Practically Fearless with Chris Girata: Episode 6, Joe Carreon
In this inspiring episode, a deep dive into serving the future of North Texas with Dallas ISD Board Member Joe Carreon. Joe shares his journey from growing up in a blue-collar, predominantly Latino community in Northwest Dallas to shaping education policy at the White House to creating equitable opportunities to all Dallas youth.
Q&A with Joe Carreon
Chris: Welcome to Practically Fearless with Chris Girata. Our guest today is a lifelong resident of Dallas with a deep passion for helping our youth. Joe Carreon is a board member for Dallas ISD, working to make sure all children have access to a quality education. He’s previously worked on education policy at the White House and helped to serve meals to thousands of kids in need through AmeriCorps. Joe, I’m excited to talk with you today.
Joe: I’m excited to be here. Thank you for having me, Chris.
Chris: Absolutely. Thank you. So, let’s first start with placing yourself. You’re originally from Dallas. Give us just a minute or so on who you are and how you found yourself to be a professional here in Dallas.
Joe: Well, thank you. First and foremost, thank you again. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Listen, Dallas is a big part of my story. I was born and raised in Northwest Dallas, specifically the Webb Chapel, Bachman Lake neighborhood. That is where I was born and raised. A predominantly Latino community. Predominantly blue-collar community. From my perspective, my bias, it’s just a very beautiful community to grow up in and to be raised in. I tell folks that my part of town, where I was born and raised, is where my neighbors are the folks that get our city moving. I believe that in my heart. All those folks live across the city, but my neighborhood is a concentration of people that really get our city moving. I’m talking about the folks that cook our food in our kitchens. I’m talking about the folks that are nannies and take care of our kids. Talking about the folks that literally are building our city – our construction workers, working nonstop. Those folks are my neighbors. Those folks made me who I am. I grew up in that environment with my neighbors, with those people. That set the foundation for everything I do today, being part of that neighborhood. If you drive to the corner of Webb Chapel Road in Northwest Dallas and community, right there in the parking lot of our supermarket, we have two Fiestas there. Fiesta One and Fiesta Two. If you’re familiar, you are aware, we have somehow two fiestas across the street from each other.
Chris: Which one is One and which one’s Two?
Joe: The One is the older one, the initial one, which is on the corner of Webb Chapel and Lombardi, and Two is the one that used to be the Carnival food store.
Chris: There you go.
Joe: It used to be Carnival versus Fiesta – this is now a little TMI and in the weeds here – but then it became a second Fiesta. Every morning, no matter how early you leave, and I like to be an early bird, if you’re there, you drive by at six in the morning, in that parking lot you will see at least 30 men standing in that parking lot ready to work. Day laborers. Waiting, hoping for someone to drive by. Waiting for someone to drive by with an opportunity to do something – work, lay some sheetrock for the day, help with the plumbing, do some roofing. Every day, that is the case. For me, I grew up seeing that and I still see that every day. And for me what that means is that we’re not a community that is ever asking for a handout. We’re here asking for an opportunity. We’re here to work. We’re here to get to work and to earn our living. That’s the community that built me, that raised me, and that’s the community, also, where I went to school for kindergarten through eighth grade. I went to Dallas ISD schools kindergarten through eighth grade, there in the neighborhood. David G. Burnet Elementary School, Julian Saldivar Elementary School, and then I went to Edward H. Cary Middle School before it was hit by the tornado and no longer now exists. In the eighth grade, I had a teacher there at Cary Middle School who had two sons who were attending Dallas Jesuit, the all-boys private high school, a Catholic high school, in North Dallas. Her name was Anette Illick. She changed my life. What Miss Illick did is she handed me the application to Dallas Jesuit. Where I’m from, the school was 15 minutes away, probably if you drive fast, from my neighborhood, but I never, never knew about it. She handed me that application. On the brochure, none of the guys looked like me. I never dressed like that. She handed me that application and she walked me through the application process and connected me with people at Dallas Jesuit who then helped take care of my financial aid and helped me ultimately get admitted to that school. And that school, it changed my life. It did two big things for me, which ties back to me and everything I do today. The first thing it did is that it prepared me academically. It was solid academic education. But the second thing that it did was it introduced to me disparity. So, everything I just told you about growing up in a neighborhood where I knew we were working hard? What I didn’t know until I went to Jesuit was that we were working hard and we also, for some reason, weren’t getting ahead and other people were. There were other parts of town that I didn’t know until that point were getting ahead or at least were ahead. There was a difference. There was a disparity. Something was wrong and I couldn’t understand it. It motivated everything from that moment forward, trying to understand why. Why is it that the fathers in my neighborhood come home with calluses on their hands? Why is it that we’re up at five in the morning? Why is it that we’re the last people to leave the office cleaning the office buildings at night? Why can’t we get ahead? And that’s the foundation for everything that comes afterwards.
Chris: So, you described how your community formed you, what you knew before you went to high school, and then you had a teacher who introduced you to a new opportunity. That identified disparity, that began to motivate you. But I’d love for you to talk about what you overcame in order to press on. Because as you described, it’s a blue-collar neighborhood, but you went off and got multiple graduate degrees. A teacher giving you an opportunity makes a big difference in your life, but you still had hurdles to jump. What gave you the strength to pursue such an excellent education beyond just understanding disparity?
Joe: I went to Dallas Jesuit for high school. I had the opportunity then to go to SMU for college. I went to the Harvard Kennedy School for a master’s degree in public policy and came back to SMU for law school. So yeah, too much school. Little bit too much school there. But again, all of that motivated me because I wanted to find these answers. I wanted to make sure that I understood the language of public policy and law to effectuate change, so I needed more. I wanted to really make sure because that was important to me to understand. That’s why I pursued it. And to your point, listen, I’m the first person in my family to not just graduate high school but also graduate college. My mom went to Dallas ISD schools and was unable to finish. She had to enter the workforce when she was a young teenager, so around seventh or eighth grade, she stopped going to school and had to enter the workforce. And my father had some education in Mexico, but ultimately also entered the workforce in Mexico as a teenager and then came to United States as a teenager and became a migrant farm worker. So, when it was orange season, he’s in Florida. When it’s peach season, he’s in Georgia. When it’s, you-name-it, whatever they do in Indiana, he was there too. Ultimately, he ends up in Dallas and meets my mom. But I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that because they didn’t have a full opportunity and chance to earn a formal education, in my household, it was very important.
Chris: So, they set up the expectation that you would have the opportunity to get educated.
Joe: There was never any moment in my life where they were,You need to get to work earlier. You need to stop now and go do this and help put food on the table. It was never that. It was,You’re going to go to school. I remember some of my earliest memories being those kind. You might think I’m young. You may not think I’m young. Some people think I’m young. I’m actually old. I’m old enough at least to remember when people would sell encyclopedias door-to-door, a little pre-internet-ish. And we didn’t have much. I had the luxury of a single-family home, a small one. A 750-square-foot, small little single-family home in the heart of Webb Chapel, Bachman Lake.
Chris: Now, did you have all the letters of the encyclopedia?
Joe: Yeah. Well, I think so.
Chris: Because I know you had to get one at a time. I do remember that.
Joe: Yeah, this is right. This is right. You have a good point. And this is exactly correct in what I’m trying to say I remember my parents doing. And I remember the encyclopedia salesman coming to the door. And I remember them – it was a “Hey, can we afford this kind of thing?” right in front of me. And I remember like, “Hey, can we do this?” And I don’t even remember necessarily wanting them, but they wanted them. “He needs to have this in the home if he’s going to excel academically.” So, my point is that was the feeling at home. And they did, they bought those encyclopedias. Now who knows what that meant for the mortgage that month. I don’t know.
Chris: I was going to say, that’s a major investment.
Joe: I was too young to really fully understand, but I remember them, it being a heavy check for them to draw, but feeling like they needed to do that. And the only point there is that they always cared about my education – most parents do – but they didn’t know necessarily whether those encyclopedias would be helpful or how to apply for college or how long college even is. One year, two years, four years, seven, I don’t know. Or especially how to take the GRE or how to master the LSAT later in my educational career. But what they did, and they did an exceptional job of doing it, is providing me with everything that I needed at home, a roof and food on my table. Where I was blessed then was with a host of people who saw potential in me, both in Dallas ISD and in Dallas Jesuit, who stuck with me through that entire journey. Folks that listen once, they didn’t just move me on to the next person. They said,We’re invested in you. That middle school teacher was with me through law school. My high school counselor at Dallas Jesuit stuck with me and helped open up other opportunities as I really began to formulate my interest in public policy and law, and say, “Oh, I know someone, they can introduce you.” That is to say, these obstacles that were overcome, not knowing how to apply for stuff, eventually each step of the way, we were like Wizard of Oz and Dorothy here, picking up a new person on the journey. And then there was a team moving forward who really, really took the time to take care of me.
Chris: So, it sounds like you had a very small group of people who set up an environment for you to succeed. Now, you’re in a position to create a big environment here in the DISD system to try and help countless students succeed. What is it that you’re doing now in your position as a trustee to really help create systems where dozens and hundreds and thousands of students, who might be coming up very similar to you, aren’t at risk of not having individuals step in, but instead the system picks them up and helps them succeed?
Joe: As I began to become aware of the disparity, I eventually came to an epiphany of sorts where I felt that one of the biggest obstacles my community was facing, again, working hard, not getting ahead, was just in different political institutions.
Chris: Like what?
Joe: I mean, just resources from city hall not being directed the right way. While you see other things being built or constructed in other parts of town that maybe don’t necessarily need it from an equity perspective, or schools also not being invested in in the right way. So just seems to be a lack of interest and indifference to particularly my little corner of the city and where I grew up and what I was seeing. I began to then shift that energy specifically to the study of public policy, the study of government, the study of law, how court decisions impact us every day. How does our local government and state government impact us? How is this impacting? How are those decisions impacting the day-to-day lives of my neighbors? That’s why I went to college and studied political science with the idea that I would then go on to law school. And then along the way I found out there were master’s degrees in public policy. But it was all with the idea of understanding “How do our political institutions impact us?”. That’s what I studied. That’s what I began to be interested in, that’s what I began to get involved in. Even as a young person in my neighborhood, I started getting involved very quickly. Given my story, I was invited to speak to young people, be a career day person, give speeches to kids. Then eventually that grew into being part of the SBDM, what we call the Site-Based Decision Making Boards of our schools that invite community members to be part of the decision-making that happens on our campuses. And then that grew into getting involved politically and helping school board members get elected that I believed in, helping city council folk get elected that I believed in. For me, I mean that’s my focus and shift and my energy began on what can we do here in these political institutions, mostly locally. So yeah, in January, 2020, the opportunity appeared to run for Dallas School Board. It was supposed to be a race that lasted from January to May 2020. But right in the middle of that, our entire world changed. A campaign that was supposed to be about three, maybe three and a half months, became a 10-month campaign. But again, to answer your question, it was exactly with that idea – to solve these issues that my community was facing using the influence of government. Some of these issues, when you talk about public policy, you can do what was done with me, and you can take an individual and help them into Dallas Jesuit and help them succeed. In some ways, that’s the vision of our current governor [SS1] right now. But the thing is, what’s not fully understood, that’s so clear to me, is that you can’t scale that. And that you need a strong public education system to really accomplish our educational goals for our society that we have.
Chris: In 2020, you quoted that only about 7% of students in DISD were college ready, and that’s when you were first running for the school board.
Joe: Right.
Chris: Has that changed and what are you all doing right now, maybe you or maybe the board specifically, to try and raise that number?
Joe: So, it can be a little bit of… There’s different ways to measure college readiness. I mean there’s a state standard, and then there’s also – what I want to keep my eyes on is – degrees in people’s hands or people actually with jobs. I want you to be college and career ready. Meaning, when you graduate here, you have a job, or when you graduate here, when we follow the data, you actually were able to earn a four-year degree. And the truth is in this country, if you are low-income, and, I’ll just stick with low-income, but if specifically you’re a low-income Latino student, we have a dropout problem in college. About half of our kids that enter the first year don’t come back the second year.
Chris: Half of the DISD high school grads who go to college do not go the second year?
Joe: Nationwide. So, it’s hard to pin down what it is for Dallas ISD. We have countywide information, but nationwide, if you take the demographic of low-income Latino students and then see how they perform in college and whether they actually earn a four-year degree at the end of the four years, what you see is in that first year you lose half of those students.
Chris: Is there any information in the data that can suggest a primary reason why a student wouldn’t return?
Joe: There’s host of different reasons. One is, of course, financial, as you can imagine. But it can also sometimes be a cultural reason, especially if we think about how inviting or welcoming some of our campuses can be to students that have never been in that environment before. First-generation college-going students. So cultural, social, financial reasons and least of which is necessarily academic reasons. It’s a mixed bag of reasons why folks do not complete a four-year degree. What we’re trying to do in Dallas ISD is shorten that amount of time that it takes you to get a four-year degree. One of the ways we do that is through our P-TECH or Collegiate Academy programs. The whole idea behind those programs is, if we can get an associate’s degree in your hand while you’re in high school, use the flexibility of state law to also allow you to take college courses while you’re in high school and you can graduate high school with 60 credit hours, which is a two years associate’s degree, two years of college, which then can, depending on the four year university you transfer into and how much of that is accepted, potentially shorten the amount of time and the amount of money you have to spend on a four-year degree to two years, maybe five semesters.
Chris: Now, is that what was done with the schools on Walnut Hill Midway that rebuilt after the tornado?
Joe: Two schools there that were rebuilt by the Tornado. One school there is our Walnut Hill International Leadership Academy. That is a kindergarten through eighth grade school with the idea that when students graduate from that school in the eighth grade, they are trilingual so that they speak English, Spanish and Mandarin. So there’s that school. Caddy corner to that school, or sharing that same parcel, is Thomas Jefferson High School, which has been there now for generations, which was also impacted by the tornado, but required significant renovation and is now fully renovated and students are there. And that is both a comprehensive high school, but also within that has a specific program that students can join that then also allows them to take classes there at that campus specifically, at Brookhaven College. So, it’s a partnership between Dallas College-
Chris: To achieve the AA when they finish.
Joe: Exactly. It’s a partnership with Dallas College and Dallas ISD, so that when you graduate, you have those 60 credit hours. The vision behind the Career Institute was pretty simple. We know in Dallas that there are jobs out there that are not being fulfilled. We have opportunity out there, we just need folks to fill those jobs and they have to have the right credentials to do it. Even jobs that you and I are very familiar with. Just plumbers, HVAC technicians, very standard positions that they’re just in need of and there’s demand for, that we know can do one or two things for someone in that position. One, it can give them a living wage career, or two, they could then use those skill sets and pair it with other maybe entrepreneurial skill sets to actually build their own company. So, if you go inside one of those career institutes – and I invite everyone to ask their school board member to take them on the tour one of these things – you’d be very impressed about what’s happening inside. It’s a place where we house just really state-of-the-art equipment where young people can train on and learn these skills, whether it’s HVAC, whether it’s a flight simulator that we have at our Walnut Hill campus. But the whole point was to graduate young people with, again, some certification that gets them into a job. But the big vision, again, being of graduating young people that are ready for college and career.
Chris: I’d love to find out from you, in your district, what do you think people watching this may be able to do to help the students? My church, St. Michael and All Angels, has a couple of years ago really prioritized Bachman Lake area, so Bachman Lake Together, Stephen Foster Elementary, that sort of area. If someone’s watching and just says,I’d love to help even just one-on-one, is there something that you would suggest they look into?
Joe: Absolutely. There’s no amount of involvement and giving back that is too small. Perhaps more than anything is ensuring that the people inside that campus know that outside of the campus we’re with them and that we understand the very difficult work that they’re doing on those campuses. In part what that means is teacher appreciation. That might sound a little bit simple, but it’s part of one of the three big pillars. We have to make sure that we have best and brightest teachers here in Dallas and that we build a culture that here in this town, our community surrounds our campuses, adopts our campuses, and takes care of our folks inside, both kids and the adults that are in there. So small things from bringing donuts to hosting maybe a luncheon for third grade teachers or one grade level of teachers, to doing bigger things. We have great organizations in this town like United to Learn that really helps if you are a corporation or business in this town and you want to really formalize a relationship with one of our schools. They’ve done that work of already knowing who to talk to and they can really connect you with a campus that is in need of volunteers and someone to adopt. Building out the student or the teacher lounge, renovating the teacher lounge, building a school garden, helping build an outside classroom. But all these are signs, a bigger message here. What these are all signs of is that people outside care. That we don’t just drive by the campus and don’t care about what’s going on in there and don’t care because kids don’t look like us or whatever they’re thinking, and they’re not my kids. That people outside care.
Chris: Joe, I’d love to ask you just a few quick-fire questions.
Joe: Sure.
Chris: Just about you.
Joe: Okay. Oh no.
Chris: What was your favorite subject in school?
Joe: History.
Chris: All history or a specific history?
Joe: I guess when I think about that, I think specifically seventh and eighth grade, so Texas history in seventh grade and Texas and then US history. When I was in elementary school, I loved science lab. And I actually entered into the city… Well, I entered into the school science fair. I think I got first place in third grade school science fair at Saldivar Elementary School, and I think that then earned me admission into the Citywide Science Fair.
Chris: Okay. Well I got to ask, what was your experiment?
Joe: I do know this. The experiment was… I don’t even know if it was age appropriate. Someone out there, some science teacher’s like, “You’re too old for that.” But the experiment was ‘Do plants grow better in clay pots or in plastic pots?’.
Chris: And?
Joe: It turns out it doesn’t matter. My hypothesis was clearly clay pot is a superior pot. So, I had a hypothesis and the whole…what you got to do, the scientific method. It turns out both plants were the same. But that got me first place.
Chris: There you go. As a student, what was your favorite book?
Joe: Now I read so much nonfiction. So, it’s like, “What’s your favorite report?”
Chris: Now you’re a policy worker. Okay. Last one. What’s one thing people might not know about you? Give me something fun, Joe.
Joe: For fun? I don’t know. Well, one thing they should know about me is I’m an only child. Which is a big part, I think, of my story for sure. We didn’t have many resources, but also they didn’t have to spread the resources around too much. So, I’m an only child and I come with all the quirks and problems that only children grow up with I’m sure.
Chris: Joe, it has been a real pleasure to talk with you. I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us.
Joe: Likewise. Happy to be here. Thank you.
Chris: Thank you all for watching today. And remember, you have the power to be fearless.