‘You’re considered homeless by the school district’ she said. Another counselor adult telling me some label that had been applied to me. Moments earlier I had walked down the beaten path of conversation that was ‘my story’.
"This and this happened, but yes I’m ok. No I don’t need anything specific. No I’m not any of those mental health labels.” Really, what I wanted to say was, “thank you but leave me alone.”
She went through her spiel anyway. “Because you’re considered homeless you now get this and this benefit. Are you sure you’re okay? Do others know?” On and on.
She was doing her job, and communicating that I was in the lowest social class possible, and because of that the system was trying to help me.
I was finally left alone when I moved my life to San Diego for what I thought would be college. I knew zero people but I was excited to fend for myself. I still remember pulling a little brown card out of my wallet when I went to get groceries. It felt kind of like magic, but I knew it was food stamps.
It meant I was still apart of the one of the lowest social classes in America even if I was finally ‘free’ and had a place to stay.
I told myself one day I would hang it on my wall alongside my emancipation papers and some honorary degree for being awesome.
Since those days, anytime anyone has asked me ‘what matters to you in the world?’ or ‘What are you working towards?’
My answer has been somewhere along the lines of ‘helping my younger self.’
Although I’ve been doing that through mentorship and consulting some, I haven’t felt like I was making a big enough impact.
In fact there’s a saying I have repeated since before I remember that goes like this, — “For me It’s not about changing peoples worlds, It’s about changing THE world.”
Recently I was feeling a little lost. I had been traveling around, trying to find work in New York so I could move there, but it just wasn’t clicking. After a while of circling, I bit the bullet and moved anyway. It was time to get focused.
An analogy came to mind from my time building sales teams in San Diego.
If you want cookies from a vending machine and you put in 98 cents, you will receive 0 cookies. If you try 99 cents, you will receive 0 cookies. However, if you put in 100 cents you will get your pack of 5 cookies. The same is true with effort.
So 100 cents (and a little more) in, I had arrived to New York, but I still needed to find and commit to a direction for my future. So I did a huge perspective check (a term I got from a Comm 101 class meaning evaluating my own perspective by asking others for theirs).
I interviewed 125 people in 50 locations around New York. I asked them all the same three questions that I was asking myself. (Proof)
1. What is your story?
2. What problem in the world means the most to you?
3. Who is the most impressive person that you’ve met and what about them was impressive to you?
Sometimes, people asked the questions back to me. In those moments, especially when thinking about question 2, I found myself drawn to my younger self again.
So I wasn’t hallucinating then.
With my confidence built and evidence on my side, I was ready to continue charging forward. The question was, what exactly was I charging forward towards?
It was the point at the beginning of any endeavor where you know too little to understand which way to go. As easy as it would be to return to familiar territory, I knew I needed to dive in. Somehow sometimes going into territory you don’t know helps you find your way.
I knew ‘help my younger self’, but what did that mean? My assumption I had made during the interviews was that ‘education’ is what counted for people looking to be better than their parents.
Despite not enjoying school myself, and actually leaving covid college, I just assumed. Though I felt there was something off about the current education system.
After 13 hour day of studying from imitation and play in the pre-writing times to the first schools called edubas of Mesopotamia and beyond from Greece to now, I couldn’t fall asleep. My mind was turning a question over and over again.
My obsession trait clicking on.
The question was ‘is education what actually creates social mobility?’
Social Mobility meaning kids ending up better off than their parents.
So again I went deep.
I learned all about the history of social classes and mobility. I found basically three buckets that created mobility,
Relationships
Assets
Skills
In that order. For all of history, relationships and assets were passed through inheritance. Skills have been mostly gated to the upper class in one way or another. This meant low social mobility, and this is all becoming true again.
The number of social classes has decreased from Ancient Greece at 5 to 3 now, with a huge split in the middle of the 3. Classes are still done by income the way they were first established in Athens by Solon.
Most know this, but the stat currently is, that the top 10% of people hold 67% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% hold 2.5% of it in the U.S.
Mobility has also fallen back from where it was in the beginning of the U.S. Around 15-20% (near perfect with 5 classes) to around 7.5% top to bottom chances for Millennials. (Likely lower for my generation)
I then looked at the studies of social mobility and my list of three proved accurate. Based on the studies recently today the mobility correlated points are
Family background and parental investment.
Place / neighborhood, often proxied by zip code.
School quality and access.
Early childhood conditions, including prenatal health.
Child self-regulation and cognitive control.
In that order.
The top two are zipcode and parental situation, followed by schools (should create skills and relationships), health (both an asset and skill), and then a skill.
Those top two aren’t controllable for people who are already alive, and neither is number 4. So I put them on my ignore list along with time in the womb correlating to IQ and that the best predictor of if a hockey player will be good is the month they are born in.
For people in the land of the living, as I am, school quality and access becomes the controllable and most valuable point. My hypothesis proved true.
It also comes with the benefits of being fundable, scalable, and able to interact with communities and parents to hopefully improve those ‘uncontrollable’ points as well for a kid.
So where is education at now (US)?
~96% of kids go to some kind of school (.i.e not homeschooled or unregistered).
Every kid going to school goes to a form of school created before women could vote, black people had rights, electricity and cars were invented, and before social media and AI.
In other words the school model hasn’t really been innovated on in ~175 years.
We don’t have schools for this era.
The curriculum may have been updated some, but the model and methods of teaching have not.
I’d say there is room for improvement and the time to improve is now.
So we’ve established that good education is the most powerful controllable variable in social mobility and that the current U.S. (and global) school model is outdated. Let me add one more point.
The U.S. school system (and model) spends $16,000 a year on each student for K-12, and $36,000 a year for higher education. This is in the top 5 of all countries in the world.
However, our results are much below that. We are anywhere from 6th in reading (I suspect worse), to 28th in math, and our colleges have a 60% graduation rate.
Basically we spend ~45% more and get results ~13% below average. (we are reportedly higher in reading, but lower in math, and these are trending down.)
So we are outdated and inefficient.
I intend to change that. That is the frontier of education.
That is where I’m headed because the problems I am most qualified to solve are the ones I have experienced because I know them most intimately.
TLDR:
I want to help kids be better than their parents.
In scientific words, I want to create social mobility.
I assumed school was the thing that let kids be better off than their parents..
So I asked: does education actually move mobility, or did I just assume that?
Mobility has a few big drivers. The strongest are things like your zipcode and who your parents know.
You can’t pull those levers. You can’t ethically reassign a kid’s zipcode, and you can’t fund or copy a wealthy family’s network.
Education is a real driver though, and it’s the one you can pay for and scale to many kids.
The school model we run is old and underperforms for what it costs.
So the work is finding a better model. That’s the frontier, and that’s where I’m going.
My overviews on social mobility and education:
A History of Education.
Sources:
Mobility Decline and history - (Source - Olivetti and Paserman (income-proxy from occupations, 1850-1940) and Ferrie (occupational mobility since 1850). For the long linked-census trend it’s the 2019 PNAS study (Song, Massey, et al.).)
Long and Ferrie, "Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States since 1850," American Economic Review 2013, plus Ferrie's earlier "History Lessons" essay (2005).
Among a lot of querying many different things for the history
And of course - James Floyd for his life stories (Me :) )