In Memoriam – “Dr. K” at 50

16 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, New York City, race, Sports, Youth

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"Dr. K", Baseball, Clayton Kershaw, Cy Young Award, David Come, Dwight Gooden, Greg Maddox, Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, MLB, New York Mets, NL, Race, Racism, Roger Clemens, Sports, Sports Journalism, Sportswriters, Substance Abuse, Tim McCarver

Dwight Gooden on SI Cover (September 2, 1985), November 16, 2010. Source: http://www.inewscatcher.com/2010/03/dwight-gooden.html. Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by the U.S. fair use laws because of the historical significance of the person and the cover, the subject of this blog post.

Before there was Clayton Kershaw, Stephen Strasburg, Kerry Wood or Mark Prior, he had come and gone. Before folks like Tim McCarver and Joe Buck drooled over Roger Clemens, David Cone and Greg Maddox, he was the headliner that caused spittle to fly out of commentators’ mouths. A full quarter-century ago, he was the king of MLB pitching. Who am I talking about? What baseball player could I possibly be referring to? The former Boy Wonder, ’84 NL Rookie of the Year, and ’85 NL Cy Young Winner “Dr. K.,” Dwight Gooden.

He turns fifty years old today. I don’t watch baseball anymore, but thirty years ago, Gooden was the reason I watched. Between a great fastball, sweeping curve and more than average change-up, the nineteen and twenty-year-old Gooden was impossible for most major-leaguers to hit for three years — when’s the last time a pitcher threw for 276 innings but had an ERA of 1.53? — and hard to hit for six of his first seven years. All while on his way to 194 total wins in his career.

Dwight Gooden being honored by Mets at final game at Shea Stadium, Flushing, NY, September 28, 2008. (Kanesue via Wikipedia, Flickr.com). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

But no one talks about what could’ve been with Gooden anymore. The mistakes Davey Johnson, Mel Stottlemyre and the Mets leadership made with his arm were not worth mentioning when describing the lessons unlearned with Kerry Wood, Mark Prior or Stephen Strasburg. I guess wearing out a twenty-year-old arm isn’t comparable to, well, wearing out a twenty-year-old arm. Especially when one arm is Black and the other ones are White.

No one mentions Gooden in the same breath with Clemens or Maddox or Cone or any other dominant pitcher of the ’80s or even early ’90s. His drinking and drug problems, his run-ins with law enforcement. All obviously hurt his productivity as his career progressed. But I guess winning 100 games in just over five years as a major-league pitcher made someone like Gooden about as dominant a pitcher as a piñata about to be beaten by a White lynch mob. Someone baseball writers and commentators everywhere could toss aside as easily as they would throw away a donut wrapper.

This is the major reason why I don’t watch MLB baseball anymore. For all of his substance abuse and psychological problems, the man was as dominant a pitcher as any in the history of the game for his first seven years, and was a serviceable shell of himself for another seven of eight years. Yeah, a shell of himself while pitching a no-hitter for the Yankees in ’96.

And yes, he wrecked his career and life — with a lot of help from teammates and coaches. It’s not like he died after killing everyone at a Hall-of-Fame game. But to not discuss Gooden at all shows that, like the ball, only the mindset is White.

This Is Why I Write…I Think

09 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, race

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Black Male Narrative, Black Males, Boy @ The Window, Colleges & Universities, Education, Humanities Program, Intellectual Development, K-12 Education, Mount Vernon New York, Prison, Privileging Athletes and Entertainers, Publishing, Writing

A Younger Me, Thinking, Central Park, New York, NY, December 23, 2002. Angelia N. Levy

In the course of the past half-decade of struggle over a now 360-page manuscript, even I’ve asked myself, why? What am I doing? Why in the world would I want to dredge up and relive twenty-three, twenty-five and thirty-year-old memories? Of all the books I think I have left in me, why a memoir about the years of my life I’ve tried hardest to forget, to not even discuss? Wouldn’t it be easier to write fiction, a novel that includes elements of that life without a detailed account of it? Why take the risk of offending my first hometown, my former classmates and teachers, my family? Why, dummy, why?

Well, it’s not because I get some perverse pleasure out of describing myself as a loser, or torturing myself with unfulfilled love, or because I’m trying to hurt other people’s feelings about Mount Vernon, New York or the Humanities Program. There are lots of reasons. Some of them start with my seven-year-old son. At the very least, I want him to understand his old man as he grows up better than I understood myself

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book Cover Picture, November 9, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

growing up.

But it’s more than that, much more. I’m tired of sitting in interviews and in on staff meetings (when I worked full-time and had more consulting work) and hearing about the tiny number of highly educated Black males in the pipeline for high-level professional jobs. I’m tired of the narrative that says that Black males — and other males of color, for that matter — have to fuck up their lives in order to find the right path. It makes me groan — in my mind and out of my mouth — when I hear over and over again how few males of color even consider college, much less graduate or go on to advanced degrees.

But that’s not all. It’s disheartening to see these narratives play themselves out in African America, in America writ large, and in the publishing world. Like with my growing-up hometown. For the most part, entertainers and athletes — from the Williams and McCray brothers of the NBA past to Ben Gordon, from Denzel Washington to Al B. Sure — are the only ones with cred. Basketball, music, and occasionally, acting and dance are the ways other Blacks are inspired to have aspirations. Intellectual abilities, especially the ability to retain and then critique knowledge, are discounted. People like me growing up were nerds, or worse, just plain weird.

I write what I write because I know that in communities and in neighborhoods like the one I grew up in, the constant ridicule and the stifling of creative thinking and intellectual development can easily lead to stunted lives. I was lucky in a lot of ways, because I was deliberately naive, because of Humanities, because some of my classmates were almost as weird as me, because we had some wonderful teachers. But that doesn’t represent the Mount Vernon educational experience, not by a long shot.

I’m tired of students of color — especially males of color — falling through the cracks of horrible K-12 education because of bad policies, racial and economic politics, and principals as prison wardens. Not only in Mount Vernon. Pittsburgh. DC. PG County, Maryland. Baltimore, Sacramento, Oakland, New York City, Cleveland, Jackson, Mississippi, Jacksonville, Florida, Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia and so many other schools and school districts I’ve visited for work or research purposes over the years.

The narrative that a Black male can only find their way out of poverty through committing criminal errors that lead to prison time and enlightenment goes all the way back to Richard Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy. The one about Black males finding a niche in the world of entertainment — as athletes, musicians, rap artists, actors and comedians — has its roots in original Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. The narrative that involves Black males who used education and their intellectual talents to overcome their circumstances and these stereotypical narratives is seldom heard from in the publishing world.

616 Living Room Window Screen Shot, November 23, 2006. Donald Earl Collins

That’s likely because some folks think that this story’s been overdone. Even though anyone can count those memoirs and novels on their fingers and thumbs. Maybe it’s not entertaining enough to describe a life full of violence and psychological torture, but with no crimes committed by the main character, no veins injected with heroin, no women knocked up with kids. I write my manuscript because I lived long enough to have learned that there are tens of thousands of Black boys and other boys of color — not to mention their teachers, parents, principals — who languish in the struggle to succeed because they’re not scoring touchdowns, spittin’ rhymes or dunking on rims. Or trying to live the thug life, for that matter. These are the kids that need to be saved, as much as the kids who are already on the brink of prison life.

For all these reasons, I write Boy @ The Window. For all of these reasons, I post on this blog as much as I do. To say what I’ve thought, but often haven’t said. And to do it without sounding as serious as an academician. Nor as entertaining as a stoned Baby Boomer trying to make the 70s sound cool. It’s a balance, and I’ve made many mistakes along the way. And will likely make more. But in all of this, I’ve found so much more of my humanity than I thought possible. I just hope that it’s really worth it.

Wisdom, Youth and Voting

04 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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26th Amendment, Activism, Civic Engagement, Corruption Perceptions Index, Election 2010, Howard Fineman, Low Voter Turnout, Political Corruption, Ted Halstead, The Atlantic Monthly, Transparency, Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Voters 18-24, Voters 18-29, Voters 18-39, Young People

Two Great Symbols of Sanity and Youth, Rally to Restore Sanity, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

Back in the days when The Atlantic Monthly was really humming with cutting-edge articles, New America Foundation founder and former president Ted Halstead’s “A Politics for Generation X” appeared in the magazine’s August ’99 issue. In his piece, Halstead wrote, “Xers appear to have enshrined political apathy as a way of life….” and “are considerably less likely than previous generations of young Americans to call or write elected officials, attend candidates’ rallies, or work on political campaigns.” This was part of a much larger piece on the lack of Gen X political knowledge, participation and activism, and served as a bedrock article for the civic engagement community for most of the ’00s.

For many, Tuesday’s midterm elections and the utter lack of participation of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds (folks born between ’86 and ’92, roughly, anyway) reflects Halstead’s words of wisdom and sobriety. Only nine percent of eligible Gen Yers voted in Election ’10, fully half of the number who came out overwhelming for President Barack Obama in ’08. Gen Xers came out in larger numbers, but still didn’t touch their near three in five eligible voter participation from two years ago.

How terrible, the scholars and pundits have said. From Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman to Donna Brazzile, Melissa Harris-Perry and so many others, the reasons varied. It was the anger and disgust over being saddled with student loans and graduating college with no jobs available. Or it was the demobilization of the millions of folks kept active by the Obama campaign machine in ’07 and ’08. Or it was because President Obama had used up all of his political capital on a year of healthcare reform, with unclear benefits or with benefits that wouldn’t kick in until ’14.

While I’m sure some of all of this is true, all of the commentary and analysis reflects a bit of disconnect

Rally to Restore Sanity Crowd, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

and condescension. The folks invested in politics can’t truly understand why millions of adults under the ages of twenty-five, thirty, and even forty find traditional American civic engagement about as vital as the Spanish Inquisition. Condescending because those with any voice in the public arena and around politics act as if those who choose not to vote are the reason for the bad politics we have in our wonderful country.

Pulling out the old “people marched and died for your right to vote,” as true as that is, is about as effective in mobilizing these voters as Sarah Palin is at appearing as intelligent as my seven-year-old son. Saying that voters who don’t vote “get the government that they deserve” only serves to prove the point of the most jaded among us. None of this works, and it hasn’t worked for the nearly four decades since the Twenty-Sixth Amendment passed in ’71.

Here’s the real truism of generational inactivity at the polls and in the campaign offices. As a group, the voters under forty see American politics as opaque, out of touch, corrupt and heavily influenced by corporate and moneyed interests. More than eighteen years ago, a friend of mine at Carnegie Mellon got into a debate with me about campaign finance reform and how then Democratic presidential candidate Clinton needed to make this the centerpiece of his platform. That didn’t happen.

Halloween & The Two-Party System, Rally to Restore Sanity, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

But he was correct. The process — despite the passage of McCain-Feingold in ’02 and because of the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of unfettered corporate contributions earlier this year — is more corrupt and secret than it has been before. Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index ranks the US twenty-second in levels of corruption and transparency, putting us between Belgium and Uruguay. This isn’t a joke, but those of us under forty see our political process as one.

One thing for the expert class in American politics to think about — especially those of us who see ourselves as progressives or liberals — is a Biblical truism about being “doers of the words, and not hearers only.” What does this mean in the context of this post? Well, on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, I left before 7 am to vote one day and to pick up some groceries the next. I bumped into City Year workers — so-called young people — on those days, rising early to do their good works, to engage in meaningful work, to — dare I say it — change the world.

Voting for the younger adults in this country is hardly enough, because they don’t see it as making any more difference than dumping salt in the Atlantic. Volunteering for campaigns, for people who could get caught in a scandal at any moment? That’s a ridiculous idea. Working and doing good work to change peoples lives, however, is much more meaningful, and less fraught with scandal, corruption and hypocrisy than coming out to vote for candidates of two parties seemingly the puppets of K Street and corporate interests.

Until the poets, priests and politicians of our era get that, we will continue to see the politics of the foolhardy. For the people who aren’t voting may be acting out of a wisdom that the experts don’t understand.

Bad Conversations and Education Reform

02 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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A Nation At Risk, Bill Gates, Conversations on Education Reform, Corporate Interests, Double the Numbers, Education, Education Reform, Experts, Higher Education, K-12 Education, K-16 Education, Obama Administration, Parents, Politics of Education, Race and Education, STEM Fields, Students, Teachers, Thomas L. Friedman

Improving Degree Completion for 21st Century Students, Center for American Progress, Washington, DC, November 2, 2010, Screen Shot. Donald Earl Collins

I’ve been thinking about the fields in which I’ve worked and sort-have-worked in over the past fourteen years, and I’ve drawn one simple conclusion. For all of the talk of education reform, the talk about reform itself is in need of a reformation. I’m tired of the contrast between the experts in the field — who pay little attention to the cutting-edge trends, research and activism in K-16 education — and the everyday folks. They refuse to do anything except complain about teachers, as if education is as simple as organizing a file cabinet. The who, what and what for’s regarding education reform has stifled what should be an engaging conversation, one that’s essential in the consideration of America’s twenty-first century ills.

Who’s part of this conversation remains something of an atrocity. Almost all of the experts in education reform — whether on a scholarly panel or in the documentary Waiting for Superman — tend to be Whites (more male than female) over the age of fifty. With more than one in three students in public schools of color — and with tens of thousands of teachers and administrators of color in this school districts — it’s hard to believe that all the experts are White, and most of those are middle-aged to elderly males. Their vision, at best, is a liberalized twentieth-century vision of K-12 and postsecondary education. Most of their proposed solutions — smaller class sizes, more homework, small schools, higher certification standards — will not in any way fundamentally reform K-16 education.

When combined with what’s considered important in education reform these days, it becomes painfully

A Nation At Risk (1983) Book Cover, November 2, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

obvious that the conversations we have on education reform are predetermined ones based on certain interests and short-sighted economic considerations. Most of the money in education reform — whether from the federal government, private foundations or corporate interests — is earmarked for things related to STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). No one living in this century would deny the importance of STEM fields to a post-industrial economy. But not to the exclusion of everything else. Science folk and scribes alike still need to know how to write well, to think critically, to act ethically, to extend themselves beyond government and corporate interests.

Thomas Friedman — at least as he wrote in The World Is Flat (2005) — Bill Gates, the Obama Administration are all correct in that STEM fields will provide living wages and supply jobs at a rate over the next generation to replace the easy jobs of the by-gone era of industrial jobs straight out of high school. Yet none of them fully appreciates the connection between education reform, community development, corporate irresponsibility, lobbyists and the swaying of government policies and the politics of race and class in all of this.

STEM fields without a real direction for providing livable communities for the poor and for low-income people of color. Education reform that doesn’t do more than make scientists out of artists. Ideas that don’t account for the long-term issues of climate change and energy and resource depletion. Education policies that contradict themselves in terms of funding and a lack of understanding of what education reform truly

Double the Numbers (2004) Book Cover, November 2, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

means. That’s what we have now, and have had since the 1940s.

In the end, all these ideas are about is tapping the same human resources. The dwindling middle class, folks who’ve managed a traditional education track, folks whose lives are stable enough to allow the resources necessary for higher and advanced education. This need to tweak — instead of overhaul — the educational status quo and then call it reform is what leads to bad conversations. This is why what little in the way of reform actually occurs, and why so few of our kids get the reform they truly deserve.

This Thing Called Rap

30 Saturday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, race, Religion, Youth

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"I've Got The Power", "Rapper's Delight", Arrested Development, Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, Lyrics, Manhood, Musical Tastes, Notorious B.I.G., PE, Public Enemy, Rap, Run-D.M.C., Snap, Sugar Hill Gang, Tupac

Snap - I've Got The Power Screenshot, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

At nearly forty-one, I ultimately don’t care what anyone thinks about my musical tastes. I haven’t cared for years. Heck, I make fun of some of the stuff I still listen to. Some of it’s deserved, but much of it’s a function of the music segregation that’s part of the cultural segregation that still exists in this country we call America.

Like most growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I was introduced to rap in late-’79 by the Sugar Hill Gang “Rapper’s Delight,” rap lyrics with Chic’s “Good Times” — a disco hit the year before — as the background music. I got to see a rap venue once growing up, the following summer at Van Courtland Park in the Bronx. Back then, me and my Holmes Elementary School friends weren’t sure if rap was much more than a curiosity or fad, or would be here to last.

Who knows if the Hebrew-Israelite years or Humanities or just having parents who’d barely made it out of the ’60s music-wise had anything to do with it, but the years between ’81 and ’84 were lost ones as far as rap was concerned. I heard more classical than probably any other genre in middle school, thanks mostly to our wacko music teacher Mrs. Mallory. We didn’t have cable, and me listening to the radio at 616 wasn’t permitted unless it was religious programming. I caught pieces of music from videos on ABC on Saturdays sometimes, from my nearly daily runs to C-Town, and from my classmates and their conversations.

That was until I rebelled in the summer of ’84. Grandmaster Flash. Kurtis Blow. The whole Roxanne thing. That’s what I got to hear when I began to turn the radio dial to WBLS-FM and a couple of other stations in ’84 and ’85. Of course, Run-D.M.C. Doug E. Fresh, Kool Moe Dee, and early LL Cool J would all hit the scene in the two years that followed.

But unlike my other Black male classmates, I didn’t take a liking to most rap. And that made me wack. I was preoccupied with escaping 616, trying to find my true self, with succeeding and surviving Humanities and high school. Chasing skirts, trying to one-up and put down those around me, going to Mount Vernon Knight basketball games and hanging out on weekends? That wasn’t me, and the rap of those times didn’t have much of me in them. To think that a quarter-century ago, rap lyrics that referred to neighborhoods in the Bronx, Harlem or Brooklyn hardly ever commented on bling or blight — especially the blight — shows how far the genre had to grow in ’85.

PE, October 30, 2010. Source: http://www.melophobe.com

It took college and Public Enemy for me to fully appreciate rap and its power and popularity. It took PE and KRS-One and Arrested Development for rap to do something that all of the other music I listened to had done. They made me think. They touched my mind and my heart. The anger and rage of their rap other ’90s rap finally matched the early music of U2 and the romance of love balled R&B. I finally felt like the game had gotten serious, enough for me to pay attention.

Then the whole fake East Coast-West Coast crap of Tupac and B.I.G. came along to ruin rap for me again. What were they doing and thinking? Really, would Pearl Jam and Creed threaten to kill each other in order to promote their music? It was “a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say. It took me a few years after Tupac’s death to come back to him, his contradictions and his poetry as rap.

Hate to say it, but only Eminem has picked up where Tupac left off since ’97 — and he’s just as contradictory. I’ve never really liked Jay-Z. Not because I don’t see the talent or can’t bump to the music.

Kanye West Album Art, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

But because until recently, his words never made me think, never gave me anything to feel at all. His music reminded me of why I didn’t like rap in the mid-’80s. It was cotton candy rap, the kind my superficially cool Black male classmates liked. Nas may be the most talented one of them all, but seems almost tormented between being a slut (this is a gender-neutral term for me) and being a soothsayer.

I find the music that is hip-hop and rap today wanting, with the same tired themes, with about as much originality as a ’60s radical patting themselves on their backs for striking a blow against “the man.” After three decades, the genre’s come full circle. I want to listen and learn. But I don’t think that the folks who step to the mike now are worth listening to or learning from.

The Land of Second Chances – For Who?

21 Thursday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports

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America the Beautiful, Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen, Chris Rock, Eliot Spitzer, John Mellencamp, Level Playing Field, Life Chances, Michael Vick, Mike Barnicle, Pink Houses, Ray Rice, Second Chances, Struggling Middle Class, Tony Kornheiser, Working Poor

Purple Mountain Majesty, October 21, 2010. Source: http://bojack.org

I’m so tired of hearing commentators talk about how this is a country that gives people second chances. “What? Really? Are you insane?,” I think when I hear such drivel from people like Tony Kornheiser and Joe Scarborough. Do these talking heads even think about who they’re talking about or what they mean when they say the words “second chances?”

Seriously, true second chances in this country are reserved for folks who are among the elite — rich, famous, public officials, entertainers, athletes (sometimes), usually (but not always) White, almost always male and heterosexual. For these folk, America is a land of second chances. For most of us, this isn’t even a land of first chances, much less second ones. As Bruce Springsteen would say, “born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground” is an apt description for a majority of Americans.

The working-poor and living-from-paycheck-to-paycheck sub-middle class, while doing all they can to improve the life chances of their kids, ultimately are dependent on breaks provided within our society for their kids to have a chance. It comes down to a decent, if not happy family life, with no major financial or job disruptions. And living in a decent neighborhood, along with being able to attend an above-average public school or having parents willing to scrape together the money for private or parochial school. Not to mention finding opportunities for outside opportunities for their kids to explore themselves, like through art classes, soccer teams, travel, and so many other things that make growing up more than just a biological process that occurs in chaos.

Little Pink Houses, Carole Spandau, Uploaded October 21, 2010. Source: http://fineartamerica.com

If anything goes wrong, if a kid makes even a relatively minor mistake, that first chance will go away. Homelessness, bankruptcy, poor grades, even minor criminal activity or rebellion against authority figures will short-circuit chance number one. For kids of color, especially males, a robbery, playing around with marijuana, a fight at school or repeating a grade puts them in jeopardy long before they may realize that life doesn’t grant them a whole lot of first chances to begin with.

If these kids are lucky or disciplined enough to make it to adulthood with a high-school education, that may open a door, but it still won’t grant even the first chance. As comedian Chris Rock would say, many of these kids have to “make miracles happen” — force open doors — for that first real chance for their lives.

Not so for the likes of Eliot Spitzer, Ben Roethlisberger, even (to a lesser extent) Michael Vick. These folks aren’t struggling to find themselves while living in obscurity, and have more opportunities to work with in any given day than the average American person will likely have in their lifetime. But for White males with money and/or the public spotlight, second chances are almost automatic. Spitzer has his own show on CNN. Roethlisberger would’ve only lost his job if he’d been convicted of rape. Former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle is still a respected journalist in many circles, even though he’s a proven a plagiarist and fiction writer. Vick, meanwhile, only got a second chance after he served two years hard time for dogfighting.

Even for the famous and financially fortunate — yet of color — the second chance remains elusive. Tiger Woods didn’t break any laws, didn’t commit a crime, but has spent the past year as a pariah (no need to go into the psychosis that comes with race and males of color, Black ones in particular). Jayson Blair will probably never have another shot at hardcore journalism. Maybe Blair shouldn’t have a second chance, but then, neither should Barnicle.

1%’s Playing Field cartoon (applicable to who gets second chances, too), December 28, 2013. (Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

To be sure, John Edwards, Larry Craig and Jim McGreevey won’t be running for office again. But they are exceptions to the rule. Edwards could’ve jeopardized the Democratic Party’s ’08 election with his scandal, while Craig and McGreevey were outed as closeted gays involved in down-low activities. We don’t give politicians like these second chances.

So, we are a land of second chances. At least for those with the keys to the kingdom of the public arena. You just have to be straight, White, male, affluent, committed a crime before the age of twenty-one — and one that didn’t involve murder or Black-on-White crime — to have them.

As for Ray Rice, because many assume that his one act of domestic violence toward his now wife Janay Palmer Rice is the only one he’s committed, and because of all his charitable contributions, the NFL will grant him a second chance. The question isn’t whether Rice deserves a second chance. The question is why Janay Palmer Rice never had a first chance at a violence-free relationship. The answer is patriarchy, misogyny, racial animus, and increasing class inequality. What second chances, and for whom indeed!

The Testing Season

12 Tuesday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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Academic Achievement, ACT, Anthony Carnevale, AP, Colleges & Universities, Educational Testing Service, ETS, GMAT, GRE, High-Stakes Testing, LSAT, MCAT, SAT, Standardized Testing, Strivers Research

Mock SAT Answer Sheet, October 12, 2010. Source: http://kellgradcoach.blogspot.com

This really is the testing season, isn’t it? In many more ways than one. For voters, the underemployed and the unemployed, the welfare poor, for undocumented workers, for the Obama Administration, for so many others. But the testing season I’m talking about is standardized testing. Between the SAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, and ACT, high school students and college undergrads face incredible amounts of stress over a five-decade-long practice that, in the end, reveals more about the system of competition that technocratic university administrators and eugenics-type scientists have created than it actually does

ETS Logo, from http://www.ETS.org, October 12, 2010

about our own abilities.

My own standardized testing history includes the following (not counting the AP or New York State Regents exams, which occur in May and June, another testing season), starting with elementary school:

1. SRAs (1st through 6th grade – ironically, started by Lyle Spencer, who also founded the Spencer Foundation, which sponsored my doctoral dissertation research in 1995-96)

2. PSATs (10th grade)

3. SATs (11th and 12th grade)

4. GREs (junior and senior years, Pitt)

5. LSATs (senior year, Pitt)

My highest score on the SAT — 1120 (540 Verbal, 580 Math). My highest score on the GRE — 1730 (530 Verbal, 580 Math, 620 Analytical). On the LSAT, I scored in the 50th percentile, not bad for someone who studied for it for only two weeks. What does any of this prove in the whole scheme of things? Nothing, really. If these scores were truly great predictors of future academic performance, then Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon should have graduation rates approaching 100 percent. Which would explain why many elite institutions have either downgraded their use of these tests in their admissions formulas, or in the case of the big three and UC-Berkeley regarding the SAT, are barely using them at all.

My GRE Score, October 1990.

But for most colleges and universities, these tests are a critical factor in a student’s acceptance and enrollment. They are a necessary evil for figuring out who has academic potential and who doesn’t, at least according to ETS and admissions directors. Which is why I still don’t understand why educators and other folks haven’t taken former ETS vice-president Anthony Carnevale’s work around “strivers” seriously. Or, rather, I do understand. Why give someone like me a leg up because my SAT score was an 1120 — giving my score more weight than a 1280 score for a White kid from a middle class background? All scores are equal. That’s why we call them standardized tests, a standard that doesn’t measure up to the realities of earning a degree.

I guess for those I know who are rolling into these exams this fall (and in some cases, before March or April), the best advice I can give is to get the best score you can. But don’t despair if your scores are only in the 51th, 64th, or 74th percentile, like mine were on the different sections of the GRE. What will ultimately matter is how you perform after you’ve been accepted by and enrolled in that institution.

I’ve given some thought to going back to school in the next couple of years, possibly even law school. Not to become a lawyer, but to make myself more marketable outside of academia and within the philanthropic world. For some odd reason, there are lots of people with law degrees who are working in education reform, international development, and social justice. Go figure.

But even this professor will likely have to take the LSATs again in order to apply to a law program at Georgetown, UPenn or some other school. And that will mean trying to figure out why A and B won’t sit together at the same conference table, but B can sit next to E, except when meetings are held on Tuesdays.