 John Wilson is a former NEA Foundation board member and lifelong supporter of public education. He says he's had a blessed life. I have to say I've never had a job. I didn't love so I've been a very fortunate person. You could say that he was the first in his family to go to college. He had great teachers who encouraged him, parents who instilled the values of hard work and generosity. He's inspired students and influenced legislators. He even won the lottery, a pretty big one, but it's his ability to empower others. That's really his story. My involvement in education is through my profession, which is teaching. I may have left the job of teaching, but I never left the profession of teaching. So I actually taught in the classroom for 23 years with special needs students. My parallel track was as an activist with the National Education Association. John loved the process of teaching so much he says the NEA had to drag him out of the classroom to be a lobbyist. And what the NEA might not know is that even when an executive there, he never actually stopped teaching. So I would spend the time when I wasn't working for NEA teaching middle schoolers to read. I believe you said you would kind of sneak into the schools or into the classroom. Yeah, I had a group of kids that had been identified as non-readers. So when I would come in, I would go and get them from the classroom and the teachers kind of knew what I was doing. And I would go through my process for teaching reading, which has worked well for me for a long time. And it was just so rewarding to see that those kids that the system had not been able to take care of, that I was able to do that in a relatively short period of time and help them learn the joy of reading and give them books to take home and to make books a rewarding part of their life. It's an empowerment that every person needs to have. I just love that and I just have lots of stories about kids who would come to my classroom as non-readers and how I would manipulate my classroom time to be able to teach them how to read and catch up and fill a part of the system. You said that there were a couple of kids that you really remembered. The first was Lil Zeke, a little boy from a very wealthy family who had been pressured all of his preschool life to learn how to read. So the first thing I did, I took away books, no letters, no pressure, and I had taken animal pictures. And I had used one of these old-timey stamps. So I made these cards and I started with just putting in front of him a horse and a pig. And then I take it away and say, what did you see? And he had to tell me in sequential order what he saw. So what I did is I improved his visual sequential memory. It was a learning ability that I was strengthening for him that you needed to be a good reader. Then I brought the letters back and then I did the John Wilson way of teaching kids how to read and it's all about success. And then eventually he became a good reader and it's so funny now that I'm in Raleigh, he's very active in politics. He's an attorney and every time I'm in a room with him, he will say, I need to introduce you to my first grade teacher. I was really his special needs teacher, but he'll say my first grade teacher. Today John runs the North Carolina Foundation for Public School Children, which he created while executive director of the North Carolina Association of Educators. Its children's fund is like a well of resources for any school employee with a need. The executive director of the foundation is always talking about how much she loves her job. Because she gets to receive telephone calls from a school employee teacher who shares a situation that it only takes money to fix it. One example of that is we had this little boy in Charlotte. He was like in the first or second grade and he needed braces for his legs. His legs were not developing for two years. They had no way of getting any funding for this, so they would use these walkers. So they had this poor little child walking in a walker around the school and someone told them about our foundation. And they called and said, well, we're going to need $1,000 to get this and, you know, could you help us? And we said yes, we'll have it in a day. And they were just stunned that, first of all, we trusted teachers to tell us what the need was. And that we were able to deliver that within 24 hours. And that's what you do with resources. You change the trajectory of children. Why can't we do that in America for every child?