USAID suspends District-based nonprofit AED from contracts amid investigation

16 Thursday Dec 2010

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I learned from a friend last night that my former employer, Academy for Educational Development (AED), was suspended by USAID for mismanagement of millions of dollars http://wapo.st/gIhw8Y. I’m mostly unsurprised. But it’s still shocking and very disappointing to learn that a place that I worked so hard for between December 2000 and February ’08 might’ve been involved in corruption, and on a fairly large scale.

The slogan for the organization for most of the time I worked there was “Connecting People, Creating Change.” It seems to me that if this investigation holds water, the C’s for corruption (obvious why) and chaos — for the futures of most of the staff — should be added to its fifty-year legacy. I was never a big fan of the organization, as its corporate structure wasn’t particularly appealing to me. But I did have quite a few friends and colleagues who I enjoyed working with over the course of my seven years. It’s those folks that I feel for the most right now. Especially in our current economic and job climate.

Slumming Lords Spinning Stories Out Of Suffering

15 Wednesday Dec 2010

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New York City – “Doing the slums” – A scene in the Five Points / from a sketch by a staff artist, Policeman leading upper class people through the Five Points neighborhood, Published 1885; December 15, 2010. Source: http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3c20000/3c22000/3c22600/3c22660v.jpg

In July and August ’83, my family’s first summer on welfare, then US Secretary of Agriculture John Block decided to do an experiment involving food stamps, at least as reported by USA Today at the time (unfortunately, USA Today’s archives only go as far back as ’87). He had himself and his family “live” off of food stamps — $58 worth — for a week.

Official Secretary of Agriculture Photo, John R. Block, December 15, 2010. Source: http://news.siu.edu/news/April04/040104pr4039.htm

Mind you, Block didn’t move them out of their comfortable home in NW DC to live in SE Washington or off North Capitol Street and New Jersey Avenue. They didn’t stop buying clothes, driving cars or paying their other bills. No, for a week, the Block family — including their nineteen-year-old daughter and the daughter’s equally anorexic nineteen-year-old friend — bought their food with food stamps to show how hard (or easy) it was for a family of four to budget for all of their eating needs on the government welfare dime.

Last week, Mediabistro.com reported on twenty-three year-old Daily Caller reporter and American University grad student Matthew Boyle’s work to do a three-story account of his food stamps experience. “You wouldn’t think I’d qualify….I don’t meet the traditional definition of a poor person, and in fact I’m not poor. But that didn’t matter to the District’s Department of Human Services. They approved me anyway,” Boyle said. Then Boyle gave his income. “I make $600 a month writing for Daily Caller and another $493 as a teaching assistant at AU. My rent is $1,365.”

Sorry Boyle, but by income alone, you qualify for food stamps, because unless things have changed since my grad school years, only your part-time reporter income counts as traditional income from a workforce standpoint, enabling you to qualify. By definition, you are poor, no matter your middle-income and elite university sensibilities.

But there’s a more important point than shattering Boyle’s socioeconomic views of himself that I need to make here, though. It stems in part from these strokes of Boyle’s keyboard: “The arrangement works because most of my rent and other expenses are covered under my student loans or paid by my parents (thanks, Mom and Dad).”

Vintage Food Stamps. Source: http://slashfood.com

Yes, this is what makes your situation a middle class one, your loans and your parents. As if millions of other people who are poor or solidly middle class haven’t received help from loans, parents, or, God-forbid, food stamps. That someone with Boyle’s background shouldn’t qualify because his parents have the dollars to bail him out.

It’s downright idiotic to complain about qualifying for food stamps. There are millions of other people with similar incomes, including grad students, who are grateful to have the program to supplement their income so that they can eat and pay rent. It’s also a bit arrogant to see the system as flawed from the contrarian perspective of a White middle class outsider — one who is technically poor at present — who thinks that it’s too easy to get food stamps.

This goes beyond John Block or Matthew Boyle, though. I took a creative nonfiction writing class to help kick-start my transition from academic writing to other, more literary forms in September ’01. The class was mostly made up of folks who saw themselves as middle class, many of whom were White. For one particular personal literary account assignment, four of these students decided to interview homeless men and women, all of whom were of color. I think that was the last class I showed up for, to hear these students talk about how touched they were by the horrors that had affected their subjects.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to understand or even help others less fortunate than us. The need to go slumming so that you can tell a story, though, is all too typical of a superficially minded society and journalism community. I didn’t need Block’s August ’83 experiment to know that it was hard to shop with food stamps — I shopped every day for my mother with them, and usually with a tinge of bitterness about using them. Boyle’s slumming to uncover inconsistencies is an example of yet another wannabe journalist making their name off of others misery.

These are stories that would be much better told by someone who’s either lived the experience or is extremely knowledgeable of the people and subjects involved. But in our screwed up world, people like me are too biased to tell these stories, in articles and in books. And people wonder why writers like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison became expatriates or bitter later in their careers.

Cream on the Brain

12 Sunday Dec 2010

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A Brain Floating in the Heavy Cream of Obsession with Academic Excellence, December 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

A quarter-century ago, education scholar and Ford Foundation education program director Jeanne Oakes published Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. Oakes’ groundbreaking, definitive work on the educational inequalities created or reinforced by ability grouping has led a whole generation of scholars to examine the viability of tracking in K-12 education. In a 2005 edition of her book, Oakes wrote that “through tracking, schools continue to replicate existing inequality along lines of race and social class and contribute to the intergenerational transmission of social and economic inequality.”

I picked up Oakes’ Keeping Track for the first time in ’90. By then, I already knew from experience how true her words and research were. Six years in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools via the Humanities Program had taught me all I’d need to know about the tensions between creating a class of students whose level of academic performance was par excellence while simultaneously addressing segregation and diversity in the school district. The magnet program and the district failed at one and succeeded at the other, which in turn reinforced its failure.

I worked on a paper some twenty years ago for the late Barbara Sizemore, my professor at the University of Pittsburgh my senior year (and a former superintendent of DC Public Schools) looking at how magnet school programs actually created resegregation in individual schools and Pittsburgh Public Schools because of the exclusivity that comes with tracking or ability grouping. It was an easy paper for me to do, guided in no small part by my experiences in Humanities at Davis Middle and Mount Vernon High School. Easy, but not easy to get a handle on beyond the obvious demographics of race, class and test scores.

I managed to wiggle myself into the culture wars of the early ’90s and the debate around multiculturalism and K-12 education soon after that paper. It seems obvious now that the unacknowledged diversity of Humanities was what enabled me to take sides in favor of multiculturalism. That led to my dissertation looking at the historical development of multiculturalism among Blacks in Washington, DC (“A Substance of Things Hoped For,” Carnegie Mellon University, 1997 for those who want more information), and eventually, my first book, Fear of a “Black” America from six years ago.

But it took my memoir Boy @ The Window to bring me back to square one. I realized about a year ago that I’d done nearly thirty interviews of former classmates, teachers and administrators for the manuscript. There was much more material to mine beyond their impressions of me and how to shape their descriptions of themselves — and my memories of them — into characters for Boy @ The Window. I decided to work on an academic piece that looked at the benefits and pitfalls of high-stakes schooling — not just testing — in the form of a history lesson via magnet schools, specifically my Humanities experience.

After a quick rejection, I redoubled my efforts a few months ago. I decided to look at the education psychology and sociology literature, as well as Oakes again, to see how these interviews and my experiences could be useful in our testing-obsessed times. I finally realized what had troubled me about Humanities for the past three decades. It was the reality that all involved with Humanities had taken on the e pluribus unum identity of an academic superstar (much more than just a nerd, by the way). Beyond Black or White, and ignoring the realities of poverty in our district and (at least for me) in our program, Humanities was all about sharpening our academic personas above all else.

This fueled the major success of Humanities during its existence between ’76 and ’93, which in turn would define its failures. In successfully nurturing the idea of academic excellence as identity, as evidenced by so many of us attending and graduating from college, this magnet program failed in its other major educational functions. It failed to embrace diversity, to help its students understand the diversity that was Humanities, to nurture creativity and imagination beyond A’s and college acceptances. It failed to develop the whole student, which aside from its charge to help desegregate Mount Vernon public schools, was its original mission.

Humanities failed because its teachers, administrators (including the former superintendent of schools) and many of the most vocal parents (mostly affluent and White) refused to deal with diversity seriously. Academic excellence without significant parental engagement or the humility necessary to discuss issues of race, gender, class, sexual orientation led to a severe overemphasis on calling us the “creme de la creme.” All of this would have a negative impact on our development as students, and as emerging adults.

I don’t think that it’s asking too much of parents, administrators and teachers to work together in both striving for academic excellence while building programs that embrace difference and nurture creativity and imagination, and not just an addiction to A’s. Or is it?

Petraeus Aide Marvin Hill: If Troops Can’t Deal With DADT Repeal, They Should Leave The Service

11 Saturday Dec 2010

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I have the utmost respect for the military. I should. My youngest brother has served a tour in Iraq, and some of my best friends from college were in the Army. But I’m tired of the exaggerati­on that they are “fighting for my freedom.” Yes, they are fighting to keep terrorists from blowing me up, to ensure that 9/11 doesn’t happen again. But my freedom? Between the Bush 43 years and DADT, there’s plenty of lack of freedom in this nation and in the military to suggest that there’s a bit of hypocrisy in our attempts at sacrosanct patriotism at home. If we really want to honor veterans and those on active duty, we need to get over our own need to deny others their freedoms, including the freedom to love and live their lives.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The POTUS and The Last Airbender

08 Wednesday Dec 2010

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C-SPAN Video Player - President Obama News Conference on Tax Cut Agreement Screen Shot, December 8, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law because screen shot is of low quality and is only intended to highlight the subject of this post.

In a post I did during President Obama’s campaign run (see “The Avatar State” post, July 22, 2008), I dared to hope that the then energized candidate and senator would be a bridge that would work across the divides of race and ideology. Much like the main character of my favorite animation series of all time, Aang of the Avatar: The Last Airbender. But unlike Thomas L. Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), I don’t purport to have a special wisdom about how he can do this.

 

And like the animated series, Obama’s run for president also came to a successful end. For both the creators of the series and our beleaguered president, it was time for the big time. For one, it was the opportunity to do a live-action, big screen movie to introduce the epic nature of kids embarking on a journey to save the world to a larger audience. For Obama and his group, it was the chance to govern based on the ideas and ideals that they communicated successfully to nearly 67 million voters.

Unfortunately, both have disappointed, and not just a little. James Cameron managed to wrest away the very title of the movie — Avatar — from the Avatar: The Last Airbender creators Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, even though his movie was merely a dream at the time that series had begun in ’04. That, and settling for M. Night Shyamalan as director turned The Last Airbender into an irrelevant movie that hurt the brand, while inadvertently helping Cameron’s Avatar make money-making history.

Poor Noah Ringer as Aang of M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender Screen Shot, December 8, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law because screen shot is of low quality and is only intended to highlight the subject of this post.

 

The Obama Administration also began conceding its brand within weeks of reaching office. They say that governing dilutes the rhetoric of campaigns, and even hopeful me maintained enough jadedness to realize that. Yet to see how quickly Obama and his administration moved from action on the stimulus bill to a bunker mentality on virtually everything else was a bit distressing. The picks of Larry Summers, Peter McNickol of Ally McBeal fame — I mean Timothy Geithner — and Arne Duncan to be pillars of his economic and education teams should’ve been signs. That the Obama Administration would look after corporate and rich people’s interests before it would look out for mine. That there would be little fighting for the ideas and ideals of his campaign.

Only yesterday afternoon did Obama decide to flash anger at liberals and progressives. To be truthful, some of them have been bitter and overly critical of Obama’s decisions almost from day one. But to paint all of those left of center with the same broad brush, as if we all “have the satisfaction of having a purist position, and no victories for the American people. And we will be able to feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are.”

It’s a nice sentiment. Except that the president doesn’t seem to understand the difference between compromise and capitulation. As David Gergen put it on CNN yesterday, while Obama may well be right in heading off political opposition from the Tea/GOP group looking to hold Americans and him hostage, his execution of this from a communications standpoint was terrible.

We’re approaching the midway point of his first — and possibly only — term in office, and Obama has yet to take a serious stand on any principle he campaigned for in ’08. I’m not speaking as a liberal or

"Sozin's Comet, Part 4" from Avatar: The Last Airbender Screen Shot, December 4, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law because screen shot is of low quality and is only intended to highlight the subject of this post.

progressive here. Just look at his memoirs, his speeches and campaign promises, even the speeches and pressers Obama gave in his first months in office. Now, some of this is the result of real compromise. But after nearly two years, those compromises look more and more like concessions for the rich and corporate, and less like compromises to protect the poor, unemployed and underemployed.

 

Like the poor kid who didn’t have a chance in heaven to measure up to the character Avatar Aang in the Avatar: The Last Airbender series, it looks as if President Obama is having a hard time measuring up to his forty-six-year-old self. But hopefully, like the animation version of Aang, the real Obama will find his way. He needs to take a stand on something important to him and us, and do it with the bravado in which he ran on. So that even the folks who wouldn’t vote for him if God asked them to will at least get out of his way.

A “Keepin’ It Real” Cover Letter

06 Monday Dec 2010

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When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong - Vernon Franklin, Screen Shot from Chappelle's Show, December 6, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by the U.S. fair use laws, because this image is used as the primary means of visual identification of the article topic and is of sufficiently low resolution to not be counterfeited.

Dear Human Resources:

I am applying for the Program Officer, Postsecondary Reform position with the XYZ Foundation, as advertised by the Chronicle of Higher Education UselessJobSite.org webpages the week of 25 October 2010, enabling you to fulfill your EEO requirement by giving you the rare opportunity to interview a Black guy with a Ph.D. who’s not yet middle-aged and your curiosity regarding my career background. My work in the nonprofit sector and in higher education has provided me with significant skills in program development and management, strategic planning, technical assistance, collaboration, and grantwriting/grantmaking, making me a viable candidate for this position, except with The Urban Institute, Social Science Research Council and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), who prefer Yes People to critical thinkers, who want people who look like them or only people they’ve drank a Bud Light with in an important job.

My overall work history includes ten years of project management in various capacities with projects funded by the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Lumina Foundation. For more than four years I served as Deputy Director for the Partnerships for College Access and Success Program (PCAS) at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). I know that you don’t know what AED is, but please keeping reading, dummies. PCAS was an initiative that assisted community partnerships in addressing college access and success issues among low-income youth and youth of color nationally. This work put me in contact with school administrators, college presidents and deans, high school and college students, and executive directors of nonprofits. Yeah, I know I haven’t done much work with boards, CEOs and admissions officers, but don’t you think it’s idiotic to suggest that I’d need to work with all of these people in order to manage a project?

Over the past thirteen years, I have also honed my curriculum development skills as either a project manager or adjunct professor. This includes my work as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland University College. But I know that none of this matters, since I haven’t taught at nor attended an Ivy League school (at least as a full-time faculty member – I did teach at Princeton for two summers). I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses and worked with talented high school youth, first-generation college students, adult learners and graduate students. What? Never been chair of a department or have managed a student’s dissertation process? I guess having taught 2,000 students since 1991 has made me as inadequate as you.

My work history also includes five years of technical assistance — I know, I know, what’s that? It’s acting like a strategic planning consultant, except I actually know what I’m doing work through AED New Voices and AED PCAS.

I also possess seven years of experience conducting research-based interviews, developing interview and survey instruments and protocols, developing profiles and case studies, and coding qualitative research. But you dumb asses only want to hear about quantitative research, crunching numbers, multivariate regression analysis, as if this is the end-all and be-all of doing work on education reform and social change. God, being able to tell people what these numbers mean is so much more important than the numbers themselves, but you Vulcans won’t listen.

Additional relevant experiences include:

▸        Previous experience in conducting a grantmaking process, including a request for proposals, selecting a suitable selection committee with extensive academic/professional knowledge and field experience in their respective fields, and sending members of the selection committee out in the field to interview the potential grantees. What? I’ve never worked for a foundation? My bad – I thought that skill sets were transferable! Oh, that’s right – I lack the I know lots of important people skill set!

▸        With PCAS, foundation relations/fundraising work  raised $1.2 million for PCAS. Surely I should’ve raised more, right? At least $10 million? But I know you won’t hold that against me, right? Yeah, right!

▸        Have published works on multiculturalism and diversity, race and identity, education, and social justice including my book Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004) How scary! Another angry Black male sticking it to the Man with a book about diversity. Of course, this shows how little people who react to the title think about educated folks of color anyway, looking for any excuse to confirm their own ignorance as wisdom, as well as articles and  reviews in Black Issues in Higher Education, The Washington Post, History of Education Quarterly, Radical Society, Teachers College Record, and Academe Magazine. Dude, you’ve fallen short — where’s your New York Times op-ed or Atlantic Monthly piece?

I believe that my experiences in the nonprofit sector make me a qualified candidate because they have provided me a rich understanding of nonprofit management, social justice, policy advocacy and program development in the transition to higher education. I look forward to hearing from you soon. But in some cases, I’d die from asphyxiation trying to hold my breath.

Sincerely,
Donald Earl Collins

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I’m hardly bitter about my experiences in the job market. But working with people who are clueless, dishonest and obfuscate at every turn can make looking for another job frustrating beyond belief. Maybe this is too honest, even for me. In the past seven years of applying and interviewing for a bunch of jobs, I’ve learned so many times after the fact that I wasn’t selected because I wasn’t a friend of the director or a certain senior program officer. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, they say. Which explains why there are so many people with questionable skills in high responsibility jobs.

On Broken Wings

02 Thursday Dec 2010

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Two pictures of a seagull that eventually soared, Puget Sound off Bainbridge Island, WA, May 21, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two pictures of a seagull that eventually soared, Puget Sound off Bainbridge Island, WA, May 21, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

It was thirty years ago on this date that Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” Broken Wings was #1 on Billboard’s Top 40 pop charts. Twenty-five years, another time, another person, I was in and was. Somehow in a world dominated by hip-hop and rap, it seems like it’s been way more than a quarter-century since a bunch of studio musicians in their mid-thirties got together to create the album Welcome To The Real World.

What I remember most about my fifteen-year-old self in ’85 what how music served as an escape from the violence — or the potential of it — at 616 and from my loneliness at school. I could find myself in another world through song, where no one could touch or hurt me in any way, where life seemed more worthwhile. The sounds, images and smells that lyrics and notes could conjure gave me a place to find myself, a confidence that I otherwise didn’t have.

I liked a lot of crap in those days of my renewed interest in music. I liked Mr. Mister, Tears for Fears, some Heart, Sting, Simple Minds, some Madonna or a-ha, and U2 even before I knew who U2 was. I also liked Kool In The Gang, Billy Ocean, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (with Full Force), Run DMC, early Whitney Houston, some Freddy Jackson, Sade, and Luther. The problem was, I had trouble combining these divergent interests in music. Sade would make me feel sad. “Another woman out of my reach,” I often thought. While I liked Run-DMC (especially “My Adidas”), the lyrics were sometimes silly, and I couldn’t be silly all the time. Kool In The Gang had gone from cool to wack in the last year or so. For me, most of the R&B from the mid-’80s was boring, romantic yet stiff. I wasn’t feelin’ it.

Sunset Over Clouds (feeling of soaring), December 2, 2010. Source: http://www.writeideaonleadership.com

Sunset Over Clouds (feeling of soaring), December 2, 2010. Source: http://www.writeideaonleadership.com

Certainly the pop of ’85 wasn’t exactly full of passion, pride, or pain. It often had the feel of folks working off a high in a recording studio, which has turned out to be true in many cases. But it was easier to listen to. Keep in mind that the music world had just started to recover from seven or eight years of music that was without social conscience and virtually pain-free — and that’s even accounting for Phyllis Hyman, Miki Howard and U2.

Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” met me at a place where I needed to be met in ’85. My own “wings” needed some mending. I wanted to be free of my family’s so-called love, and I wanted to know what love as an emotion really felt like. I needed inspiration on a weekly basis because of what I saw at home and at Mount Vernon High School. R&B rarely provided that kind of fuel for my mind and spirit.

I found it in the lyrics, the liner notes, the pace of the music, the ability of a voice or synthesizer (as the case often was) to make a song soar. Given my situation, it was a no-brainer for me to choose lyrics like “take these broken wings and learn to fly again, learn to live so free . . .” over “rock . . . steady . . . steady rockin’ all night long . . .” in the mid-’80s.

I certainly don’t walk the streets of Mount Vernon with $20 Walkman knockoff singing in high falsetto to Mr. Mister like I did twenty-five (or thirty) years ago (I do that in DC and Maryland running 10Ks, with my iPod or iPhone instead). But I do still find songs like “Broken Wings” appealing. At almost forty-one (now almost forty-six), I understand much better the need to mend broken relationships, to heal bruised and broken hearts, to want to make yourself and those you love whole again. From my wife to my mother to my late sister Sarai and older brother Darren, I really do understand. I sometimes can’t believe I got this much out of one song from so long ago. Especially when I was so young and so injured myself.