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BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Hello, everyone, and welcome to “Amanpour and Company.” Here’s what’s coming up.
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DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: He said he did not say that and I believe him 100 percent.
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GOLODRYGA: Trump defends Pete Hegseth amid outrage over his alleged kill order on a suspected Venezuelan drug boat. We have the details.
Then —
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MARCO RUBIO, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: There’s more work to be done. This is delicate, it’s complicated. There are a lot of moving parts.
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GOLODRYGA: — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner head to Moscow for Ukraine peace talks. Christian speaks with former U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry about the Trump administration’s approach to diplomacy.
And —
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nobody never put their hands on my face and tell me they love me. I look at my father, my real father, and you know, like,
seeing people do that continuously, you know, like, I feel loved.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: — “Fatherless No More.” Pastor Tim Johnson embeds himself in one of America’s most infamous prisons. I ask him about his new documentary
setting inmates on a better path.
Also, ahead —
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ANDREW RICE, FEATURES WRITER, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: All of these gaps, especially the achievement gaps between white students and black students
especially, have started to widen.
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GOLODRYGA: — the steep decline in the U.S. education system. New York Magazine features writer Andrew Rice tells Michel Martin about what’s
behind this worrying dip.
Welcome to the program, everyone. I’m Bianna Golodryga in New York, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.
We begin with outrage and confusion in Washington over the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuela and the Maduro regime.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is calling for an investigation into a so- called double tap strike by the U.S. military targeting survivors from an alleged drug trafficking vessel.
President Trump says the second strike wasn’t at his request, and he’s backing his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who insists all U.S. strikes
on alleged drug boats are lawful.
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DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: Number one, I don’t know that that happened. And Pete said he did not want them. He didn’t even know what people were
talking about. So, we’ll look into it. But no, I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine. And if
there were two people around, but Pete said that didn’t happen.
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GOLODRYGA: The controversy erupting after months of deadly strikes at sea. And as Trump has again threatened that the U.S. will begin operations
against drug gangs inside Venezuela very soon.
So, is the U.S. edging closer to war with Venezuela? Our Stephen Collinson joins me now from Washington, D.C. First, Stephen, about these strikes, we
now know that Congress, including some Republicans, are wanting to launch investigations into these operations, specifically that of what occurred on
September 2nd that the president said he was not aware of. The second strike, the White House at the time had released unclassified video showing
the first strike. What more are we learning about the conflicts that resulted after reporting surrounding a second strike?
STEPHEN COLLINSON, POLITICS SENIOR REPORTER: Well, the reporting that came out from CNN and The Washington Post last week really played into
deepening concerns about the legality of everything that the administration is doing in the Caribbean and around Venezuela. What that reporting said
was that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, ordered the first strike on this boat on September 2nd. It wasn’t clear whether he had ordered this
follow-up strike, supposedly to kill two crew members who were still alive after the first strike.
The reason that is very concerning to a lot of people on Capitol Hill, as you say, including Republicans, is that second strike would be an
infringement of the laws of war and international law. As the president said, he is trying to, I think, push this under the carpet, saying he
believes Hegseth when he said that he didn’t order the second strike. But that also raises huge questions about what is happening in the chain of
command, who is in control of this, and who else might have ordered that strike.
All of this information should be possible for congressional committees to get. As you see there, there is a lot of video evidence to start with. And
I think these plays into the wider question of what the administration is doing. The justification legally for these strikes on the speedboats in
themselves is very problematic. The justification, according to the Office of Legal Counsel from the Justice Department, is still classified. So, the
administration hasn’t fully explained what it is.
What they seem to be arguing is that the United States is acting in self- defense and the defense of its allies against what it says are cartel boats importing narco-terrorism into the United States. All sorts of political
leaders and legal groups and constitutional groups say that is a very problematic interpretation of what is going on, and that in themselves
these strikes, which do not allow the alleged drug traffickers due process, and in many cases the U.S. doesn’t even know individually who these people
are, could well be illegal.
So, I think this has been building over a couple of months, but now this particular strike on September the 2nd has really deepened a lot of these
profound questions about the administration’s conduct. That’s before we get to any potential military action against Venezuela itself.
GOLODRYGA: Yes, and the legality over that September 2nd strike, the questions surrounding it are raised even higher given that the subsequent
strikes we know there was not, at least as far as the reporting has revealed, allegations of a double tap strike, a second strike. In fact,
survivors of subsequent strikes were actually repatriated back to their countries, and that raises the question of whether legal advisers in the
DOJ may have stepped in following news and reporting and allegations surrounding what took place on September 2nd.
Quickly, Stephen, this all leads to the bigger question of what are the president’s plans with regards to Venezuela and Nicolas Maduro’s regime.
The president will be holding a cabinet meeting, I believe, tonight on this subject matter at the White House. What’s the significance of that?
COLLINSON: Well, it appears that the goal of the administration’s military build-up, sanctions and other pressure on Venezuela, the president’s
threats, has been to try to convince President Maduro either to leave office of his own accord and go into asylum, perhaps in Russia or Turkey or
somewhere, or for generals around him to topple him. That so far hasn’t happened, even though the pressure is intense in Venezuela.
That leaves the question of what will the administration do. The president said over Thanksgiving last week that strikes against supposed cartel
targets on land will begin very soon after amassing this massive armada of U.S. ships and armor off Venezuela. The president is in a very difficult
box. If he leaves without toppling Maduro, there will be great questions about his credibility and strategy.
And, you know, starting a new war in Venezuela effectively would be a great political risk at a time of domestic troubles for the president, and is not
something necessarily that is supported by his base in the United States.
GOLODRYGA: Yes, we’re seeing fractures within his own base around some of his foreign affair’s policies, specifically now as it relates to Venezuela.
Stephen Collinson in Washington for us. Thank you so much.
Well, at the same time as intensifying pressure on Maduro’s regime in the name of cracking down on narco-traffickers, Trump has announced plans to
pardon a former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the U.S. It’s a
seemingly contradictory move, but my next guest says that it is part of a wider pattern.
Brian Winter is editor-in-chief of America’s Quarterly and a guest writer for The New York Times. He joins me now from New York. Thank you so much,
Brian, for taking the time. We’ll get to Honduras and the president’s involvement not only in the pardoning there of the former president, but
also his interest in picking the winner in the presidential election is notable.
Let’s start with Venezuela, though, because as we’ve noted, the president called Maduro an illegitimate leader, a narco-terrorist. I think there are
many world leaders who would likely agree with that designation. But the U.S. has now dispatched the largest naval task force to the region, I
believe since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In addition to F-35 fighter jets, the president posted over Thanksgiving break, over the weekend there, that the airspace will be closed as well. Is
the U.S., in your view, planning for some sort of military involvement in Venezuela?
BRIAN WINTER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, “AMERICAS QUARTERLY”: It’s tough to say. I mean, what’s clear is that they’re doing all of this. The United States is
marshalling all of these forces, the biggest presence in the Southern Caribbean in decades, in an effort to get Nicolas Maduro, the dictator of
Venezuela, to leave, preferably of his own accord.
But what we’re seeing right now seems to amount to a giant game of chicken, where Maduro is trying to hold out, trying to perhaps lengthen this
confrontation even further by proposing negotiations, probably or certainly aware of the divisions that President Trump faces, even within his own
base, on what kind of action the United States should pursue in Venezuela. And meanwhile, you have President Trump continuing to try to ratchet up the
pressure, possibly in the hope that this situation will resolve itself without any shots actually being fired within Venezuelan territory. That
would clearly be the ending that President Trump prefers.
GOLODRYGA: And we know that Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, had been the dominant force in the country. And Maduro was seen perhaps as a
placeholder, and not many would have expected him to last as long as he has. And yet he’s still there.
Political overthrows, military coups are much easier to document and lay out on paper than they are actually to perform in real life. And we’ve seen
some of the fallout from that as well. Can you just talk about what the president risks at this point? Because the Wall Street Journal, in their
editorial board over the weekend, really raised the stakes with this op-ed. And they said, President Trump is in a high-stakes showdown with
Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and the dictator’s backers in Havana and Moscow. One of the two presidents is going to lose, and it will be Mr. Trump if Mr.
Maduro isn’t ousted one way or another. Has the president put his own credibility on the line here with this particular foreign policy
entanglement?
WINTER: Well, you mentioned how long Nicolas Maduro has been around, and he’s been around since 2013. He lost an election last year badly, and yet
he’s still here. And if you look at Cuba, which is really the model that Venezuela’s dictatorship has in mind, that’s a regime that has been in
power for 65 years and counting. And the point here is that once dictatorships become installed, they’re very hard to get rid of, even if
you have the biggest military force in the world, as the United States does.
And, you know, these kinds of regimes have been trouble and posed thorny challenges for American presidents of both parties, including hawkish
Republicans. Few people remember this now, but back in the 1980s, the Cuban diaspora in Miami was extremely critical of President Ronald Reagan,
because they believed that he was not being tough enough on Fidel Castro.
And here we are today, and President Trump faces a dilemma that in some ways is similar. He has part of his base that wants to see, you know, a
firm military action in order to get Maduro out, and is warning him of a loss of credibility if he fails to do so. But you also have a part of
President Trump’s base, which is, you know, maybe not isolationist, but certainly has fresh memories of the two “forever wars,” quote/unquote, of
the 2000s in Afghanistan, many of them, including J.D. Vance, the vice president, are veterans of at least one of those wars.
And, you know, what they see — what they’re thinking to themselves is, you know, here we go again, another regime change-type operation that the
United States is being pulled into, and they’re very wary of it. So, you know, not an easy situation for President Trump.
GOLODRYGA: So, if Maduro does happen to leave by force or otherwise, then what happens to the country? Because we know that just from their elections
most recently, the majority of Venezuelans do not support Nicolas Maduro. They do not view that he is the legitimate leader of the country. So, is
there an opportunity, perhaps, for the country?
WINTER: Oh, there’s definitely an opportunity. And look, at least 80 percent of Venezuelans want to see Nicolas Maduro gone. We know this
because of the ballots whose results were leaked, the real results, which were leaked to the International Community last year.
And look, both parties in Washington, for the most part, want to see Nicolas Maduro gone and democracy return to Venezuela. The question here
is, what kind of effort and sacrifice on the part of the United States are people willing to endure in order to see that happen?
If president — or if Nicolas Maduro is prevailed upon to leave or if he leaves of his own accord, there is reason to believe that the opposition,
Maria Corina Machado, the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, that she and her group of people would be prepared to take power. They have an
economic plan that they have put together. They have considerable support from the Venezuelan people, as I stated.
I think that some of these worries about, you know, an Iraq-style quagmire after the fact, there’s probably something to those worries, but they may
be overblown. Venezuela is not Iraq, and you would also hope that the U.S. military would learn at least some of the lessons in terms of trying to
keep the Venezuelan officer corps involved, give them a seat at the table, and not run into some of those mistakes that Washington did 20 years ago.
GOLODRYGA: Yes, with the Ba’ath Party and give them some clemency, perhaps. I did bring up Honduras in the introduction there, and there are
questions about whether, at the very least, there’s a double standard here in the president designating Nicolas Maduro a narco-terrorist, and now
pledging to pardon the former Honduran president who U.S. prosecutors convicted of turning Honduras into a narco state.
From a credibility standpoint, what does that say about the United States, both in the region, and does it not cut into U.S. moral authority in
whatever ends up happening in this Venezuelan operation?
WINTER: Well, I’ll tell you that so far today, I have not even heard any Republicans defend the — President Trump saying that he will concede that
pardon, the former president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was found guilty in a U.S. court of taking bribes in return for allowing drugs to pass
through his country on their way to the United States.
The dissonance, to use a very polite word, I think is very clear. I understand President Trump, you know, he says that, well, this was a case
of a president being persecuted as he believes he was. That may explain at least part of the decision-making here. But there’s no doubt that, you
know, many both inside the United States, as well as certainly within Latin America, have picked up on what they see as a double standard.
GOLODRYGA: Yes, there was a mountain of evidence in that trial, and he was convicted by a U.S. jury, as well. Brian Winter, thank you so much. Good to
see you.
WINTER: Thank you.
GOLODRYGA: Now, to a flurry of diplomacy aimed at ending Russia’s war in Ukraine. U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff is headed to Moscow for talks
after meeting with Ukrainian officials in Florida. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called those negotiations delicate and complicated, while
acknowledging that a lot of work remained.
Witkoff’s trip comes just days after a transcript was leaked appearing to show him coaching the Kremlin on how to handle President Trump. Christiane
spoke to veteran diplomat and former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shortly after the leak about what he makes of the administration’s
unconventional approach.
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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: AMANPOUR: This week has been really dominated by what on earth is the U.S. doing regards trying
to bring a peace to Ukraine that looks heavily tilted according to all the links and leaks towards Russia.
So, you know, Trump, the president, says, oh, but this is nothing but, you know, normal statescraft. I want to ask a statesman who’s engaged in high-
stakes negotiations. Is it? Is it normal?
JOHN KERRY, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: I would say this has proven to be fairly normal for how the Trump administration chooses to do its
diplomacy. I think just plunking something down and giving somebody, you know, sort of an ultimatum, you have to decide this by Thursday, not a
great way to begin. And I hope they’re successful. Genuinely, we hugely hope they are successful. This war must end.
But President Putin has a set of very clear objectives. And needless to say, in any kind of treaty or end of war, both sides will not get
everything. And you have to find the sweet spot of where you can land so that they’re satisfied significantly enough that their people, their
countries, will not rebel or feel that they somehow gave away the store.
AMANPOUR: What do you think Putin is getting out of this current administration?
KERRY: Well, I don’t think anybody can explain precisely why there appears to be this excessive sensitivity to President Putin. And I think a lot of
people feel that the absence of some of the sanctions, which could have been put in place, the absence of some of the, you know, greater pressure
on President Putin has changed what you can put on the table and then negotiate about.
Obviously, there are huge implications here for Europe also. You know, Russia continues to promulgate these episodes of invading airspace with
drones and testing and, you know, back and forth playing a dangerous game. And Europe is concerned, as it should be.
AMANPOUR: You talked about the kind of pressure sanctions, et cetera, that should be brought to bear on Putin to make him feel the need to come to a
negotiation. I have recently been speaking to the former NATO secretary general who was secretary general in 2014 when you were in office.
Jens Stoltenberg has written a memoir, and he’s very clear that he regrets that the United States, Europe, et cetera, didn’t put enough pressure,
whether it was sanctions or military aid to Ukraine on Putin after the annexation of Crimea and the first invasion of the little green men into
eastern Ukraine. Do you accept that in retrospect that you should have done much more then?
KERRY: I think it is so easy to sit here and see a situation where a number of years later something happens and you say, oh, gosh, why didn’t
we do this or that then? But I remember very clearly, as does President Obama and everybody in that administration, that we were trying, there was
an initial stage where already what had been happening in Donbas and Luhansk had been exacerbated and these, quote, “little green men” were
running around in, you know, nameless uniforms.
AMANPOUR: Otherwise known as Russian troops.
KERRY: Otherwise known as Russian troops. But because of a very different history with Crimea. And at that point, only a beginning of this process of
understanding Putin’s full ambitions, sanctions were immediately put in place. I think there was — you know, as the initial evaluation of this new
tactic was being done, there was some consideration to how do you put pressure, but not start World War III.
AMANPOUR: Right. That’s what everybody’s saying, including Biden and then Trump and everybody. To be fair, Trump likes —
KERRY: Well, it’s very real.
AMANPOUR: I know.
KERRY: To be fair, it’s very real. Now, that said, everybody now understands exactly what the game plan is. Everybody understands the danger
of that game plan. Europe particularly has stakes in this. And so, I think it’s much more clear that the risks are more meaningful, are more — you
know, assumable in this situation. I think one has to be tougher. I think you have to make it crystal clear. He thinks he’s going to win. He thinks
he is winning. And that equation has to be changed. If you’re going to get the full measure of what you want.
That’s why I think members of the United States Senate, Republican and Democrat, are increasingly concerned about the direction this may be
taking. You know, the old saying, no peace at any cost. No. And you have to be certain that the long-term interests for real peace that can be held
onto may take a little longer and may take a little longer and may take a little more pain.
AMANPOUR: Now, you’ve got the Pentagon investigating Senator Mark Kelly over, quote, “serious allegations of misconduct,” after he also said in the
video that American troops can refuse illegal orders. So, I’m asking you, not as former secretary of state, but as America’s most famous Vietnam vet,
who, you know, are known for having explained to the Congress and everybody why their war in Vietnam was going wrong. What do you say to people like
Mark Kelly and the others or even to the Pentagon?
KERRY: I think this singling out of people and suggesting you’re going to bring them back and put them into, you know, service again for the sole
purpose of then trying them or court-martialing them. I think it’s un- American. I think it is not in keeping with the spirit with which American citizens join the military and go in and serve their country and such a
distinguished career from so many of these folks.
And then you turn around and start threatening them with court-martial and with death for a sedition that, you know, it’s just — it’s really hard to
watch. And it’s very sad for our country and I think for the military to have this kind of dissension and leadership. And it’s quite extraordinary
to have a secretary of defense whose service is not that long and strong.
AMANPOUR: Major Hegseth, you’re talking about.
KERRY: I’m just talking about not having somebody there and all of a sudden, you’re concerned about people who are fat and you’re addressing
people who fought for their country who have served, you know, unbelievably high qualified service with four stars on their shoulders. There’s
something really disturbing about that. And my hope is that that’ll stop or that maybe the commander in chief will join in and set an example.
AMANPOUR: Secretary Kerry, thank you very much for being with us.
KERRY: Thank you. Appreciate it.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: Well, next, we turn to Rikers Island, the notorious New York jail famed for its brutality and violence, long seen as a symbol of a
failing criminal justice system. Now, a new documentary is sharing a radical new approach being taken at the prison and the extraordinary man
behind it.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Rikers Island, there’s a lot of pain behind these walls. To my young kids, 18 to 21.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These kids were getting cut, stabbed at a very high rate. It was just pure anarchy.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: “Fatherless No More” tells the story of Pastor Tim Johnson, a former NFL Super Bowl champion who moved to Rikers to work with the young
men incarcerated there. And Pastor Johnson joins me now from New York.
Pastor Johnson, Tim, if I can call you that, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for the work that you are doing, that
you have been doing, that we hope so many of our viewers will have the chance to see in this incredibly impactful film.
Just to tell our viewers a little bit about your backstory, you traded a comfortable life and a successful ministry in Florida for an RV parked in
the lot of Rikers Island, a place often described as hell on earth. Take us back to that moment when you heard the calling, because I believe you
describe it as a spiritual invitation, hearing the words Rikers Island in a prayer.
PASTOR TIM JOHNSON, FOUNDER, FATHERLESS NO MORE INITIATIVE: Yes, Bianna, thank you so much for the pleasure of being able to continue to tell this
story.
It was March 12th, 2022. I was in prayer, like I have been for the last 40 years, and I prayed a prayer that I didn’t expect a whole lot from, but was
shocked by the answer. And the prayer was, Father, would you show me the secrets of your heart? And after a pause, I heard the words Rikers Island.
I had never at that time, I was 57, said those two words out of my mouth.
I was aware of Rikers Island. I had a sense that there was some problems with it, but didn’t know much about it and read an article and didn’t get
through the whole article because of how much devastation that I had read about that was happening there, the violence level and the controversy. And
from that moment on, my life has not been the same.
GOLODRYGA: And you took that prayer and followed up on it and physically went to Rikers Island to meet the young men who were jailed there. Talk
about those first few days and the men that you first met.
JOHNSON: It was kind of funny because we walk in the room, myself and a former teammate of mine, Art Monk, who’s a Hall of Fame receiver for the
then Redskins. We go in and they bring in the most unlikely group, meaning these individuals were never supposed to be in the same room together.
Officer White and Officer Cummings had started a basketball league to bring together opposing gang members in the interest of basketball and the love
of the game to provide some civility. But there was no follow up after that. And so, through the warden’s direction and the commissioner’s
direction, they ended up in the room with us.
And when we come in there, the guys all came in the room and they were like this. They were looking at us like, who are you and when are you leaving?
Because I think they were used to the program idea that you come in, you offer a service, but there’s no real relationship. When I shared the story
of how I got there and that whether they wanted to stay or not, I was not going anywhere. In a couple of weeks, it began to turn slowly to when
you’re coming back.
GOLODRYGA: And those men, you can see that they built a wall, that they were not ready or expecting to let you in. And yet they did. And you have
been a role model and a guardian for them for so many years since. And many of these men in the documentary are very young. I was watching this film
with my husband we realized, you know, my stepchildren are older than these men. And they were put in a life of crime before they even had a chance to
carve out their own life’s path. There’s a moving scene in the film that I’d like to play for our viewers about just who these men are.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nobody never put their hands on my face and tell me they love me. Not even my father, my real father. So, you know, like,
seeing people do that continuously, you know, like, I feel loved.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There’s a lot of articles out about me saying that I’m a misogynist, I’m extremely violent. I’m just trying to show I’m different.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: There’s a powerful theme in the film also about these men being seen. I believe there are no physical mirrors in the prison. And for the
first time through your eyes, these men felt seen. Just talk about the importance of humanizing these prisoners.
JOHNSON: I think we were created as humans first before we were anything else, before we were violent, before we were of some religious affiliation,
before we had any claim on what our name was supposed to be. We were created in an image of God. And God is love. And he created us in his image
to express to us his love, not a bunch of hoops to jump through, not a bunch of conditions to meet. It was that we would know his love and then be
expressions of his love in the world.
And what I believed was true, that all these young men want is the same things we all want. We want to be seen. We want to be respected. And we
wanted to be treated as human because I believe if they didn’t trust that I saw them as humans and that they had a place to belong, what I believe and
their behavior would never be affected.
GOLODRYGA: So, many of these men share, sadly, the common link of not having a father or having a relationship with their father. Many of their
fathers served time in prison as well. So, this was a vicious cycle that was continuing in their families. And you related to these men in a similar
context, that you, despite your Super Bowl fame, your celebrity and success, both professionally and then after your time in the NFL as a
pastor, you have children of your own, you’re happily married, but you also were fatherless. And that left a hole in your heart. Just talk about that
connection that you were able to establish between yourself and these men.
JOHNSON: One thing I know is if you don’t know who you belong to, you don’t really know what to believe and you don’t know how to behave. And so,
we make up life based on our gifts and our talents and whatever we want to make of it. But we were made for something pretty beautiful and wonderful
in the eyes of our creator, who is God, the heavenly father.
And so, I was born January 29, 1965. And on every birth certificate, there’s two places that allow you to see where the person’s names are that
are responsible for you coming into this world. In the place where it says mother — my mom’s name is in place. And the place where it says father,
it’s empty.
And so, when I went to Rikers, I wasn’t just communicating a Bible story, even though there is preeminent evidence of this need we have for God, the
father. I was telling them my story as well, because I know what it’s like to walk around with a hole in your soul in the shape of your dad, wanting
somebody to want you.
And what I was looking for was a father’s love in the midst of self- medicating and doing all the things that I was doing to create my own life, I wanted to be loved. And I found out the love of the father was looking
for me when I was at Penn State University. And when he found me in Christ Jesus, the hole was not only healed, but his spirit living in and through
me had enough overflow to offer to these young men.
GOLODRYGA: This movie doesn’t have the happy ending in that all of these men are now out and living their lives as free men. They were charged with
serious crimes. They are paying the price of that. Many of them sentenced to 20 plus years in prison. You’ve proven, though, that this model to
change them as they are serving their times work. How do you scale that? I guess that’s my final question to you, because that must be the biggest
reward for you.
JOHNSON: It is. And I think the condition that these young men are in are that they live behind bars you can see. But most people in the world live
behind bars you cannot see. And so, they’re imprisoned in different ways. And the goal is not just to fight past the bars, it’s to find out what it
feels like to be free.
And the measurable for me is the freedom I see in here in the lives of these young men that are affecting their families, that are affecting their
friends, that are affecting their communities, because living in the freedom of knowing a relationship with the heavenly father is not only
real, but it’s what I was born for, allows you to have an impact that leads to a life of flourishing. So, the guys that are in prison, they’re
flourishing. It sounds kind of contradictory, but they’re flourishing in their souls in prison while there’s plenty of individuals I know who are
still in bondage outside.
GOLODRYGA: And that is visible through how these men have transformed even in this documentary in the hour and a half plus. I highly recommend
everybody watch it. It is very moving. Tim Johnson, the film is under consideration for an Oscar, we should note. Really appreciate the time.
Thank you. Thank you so much for the work that you continue to do.
JOHNSON: Thank you, Bianna.
GOLODRYGA: All right. Next to a crisis facing public education in America, students’ reading and math scores are reaching historic lows. And according
to our next guest, the cause of this decline isn’t as obvious as you’d think. New York Magazine’s Andrew Rice joins Michel Martin to explain.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Andrew Rice, thank you so much for talking with us.
ANDREW RICE, FEATURES WRITER, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Thank you.
MARTIN: You open your piece with some of the latest findings for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This is considered kind of the
gold standard figuring out, you know, how kids are doing academically.
And these results show — this is over the past year, and it showed that 40 percent of fourth graders and a third of eighth graders scored below basic
in reading. And on the recent 12th grade math assessment, about three quarters of high school seniors could not correctly add the cost of six
lunch items and calculate a 20 percent tip. And I was just wondering, since you write about a lot of things, what made you take a look at this?
RICE: I mean, it’s — I think — really, it began with a, you know, personal question that I had, which is, you know, I have a son who’s in
eighth grade, he’s 13 years old, he spent the pandemic, about 18 months almost during the pandemic, you know, in and out of school, his education
was quite disrupted during that time period. And so, afterwards, I always kind of wondered, what would the long-term educational consequences of this
be? There weren’t a lot of precedents for it in the academic literature.
And so, you know, I just kept reading these articles that described these really sobering, you know, maybe even catastrophic sounding declines in
education now, or an educational achievement, I discovered that, in fact, the story was a lot more complicated than that I imagined when I started
out, that really people were studying these declines, and they are really drastic, and they did really really accelerate during the pandemic, but
they began before the pandemic. And they’ve continued in many ways — in many categories after the pandemic, which, you know, makes it obvious that
there’s something else deeper going on here.
MARTIN: One of the most alarming findings in your piece is the reversal of decades of progress. In 2015 — this is a Cornish U piece, in 2015, fourth
graders performed a full grade level above their counterparts in 2000. Yet almost a decade later, those students were registering all-time lows in
reading in high school. So, what happened here?
RICE: You know, there are a couple different theories about what happened and why. But the best clue that we have is timing. The — you know, the
downturn started in about the middle of the last decade. And then that leads us, being the people who are, I think, you know, educational scholars
who I talk to, I guess, you know, leads them to a couple different potential theories.
One of them, real obvious and maybe intuitive one to most people or most parents of a teenager, like me, is screens. A lot of people just think
that, well, you know, the iPad was invented or introduced to the public in 2010. And those kids, you know, hit the education system around 2015. And
that’s when test scores started to go down. So, maybe that’s just a simple answer.
But as I noted in the story, there are — there’s a lot to suggest that there’s something deeper going on, something else about the system itself,
because, you know, the declines are not evenly distributed there. They’re distributed unevenly to kids who are scoring the lowest. So, the kids who
are — the kids who were scoring the lowest for a long time were making up ground and gaining ground.
And essentially, you know, the way the academics that I talked to described is like, think of it as a fan. For a long time, the fan was kind of getting
closer together. What’s happened now is the fan is spreading back out. And all of these gaps, especially the achievement gaps between white students
and black students, especially, have started to widen the achievement gap, the math achievement gap, between gender gap between girls and boys, has
started to widen again. All of this sort of old, you know, longstanding inequities have reasserted themselves.
So, because it’s unevenly distributed, we have to start asking questions about what the schools are doing and what they’re doing differently. And
that’s what my story really tried to go deep into.
MARTIN: Some of these anecdotes that you describe in your piece are really a bummer. I mean, just tell me a couple of stories that some of the
educators told you about what they’re seeing in the classroom.
RICE: One of the things I thought was sort of the scariest as a parent is the talking with folks about the way that grading standards have slackened.
A lot of teachers told me that there’s just been a softening of expectations. And they just don’t expect children at all sorts of different
levels to be able to perform in the same way that they used to.
And the reason that’s scary to me as a parent of a teenager is that, you know, grades are one of the two or three pieces of metrics that you can use
in an outsider to try to gauge how your child is doing. Test scores are another. But one of the things I heard was, you know, this phenomenon of
what they call B-flation, which is, you know, basically, you know, kids are just getting Bs for doing less work than they used to.
Similarly, just hear stories about teachers who say that they can’t ask children to read books on grade level, that they should be able to read at
their grade level anymore. We’re hearing these reports from people inside the building. These are not, you know, interest groups that are trying to
advocate a political agenda, these are actually people who are practitioners who are raising the alarm and saying, something’s wrong here.
MARTIN: The other thing that you point out in the piece that I think a lot of people will be interested in is that the steepest academic declines are
not happening in traditionally underfunded or we’ll say conservative regions that have not traditionally invested in education equally,
especially for groups that have been historically marginalized, right?
RICE: I mean, and it’s true. We’re talking really about southern states here. Mississippi is one. Louisiana is another. These are states that are
not — to put it mildly, do not have a good civil rights record. But the NAEP scores, the national assessment scores, show that today an
economically disadvantaged fourth grader in Mississippi scores better than an economically disadvantaged fourth grader in Massachusetts or New Jersey,
traditionally high performing states
MARTIN: Exactly. Places that publicly pride themselves on valuing education, spend a lot of money on education, and historically, at least
publicly, value equity. You focus on a place that you know well where you live, which is Montclair, New Jersey, which spends a little more than
$27,000 per pupil per year, right? Achievement has dropped by a grade level in reading and by half a grade in math since 2013.
What made you take a look at that? Was that kind of the logical extension of, huh, like, I wonder what’s happening in my own backyard?
RICE: One of the things that really inspired me to do it is that there was a — you know, we — as you alluded to a second ago, our district spends,
you know, the 95th percentile in the country per pupil on education. And yet, we have not made much of any progress closing the achievement gap. The
achievement gap in our town, which is actually pretty racially diverse, has gotten wider since the pandemic, especially in math.
And meanwhile, we just found out, you know, over the summer that we have a gigantic budget deficit that we didn’t know about. So, in fact, even as
we’re not getting results, we’ve also been spending much more money than we budgeted for education. And consequently, the whole community is having
this very difficult conversation about whether we’re getting the results that we’re paying for from the system and whether we’ve allowed the system
to atrophy and whether we’ve perhaps prioritized things in our spending that don’t necessarily go towards learning and go towards closing
achievement gaps and go towards preparing students to really thrive in college and in the rest of their lives.
MARTIN: You quote a superintendent who says, “Our budget reflects our priorities. I don’t know how much of a priority teaching and learning has
honestly been.” So, what has the money been going to?
RICE: Districts are spending more money on ancillary things that they didn’t in years past than they ever have before. If you talk with teachers,
they’ll often tell you that they’re being — the schools and teachers themselves are being asked to do more than they have ever done before.
There’s an article that’s just out in the New York Times about how classifications for special education and anxiety diagnoses and depression
diagnoses have really just gone through the roof in a lot of schools. And so, that means schools are hiring counselors. That means that a lot more
kids have IEPs and other forms of special education classifications, which mean having to hire more teachers, more personnel to address those
deficits.
Again, it’s not a monocausal situation, but it all starts to add up. And what you end up getting is a situation in which we have ever-inflating
costs for public education. And crucially, I think it’s important to note, under Republican Governor Chris Christie in the middle of the last decade,
the state also put in a cap on how much municipalities can raise their property taxes, which finance schools, of 2 percent.
So, you know, you can do the math. Inflation is going up faster than 2 percent in everything, buses, personnel, every aspect of education. You can
do the math. Inflation is going up faster than 2 percent in everything, buses, personnel, every aspect of education.
And the school districts, at least here in New Jersey, and this is not uncommon throughout the country, have a hard cap of how much they can raise
money. And it means that they end up having to always be doing more with less.
MARTIN: OK. But how does this explain the fact that some of these southern states that traditionally have not invested as heavily in public education,
their kids seem to be doing better?
RICE: There are a couple different theories. One has to do with curriculum and continuing teaching of phonics and so on. Others have to do with
teacher training. But a really big one that I addressed at length in the story is this idea that the more conservative states never really backed
away from a system of, you know, what was called accountability for schools, largely based on test scores, although not exclusively based on
test scores.
But, you know, there’s a long period of time when Republicans and Democrats alike had a sense that they would have set high standards for schools and
hold them to those high standards, rewarding them when they met them or exceeded them. And there were incentives that were — and disincentives
that were set up around these accountability benchmarks.
And so, the southern states, by and large, have kind of stuck with that. A lot of the liberal northeastern states, especially since the pandemic, have
moved away from using test scores in that way. Lots of complicated reasons for that. But, you know, a big one is, you know, a federal law signed by
Barack Obama in 2015 that really delegated a lot of authority to the states.
In 2015, if you remember from what we just talked about, you know, we talk about the mystery of this inflection point where things started to go down.
What happens to, you know, the people who believe in, you know, what I call the declining standards hypothesis point to the signing of this law in 2015
as the kind of turning point in which educational achievement started to go in the wrong direction.
And so, if you want really — if you want to think about, you know, what might be going wrong or what we might be able to fix, that might be a good
place to start, I think a lot of the people in this educational reform movement would say.
MARTIN: Some people forget just how heated these arguments were over, you know, George W. Bush’s administration, his kind of No Child Left Behind
initiative. And a lot of people kind of in the educational policy world, teachers unions were sort of furious about it. They thought this is, you
know, teaching to the test. You’re going to drive all the joy and passion out of teaching and the creativity. It’s all about — it’s going to be all
about the test. It’s all about the test. But sort of now looking at it, do you think that there’s been any kind of a change of heart?
RICE: You know, I mean, I think everything that you said about sucking joy out of the classroom and teaching to the test and incentivizing cheating
and so on, these are all real things and real downsides to the No Child Left Behind regimen. So, I’m not in any way sort of romanticizing, you
know, what there was before, but as always, with any kind of policy change, there are unintended consequences.
You know, one individual — one education policy specialist told me, you know, in the course of doing this that, you know, in 2015, when Obama
signed the law reforming No Child Left Behind, he said, you know, there’s widespread anticipation that we’re moving to something better. And it
turned out we’re moving to something much worse.
MARTIN: Andrew Rice, thanks so much for talking with us.
RICE: Thanks a lot.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GOLODRYGA: And finally, remembering one of Britain’s greatest playwrights, Tom Stoppard, who died peacefully over the weekend at the age of 88. With
plays like “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Arcadia” and “Leopoldstadt,” he earned endless accolades.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, his family fled the Nazis. But only later in life did he discover that both of his parents were Jewish and that many
of his family members had been killed in the Holocaust. Back in 2021, Christian spoke to Tom Stoppard and asked him to reflect on his
extraordinary life.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: You know, you have said that for many of the reasons you listed, your mother made sure that you said she saved you, she saved your lives,
and that you always believed you had a charmed life. After all of this, do you still believe you have a charmed life?
TOM STOPPARD, PLAYWRIGHT: I’m afraid I do. I mean, I know bad things happened to as to everybody. And I lost my father when I was four years
old. But many had greater losses to bear. When I was first starting to write, a London season would have perhaps 24 straight plays and three or
four musicals.
And progressively that’s turned into 24 musicals and three or four straight plays. So, it’s a kind of a rare beast, a straight play in a way. But every
time a new one shows up, I — you know, I kind of — my eyes brighten, my fur starts glistening.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GOLODRYGA: A legacy that will go on for many, many more years. Well, that is it for now. Thank you so much for watching, and goodbye from New York.