you know, these car wrapping companies that wrap the cars, and like people are making millions off of that, or if it's real estate, or if it's whatever it may be. You know, I don't see a lot of schools jumping in to those curriculums. It seems like those curriculums are outdated and ancient, and a lot of these students bought is boring to them because what they're seeing online or what they want to do is like I don't want to do this in school. I want to do what
I enjoy doing. And I see a lot of times that you're not seeing that in those schools. Absolutely, brothers, So I couldn't agree with you more. It's part of the reason why.
One of the ma things I focused on was the reimagining of the school experience for kids. You can't do school like we did it one hundred years ago, correct, even fifty years ago, I mean twenty five years ago, right, Like, the world.
Has changed and it is changing rapidly before our eyes.
And it is a major challenge for a bureaucracy as large as a New York City school system, which is the largest school system in the nation, right and by far it's the largest. It doesn't it the most complicated too, It is absolutely the most popular, complicated the work that we do. But it can change, and but it needs vision, It needs leadership that is courageous and bold, and that's
what we are trying to do. So you know, one of the things that we are leaning into now is we call bold futures, creating career connected learning for kids.
That idea that you just raised that school is boring.
That's the major reason why kids give up on themselves. This is not I'm just doing school. There's a difference between schooling and edge educating really connects to relevance. Why are we doing this? Kids ask that all the time. Even when we were in school, we always said why are we doing this?
Lesson?
And oftentimes you did not get good answers to those questions. We're helping to provide much better answers. I created a couple of programs that we're leaning into right now, our modern youth apprenticeship programs and our future Ready programs. What those are our career connected programs to some degree that what we all remembered as CTE programs, right except that the old CTE programs were about or automotive shop, building cars, doing wood shop. The career connected learning today is not
your grandfather's CTE stuff. Kids are coming out now with the opportunity to step into.
Real jobs even if they didn't go to college.
They can make six figure, six figure salaries coming right out of high school. So we're building a range of partnerships with the aviation industry, the biotech industry, financial industry. JP Morgan Chase is paying kids up to twenty five dollars an hour while they're still in high school. Where they go to school, a certain number of days and then they're actually working in the industry for at least two to three days, where we're merging school and the
real world at the same time. Then kids understand why you need to be focused in this science class. It connects to something that's real and meaningful. So we got thousands of kids that are doing that. I would invite you to come and join us, you know, come and visit what we're doing at some of these schools. But my goal is to scale this work to very significant
levels so that kids get real world experiences. Kids have an opportunity to get not only exposed, but to get paid while they're in high school, and so it prepares them. They get all the credentials that they need when they graduate. So when they graduate, they get a diploma. You can't have it being an empty diploma that doesn't mean anything. I want them to be able to go to college if they want to go to college, but I also want them to have the credentials to step right into
the world of work. We're doing that right now for all the reasons that you just laid up.
Let me ask question, what's your thoughts on kids taking maybe a year or two off right and this is the reason why I say it. In high school, No, no, when they graduated at a house. I'm just curious. We'll be talking education the reason. Oh yeah, maybe after high school, before you go to college. I'm explained why. So I went to Hampton University. But when I went to Hampton University, I went for a different reason.
Right.
I went because I had to. My parents wanted me to go, and I was just did a graduate. Right after I graduated and I spent some time in a real world, I realized there's so many things that I should have took serious in school, so many classes that I should have taken that I didn't take. And I feel like that's because I didn't know myself. I didn't know what I wanted to do. They make you pick a major, they make they make you do it now,
do it now, do now. But if you don't experience the world, you don't know what you're gonna want to do. So I feel like sometimes what you're saying where you're saying, Okay, well, I can take these classes, but I can work at JP Morgan and Chase to see if I like it. You know, I can work at an automotive company to see if that's what fits me, and I feel like that is better because I get a little time to see what I want to do and be like, you know what, I'm going to focus on this opposed to
focus on classes that don't make sense to me. So what's your thought on that?
First of all, that is a big part of what we're trying to do with these programs.
The more the earlier you can.
Provide that kind of level of exposure for kids, the better it is.
Because nobody should.
You know, you shouldn't necessarily know what you want to do for the rest of your life when you're fourteen years old, right.
So you can.
Kids change every year about what they want to be, and a lot of it is based upon what they see and what they experience. And what we want to do is create more opportunities for them to see different things and to experience different things.
You know, the model of the one hundred Black Men is they will be what they see.
Well, if what you see is very limited, then even your imagination can be limited. But when you have an opportunity to see more and to see what it means. You know, when I was in high school, you know, I did an internship at the York College Computer Division. This was back when they were doing computer languages of Cobalton, you know, yeah, exactly right. And this was way before the personal computer. But but it was an eye opener for me because I had a chance to see in
real time what the career could potentially look like. And I said, I don't really think I want to do that. I was an engineering major when I went off to college, and and I did not have enough exposure to that because I stayed as an engineering major for two years before I switched to political science. I said, boy, i've I had I had more exposure to this, I probably wouldn't have chosen engineer. I was a good math and science student, but I didn't really want badly enough to
be an engineer. You know, I try to provide as much exposure for my own kids. I raised four kids, and you know, my daughter graduated from Hampton as well. All my kids went to HBCUs. I have two sons of my daughter went to Hampton. She's teaching in the Bronx now. My oldest son, Jamal, is an assistant principal. He's also in education in Washington, d C. With the Virginia State and then my other two sons, Ali and
Malcolm are both graduates and more house. So while I didn't go to an HBC, you all my money went to HBCUs. And the reality for me is that I tried to help provide as much exposure for them to see what was possible correct. And I often tell folks, you know, we never see the genius of a Tiger Woods if his father didn't put that golf club in his hands and put them out there on the greens, right. And so the more we expose kids, so I want
to expose them before college. I want to expose them while they're in high school so that they can get to their AHA moment, which then when they're in college is more instructive around what they actually want a major, because they then they know why they want to focus in that area.
That's right.
As a chancellor, you know in New York City, like we said earlier, you know the largest, most complicated public school system in America.
Was there any pressure stepping into that position.
Well, stepping into the position, that's a great question.
There's always a lot of pressure.
I would tell you that the biggest pressure o' charlemagne was the pressure that I put on myself because I hold myself to a very high standard and a standard of excellence. I didn't come in here and take this job just to play at it. You know, I've known Mayor Eric Adams for over thirty years. He didn't even interview anybody else to be Chancellor. He said, you're my guy. If I become mayor, you're my guy, and so I
didn't go through an interview process. He tells the story that he was interviewing me over ten years, but that interview was him watching the work that I was doing over all of those years. The pressure that I feel every single day is to ensure that I am living up to what my ancestors laid out for me to do. That I know that I'm standing on their shoulders and that they have paid this way for me at this moment, in this time, to do what needs to be done on.
Behalf of all of our kids. Right.
So that's the pressure that I feel. It's not the day to day pressure of the media or it's actually going going on in our schools. It's just knowing that these kids are counting on me. They're counting on me, and I have to set up a structure that's going to allow it to happen. So let me tell you the biggest, the biggest thing that I have learned since I've become chancellor, and it is the driving force behind everything that I do. Far too many of our kids can't read.
I saw that recently you made you made a lot of news saying that we should, they should focus on literacy and schools, and it kind of blew my mind a.
Little because I'm like, what the hell are they focusing on.
Me.
I've had as some guys that I grew up with out there in Southeast Queen's who you know, we get together, we watch the games on the weekends and whatnot, and then say, hey, Dave. When I leave the room, they say, you just teach the kids to read right, And you still have to say, well, what else are we doing?
And think about this.
Fifty one percent as we came into this administration, fifty one percent of the kids in the New York City public schools fundamentally do not even read on grade level. Sixty four percent of Black kids, sixty three percent of of of Latino kids. But it's a national phenomena. Sixty six percent of the kids in Philadelphia don't read on
great level. Eighty percent of the kids in Chicago, and can you imagine it gets worse in the city of Detroit, Charlamagne, the city of Detroit, ninety one percent of the kids don't fundamentally know how to read. You could get those same results if you never even had a school system, if the kids didn't even go to school every day, if they just.
Stayed home, and then one day at the end of the year, you.
Said, everybody, come in and take a test, you would get those same results.
What is not knowing how to read mean?
Because I know these kids on their phone reading Instagram and Twitter and everything.
I said, what did that mean when you say not know how to read? What you mean?
What I mean is the ability to fully decode text and read for meeting at a level commiserate with where you are. So here's what we've done in our schools for years. We have taught our kids how to read through an approach that's called balance literacy. School teachers know about this all over the country. It is a fundamentally flawed approach. It involves a lot of what they call queueing, which is a fancy word for guessing where basically you open a book. You might not know how to say
the word read the word purple. But if you see a purple fence, they'll tell you what do you think it's saying. And because you see purple fence, you may say purple is a purple fence. But if they remove the picture and say read the word purple, you don't even know how to read because you've not been properly taught. I want to be very clear, there's nothing flawed with our kids.
The approach that.
Has been taken in our public schools all across the nation has been deeply flowed for at least the last twenty five to thirty years. So I'm taking the system back to the old school. We're putting phonics back into our curriculum. Kids are going to learn how to do the basic decoding of words, which it's the way that I learned how to read.
And I was going to ask you that because as a parent, right, I don't know, Charloamanne, if you do homework with your kids or if your wife does. But some of the stuff I can't teach my kids, right because I can't teach him the way that they're learning now. Right, So we all learned purple and you.
Have to say.
Right, and then you got to keep going through that cert until you say the word purple. They don't teach like that, which is very difficult. And I was going to ask you what those percentages that you said was that before COVID, after COVID, during COVID, Because during COVID, we got a lot of kids that mommy and Daddy can't teach them and talking to the screen every day on FaceTime, on class work, they're not paying attention like my son would be in class. The birdfly. He outside
looking at the birds. He outside looking at the people cutting the grass. He's looking at his siblings. He's like, mam, can I get a snack because they're not in So I felt like COVID in the pandemic affected them a lot because it put them behind where they needed to be.
They were already behind envy, that's my point. They've been behind for the last twenty five years. When COVID did was reveal what was all there, and it was an eye opener for so many of our parents who had already been struggling to understand what is this, what is this new way that they're doing with the kids that even the grandparents were saying, this is not the.
Way you learned to read.
So folks knew that something was wrong, but weren't sure what to.
Do about it. New math that new.
Math, Yeah, and and and uh.
And it was very frustrating for parents who said, I don't even know how to help with the math or even with the reading. And it shouldn't be that way, because a sound educational system is so clear and basic that parents can be real partners in helping to do the work. But we were using this very progressive way. A lot of it came out of Columbia University Teachers College, and the average educator believes that the folks at the university level they must know, right, they're a deep researchers,
they're really smart folks. So we just kind of followed the script that they laid out, and like the dance of the Limits, they marched us off the side of the mountain all across the nation. But my message to kids is wasn't your fault. My message to the educators is it wasn't your fault. We gave them a floored playbook, and I'm giving a very different playbook that's going to put folks back in place, and you know how I
know it will work. In the state of Mississippi, they went from using that that approach of balance literacy and took it back to the basics of phonics and vocabulary development and what we call the science of reading. Mississippi for decades has been the lowest performing state in the nation. Even other states that did poorly said we at least
we're not as bad as Mississippi. Mississippi has gone from last to basically first because they completely shifted from that florid approach, and so a state like Mississippi can do what they did. All odds are on what we're doing here in New York City. So we've trained up all of our teachers across the city. Half of our school districts have rolled out this new approach this September. The other half are going to be rolling it out next year. We're not leaving it up to every school to do
it the way that you think works best. We're giving a very prescriptive model here and say we know what works, we need everybody to do it this way, and we're going to be able to monitor this in a much more significant way that really has a level of fidelity that's attached to it. I'm not going to leave this up to just willy nilly everybody just doing this because we have failed kids for far too long, and that stops with me.
I guarantee you.
You think schools are still recovering from the COVID homeschool years.
Yeah, yeah, schools are still recovering. But I do think that we're seeing the signs of the recovery. Our tendance is up. You know, we have this issue around chronic absenteeism, which essentially means kids still missing too many days from school, but those numbers are lowering as well, so we got more kids back in school. Listen, kids need to be in school, their families need their kids to be in school. Nobody should just be home, hanging out or otherwise out
on the streets. So we're seeing folks back. But I think what we're also seeing is because of what we're doing around our literacy work and our career connected learning really giving more purpose to schools, kids have a reason to be back in schools in a way that's making sense. I see parents talk to parents, I speak of churches and whatnot all over the city, and people are saying
thank you, thank you, thank you. It's an amen corner because they know what we're doing is getting our kids back on the right track, and it's going to give a greater degree of.
Hope for our kids.
There's nothing worse than for a little boy or little girl to feel like a failure and they're eight years old in the fourth grade.
Chance.
I was just going to say, if you do the comparison of kids that you feel are failures that I can't read or can't do math, and you compare it against mental problems or mental illness, and I'm gonna tell you why, Right, if a kid can't read or understand in correctly and they are in a classroom, right and they feel like a teacher is gonna say, young man, you read, and he's gonna be embarrassed. What is he gonna do. He's gonna act out, right, He's gonna act
out so that teacher does not call on him. So he's gonna want to get in trouble, right, and then he's gonna get sent to the principal's office and he's gonna be be deemed as a kid that is a problem or a troublesome or not focused right then they're
gonna put him into a conversation with a therapist. With a lot of times school therapists will be like, the first thing that they do is they want to give the kid medicine or give him something that he might not need, when really the problem might be he just can't read and he's not confident in himself.
Man, and let me tell you something, brother, you are spot on, because when you can't read, you wind up giving up on yourself. The system gives up on you. It's a direct alignment pathway to prison, to homelessness, to unemployment, to depression. It's all those things. The die gets cast
very early on. That's why I'm making my biggest bet that if I can ensure kids are all going to be on grade level by the third grade, because all the resource says, if you get the kids on grade level by third grade, they're good from there because from there they can see the success, they feel a level of success, their confidence kicks in. Now you can start they can start to to to read to learn as
opposed to just learning to read. But but but if you don't teach them how to read properly, it's like building a house starting on the second floor.
You you didn't have.
The foundation, and so so so we're gonna make sure that the foundation is solid and strong. It doesn't happen overnight, but I believe it can happen sooner rather than later. And it certainly won't happen if you don't start. So we have started.
I'm all in on this.
I've been in this education space for you know, over thirty five years now, and and and I've seen some things, and and and I'm from New York. I've been here all my life. We're gonna change the system, man, We're gonna get We're gonna get these kids back on track. And as I travel all around the city, the educators around New York City, they're saying thank you, right because they also have been told that they are failures because they can't The reading scores are so low, the mass
scores are so low. And these some smart people who are committed, who do care about kids. But the narrative on them has been they're racists, they don't care about kids, they don't care about our kids. That's really not the case. People do care. You have to give them the right script on what they need to do. And that's what we're giving them, and we're going to be monitoring it very closely.
How are New York City public schools addressing mental health issues and young people?
Well, first of.
All, there are a whole wide range of things and kids talk about this all the time, right, So I mean we've got we've got over five thousand social workers across our schools, a whole several thousand guidance counselors who are all stand in a gap really around those issues. When you see Kwamei shows up and you can see things that just not quite right and they need some help, right,
so we stand in the gap for them. We have over three hundred of our schools right now today who have mental health school based mental health clinics in the schools, So there are real resources in those schools right now to help to address those needs for our kids who
just have some extra supports that they need. Do We have close to seven hundred more school Charlamagne where they don't have the school based health clinic, but they have a partnership with the local hospital or some community based organization that also provides those so support.
So we got closer to a.
Thousand of our schools that already have these kinds of supports that are actually in place. One of the things I'm really excited about is this December, together with the Department of Health, we're gonna be launching our telehealth program. With that program is designed for high school kids. A high school kid who's gone through some stuff, whether it's suicide, aviation, or just some level of depression, some level of trauma, whatever it might be.
They don't have to make an appointment.
I don't have to wait till school starts to go and try to find the counselor they can just pick.
Up their phone.
We're gonna have everybody will have this app and they'll be able to call right into and get somebody in real time who can be on the phone, who can talk them down, who can give them in that moment, just what they need, because there are a lot of kids who are crying out for help and we can't afford for them to have to wait to get the help. So that's going to start in a couple of months.
We're really excited about that. The Department of Health is rolling that out, and they're gonna be working in a strong partnership with New York City Public schools. So that's another thing, and we're going to continue to continue to build from there.
I want to go back to something nbcaid, how do you know when a child is actually going through mental health issues versus them just acting out if they want to get out of work or school.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's a great question. And that's that's I think win in doubt. Make sure you error on the side of thinking that there's something really wrong, correct, right, But a lot of that comes from just knowing the kids. Right, These kids are not robots, and the people that work in their schools. And when you ask me about what's the secret source to like an Eagle academy, again, it's
our relationships with the kids. When kids are in school where they're well known, somebody knows them well, that's how you keep your hand on the posts of what's going on, and you can see when the kids are just something is off from its normal course. And then the other kids themselves, their friends will let you know. You know, all those years I was principal, I probably learned out.
I learned more about kids from their friends who would say, mister Banks, you need to really go talk to Charlemagne because he's going through some stuff right now. He's not gonna willingly come and tell you about it. But there's
some stuff happening at home. I know about it. Just see what you can do when you're in a school, when the school works, well, it's a family, and we keep our hand on the pulse and the kids are not like just a factory workers, you know what I mean, So we know what's going on with them.
And then went a doubt.
You know, that's why you those social workers in there, because they're trained to look with that, with that, with that extra eye and have a better sense. Me what I did and I encouraged school principles all around the city. I didn't always know because I wasn't a trained social worker, but but but I cared deeply about these kids every single day, Envy, every single day, Charlamagne, I greeted all my kids at the front door every day I was not in my office as.
Kids came into school.
I shook the hands of every single young man of Eagle Academy when they came into that building, not most days, every single day at the front door, greeted them. I dapped them up, gave up game, game, gave up gave a hug, and I could look in their eyes and I knew right away if they were going.
Through something because I knew them.
And I'm telling you, most of our leaders around the system operate the same way. They know their kids, They love their kids. Our New York City public schools have gotten a really bad rap as though, as though we're in an industry of folks who just don't care.
And the kids can't read, and the kids can't do math, and the.
Kids can't can't, can't, and the kids also take on that persona. I'm here to change that, and I believe that we can change that. But you gotta You have to breathe a level of hope and optimism into a system for the.
Believe in itself.
And then you have to start to see some victories so that people recognize that, you know, we.
Really can be better.
You gotta help convince them and so and that's why I keep telling you the reading thing is so important. And I've already seen some signs. Ive already spoken to some parents in such a short period of time who've already said, my son had a woman in the Bronx who told me my son every day, I had to like push him.
To go into school.
I think it was in the third grade. Oh boy, she's had to push them, like, come on, you gotta go to school, she said. But because of the work we've already done with the reading, she said, I'm at home and he's like, Mommy, come, I want you to read. I want you to read with me. This new book that I'm reading, she said.
He's reading like he never read before.
I love it, she said.
So now when I walk them to school, he's running into the school at his mom tell me that It brought a tea into the eyes of everybody that was in the room, and what it said was we are on the right track. Stay steady on this course, and make sure that we're doing that. Because when kids learn to read, they believe in themselves and they get that confidence, and when that confidence kicks in skies on them.
You can do all kinds of things after that.
How can people get involved, man, and continue to make a change in their local public schools.
How do we help you do your job?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, I need you first of all.
I think you know we need the fillanthropic community first of all, to continue to invest in this and to.
Believe in the public schools.
You know a lot of great charter schools out there, and I believe in choice, and I'm not knocking any schools, but ninety percent of the kids in New York City and across the nation still go to regular public schools.
So if you don't lift up those public schools, you're just playing around on the margins. You're never going to fully affect real change.
So, first of all, believe make those investments our folks in the community and folks like yourselves.
But one of the things I say to.
Folks is when when people come in, don't just ask them how they're doing, ask them what they're reading.
You know what I mean. Like, I just started this new book, the Age of AI, this.
Whole notion around artificial intelligence.
It's critical.
We're doing some stuff with our kids right now, trying to build out a whole new system. The New York City public schools and schools around the nation and in fact around the world are going to look drastically different within the next ten years because of artificial intelligence.
I'm reading a book right now about the dangers of it, and the dangers are real.
The dangers are real, and if we're not careful. They'll make people obsolete. So we have to be careful.
I read a book when I just finished this summer on the bluff book, right, you know, I get a chance to go to the vineyard in the summer and spend some time and relax. But but the deal is, as folks what they're reading, right, and and and let's just help make sure that.
Let's make reading the new sexy and.
Uh, the Shamans Path to Freedom, That's what I'm talking about, right, self reliance.
It's a book of original essays from Ralph Waldel Emerson.
You know what I want you.
I want everybody that comes on your show, I want them to I want them to come in with their book. I want them to come in into even if you just take a minute or two, because with your show represents better than anybody, it's culture and the millions of people that you have watching this.
If these folks are all like, what are you reading?
And you can't show up with very and Charlemagne unless you're talking, showing them the book that you're reading and talking a little bit about it. If that becomes part of our new lexicon, if that becomes part of the culture of what we're talking about you can transform minds, you can transform the way we show up in our schools. I really believe that, and so I was just saying, continue to promote it.
I just did that this morning because I was talking.
You know, my donkey of the day to day was a public library in Huntsville, Alabama that's banning a book. I can't remember the name of the book, but they banned it because the author's last name is Gay.
It's not rock Sanne Gey, it's.
Another w wow.
But they're banning it just because that word gay comes up as a key word.
Wow.
So they banded the book.
The book has nothing to do with sexuality, just as crazy nothing. And so I did Donkey to Day to that library. But I was talking about how much I love reading because my mom was an English teacher and I grew up on the bookget program.
You know, I got two books.
I'm a New York Times bestselling off book in print, and I'm also from South Carolina, where the first anti literacy laws were created.
Wow.
So when you asked me about reading in books, it's business and it's personal to me. Yes, man, you know, it's personal. Like I truly believe reading reading it helped me change my life.
See that absolutely, and it can help to transform the lives of so many young people.
Let me tell you, these kids are brilliant. Man. I had the best job in the world. I really do.
And it's because first of all, New York City. There's no place like this, and we know that, but I get to live it every day because every single day I'm moving around the whole city right, like, like where in the world can you go with? One day, I start in the Bronx at a school with Cardi b who it made a million dollar donation to her middle school that she graduated.
From, and and and and and.
The kids go crazy and she shows up in all her Cardi b neis and and then I leave there And at the end of the day, I'm meeting with Jewish Yeshiva leaders from the Orthodox Jewish community at City Hall. Where else can you see that range but a place like New York City, right, the whole world lives here out of the school last week in Brooklyn and all.
The kids are Ukrainian.
When you represent, when you understand like what that diversity is and you figure out how diversity can represent the ultimate beauty of what a nation should really be. It's an amazing, amazing opportunity. But if you don't do it right, you can see some of the craziness. Like we another part of the country at banning, banning books, banning.
Books because of the author's last name.
Feel about that, just the overall banning of books, especially the black books.
Man, it is it is.
It is not only ridiculous, it is so dangerous and it is a form of indoctrination because education is ultimately about the enlightenment of the mind. You can't enlighten your mind if you're limiting what folks even have access to, right, and so so we should never be about banning books. Certainly, there's some books that are appropriate at certain grade levels, and that's that's true of any good school system. But what we're seeing, which I think is very dangerous, is
the banning of books for political reasons. And I don't stand. I don't stand for that. I want I want New York City to be a beacon of enlightenment. Uh, you're looking at this issue. What's going on in the Middle East right now, as horrible as it is, and we pray for the.
Peace for the people over there, but kids need to be studying.
What's why folks, you know, dropping bombs on each other, that that stuff goes back centuries. What let's study that, Let's talk about that. Let's not limit the books, you limit access to knowledge. That's a that's a recipe for indoctrination, that's a recipe for authoritarianism, and it leads you.
Down the wrong path.
That's not what any healthy republic or democracy should ever be about. So so I'm about consciousness raising, I'm about knowledge, and every side has a little something to offer, and we need to be paying attention to what everybody's saying. This issue of immigration that we're watching every single day and how it's playing out in New York and all across the country. I want our kids studying the issue of the day, not just being told this is the
right way. And the only thing we're going to read and study is one person's point of view.
That's not education. That's that's not education.
So so not for it, and we need to continue to make sure that we lift this up.
I got one more question because we talked about the mental health piece earlier, and you know I have an organization called the Mental Wealth Alliance, and one of our biggest things that we want to do is we want to get social and emotional learning in public schools K through you know twelve.
What are they doing?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
First of all, let me tell you we would love to work with you on that, because there's a way for us to take that work and really and really scale it up, and particularly coming off of the pandemic, the social emotional learning work, and it's happened well before I even became chancellor. You know, there's a lot of work that is being done in our schools in support of social emotional learning. You know, I visited a school in Staten Island, like maybe in my within my first
two weeks of being in this position. The school designed a wall and the wall represents and it lights up. It's a wide range of the feelings that you're having at any given moment in time, and they designed it as a fun war and you get a chance to
kind of walk along this wall. There's a little path that you walk through and you get to touch different parts of the world that reflect the feelings that you're having and that moment, and the folks in that school so get to observe that and figure out who they need to try and support who's feeling a certain way, because you have to remember kids don't always they won't always articulate how they're feeling at a given moment. But this is another way for them to kind of physically
express where they are. They're feeling anger, they're feeling happiness, or they're feeling joy, they're feeling sadness, Like what is it that they're feeling? Because ultimately that tips you into a place where somebody needs to sit with you and say I'm here.
That's right, I'm here.
You know, next year when I do my Mental Wealth ex Vocal, we just had it this past Saturday and on our World Mental Health Day, I want to bring like two hundred kids.
Man, we got to figure that out. How we just have to undred kids in attended Charlamagne.
We can do two thousand kids?
Oh, I mean we did three thousand people this year, right, you know, But I want to have like this always kids there. But I want to do something specifically. But we just have a bunch of kids from New York just just there.
Brother you you all you got to do is let me know where and when and we will absolutely make it happen. We would love to be in partnership with you on this. When we go to the schools the Marini, we talk to kids. Mental health is one of the major things that kids talk about, not just for themselves, but for their friends, right because they care about their friends and they can see the stuff that sometimes that their friends are going through. So yes, let's make that real.
Let's partner on that because you know, young people and they follow your lead as well, want so much of this, and if we work in partnership, we have an opportunity to truly impact the lives of just let's do it. Let's do it, man, I'm with you.
You have it, James. We appreciate you for joining us. Thank you so much, brother, Thank you, New York City Schools Chancellor, and thank you brother, thank you. It's the Breakfast slog, good morning, wake
That ass up early in the morning at Breakfast Club