Tag Archives: Adult Learners

The Yoke of Student Loans

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Time, money, debt, yoke = same difference, from screen short from movie In Time (2011), October 27, 2011. (http://collider.com/in-time-review/).

This week in July thirty years ago, I took out the first of what would be a series of student loans. Loans that would help cover eight of my ten years of undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. In three-and-a-half-months, I will be ending my twentieth year paying off those loans. If I had to do it all over again, I may have stayed in New York State to take advantage of the TAP award (need-based financial aid). That way, I wouldn’t have needed to borrow for my undergrad. But given my near desperation for wanting to escape grinding poverty, 616 and my family, Mount Vernon, New York, and the stigma that was my life living there among hostile and indifferent classmates, teachers, and neighbors, borrowing $2,625 on July 16 of ’87 didn’t seem so bad.

Yep, my first subsidized/unsubsidized Stafford student loan was a modest one. It was a set maximum based on the old laws limiting student borrowing (especially for college freshmen) three decades ago. I remember thinking to myself, “How the heck am I gonna pay this back?,” as I went through an hour of phone calls between Pitt’s financial aid office and Marine Midland Bank (now part of HSBC). The latter was where I had my first bank account, where I had deposited $500 of scholarship money from Mount Vernon’s Afro-Caribbean Club. That’s how little I knew about the process – I went with a bank that didn’t exist outside of New York State to work with a school in Western Pennsylvania!

Pact with the Devil, July 18, 2017. (http://evil.wikia.com/wiki/Pact_with_the_Devil)

Because I wasn’t yet eighteen, I needed my Mom to co-sign my loan. Because my Mom didn’t have collateral, she needed to add two relatives who did have assets to my first loan. In the end, Mom chose my maternal grandmother Beulah and my great-great-aunt in Seattle Inez (who just happened to be Johnny Gill’s great or great-great grandmother — didn’t know it at the time) as relatives with collateral who could be on the hook if I or she ever defaulted on our future payments. Of course, Mom didn’t actually seek permission from my then sixty-year-old grandma in rural Arkansas or my better-off, octogenarian, great-great aunt for this sign-off. Apparently, Marine Midland didn’t care, either. And that’s how it was for the next four years, having relatives whom I had never met (and in the case of great-great aunt Inez, who died at 101 years old in the early ’00s, would never meet) as collateral for my loans.

I’d also take out the smaller Perkins Loan for my undergraduate time at Pitt, an additional $2,000 per year, for three of my four years there. In all, I’d borrow more than $16,000 in four years, with a high of $4,000 in Stafford Loans in my junior year, 1989-90.

It bothered me every time I had to re-up for student loans. Not just because of the false notion of American individualism, the idea that I shouldn’t need anyone’s help to go earn a degree. It bothered me because I feared, sometimes to the point of nightmares, that I’d never be able to pay this money back.

Graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and the loosening of the student loan rules and amounts under President Clinton in 1994 made things better and worse. I barely borrowed my first two and a half years of grad school at both Pitt and CMU, to the tune of $1,800 in all. CMU paid me so little as a grad student that I had little choice if I ever planned on eating more than one meal a day but to borrow. And that’s how most of my borrowing occurred between January 1994 and January 1997, to either have to supplement my meager stipend (before the year of my Spencer Dissertation fellowship). Or, to use the funds to help support my dissertation research, the travel to/from and living arrangements while in DC in 1994 and 1995. Unlike many of my graduate school colleagues (especially the ones working on professional master’s degrees or a law degree), I didn’t use my loans to go on extended weekends to Bermuda or to take summer vacations in the Grand Caymans.

Of course, I graduated in May ’97, and lo and behold, I couldn’t find full-time work. And with the exception of the months of July, August, and September 1998, I wouldn’t have full-time or full-time equivalent work until I left Pittsburgh for work in the DC area in the summer of 1999. But, my consolidated student loans through the dispensations of Sallie Mae never took that into account when my first payment became due Thanksgiving Week 1997. I was able to get a reduced payment of $20 per month for the first two years. I didn’t default, but it made paying off my student loans that much harder. It didn’t help that Sallie Mae had locked in my interest rate at eight percent, retroactive to July 1987, and unchangeable under any circumstances. Even with consumer interest rates the way they have been for the past decade.

Relationship between lenders and payees, July 27, 2015. (http://forbes.com).

Flush or not, full-time or underemployed or somewhere in between, the student loan payments, deferments, and forebearances have been non-stop for two decades. Even credit card companies will leave folks alone if they make regular minimum payments. Not so with student loans or with Sallie Mae (now Navient, which must mean assholes in financial aid-speak). Despite everything I’ve been through financially over the years, I finally paid off the original principal of my consolidated student loans about two years ago. Great. It still means that I have left another decade of payments on accumulated interest before I can be forever free of this nearly endless cycle.

Here’s the real thing that I think I’d do over again, that should be done about this corrupt and serfdom-like process. Sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen years old is way too young to be making financial decisions that I or anyone else will have to live with for four decades or more. Even deciding to serve in the military isn’t a decades’ long commitment (unless one chooses to re-up or goes to officer’s school). At the very least, no one under twenty-one should have to commit themselves to debt peonage, including student loans. As for me, working thirty hours a week on or off campus between 1987 and 1997 to cover costs and necessities would’ve been preferable to this iron collar.

The real problem, of course, is that adult learners are taking out many of these loans these days. Even though they may be old enough to know better, they aren’t experienced enough. Lumina Foundation and other organizations have concentrated on “financial literacy” as the way out. This is wrong-headed, as it does nothing to change this financially enslaving system. Really, it would take free and significantly-reduced undergraduate tuition to do the trick. But where’s the fun, profit, and human misery in that?

Students and the Joys and Travails of College Teaching

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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Argentina's Pablo Zabaleta lies on the pitch as Lionel Messi stands beside him after losing to Germany in the final, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 13, 2014. (Francois Xavier Marit/AP via http://usatoday.com).

Argentina’s Pablo Zabaleta lies on the pitch as Lionel Messi stands beside him after losing to Germany in the final, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 13, 2014. (Francois Xavier Marit/AP via http://usatoday.com).

Maybe not to that extreme, but there are circumstances where teaching a college course can be a joy or torture or even sometimes both at the same time. Some of this has to do with the actual nature of the course, some of it with my disposition, some of this with the types of students that walk through the door. But, in teaching somewhere around sixty courses since ’91, working with a civic education nonprofit and consulting with another one, I’ve found two large categories of students who have made teaching more enjoyable over the years, though not always an actual joy. One group has been graduate students, the other high school students aspiring for college.

There are a number of reasons why, of course. Some are pretty easy to understand. High school students aspiring to go to college or taking college-level courses are often ambitious and motivated, students who are amenable to learning. Graduate students often aspire to be better at their specific profession of study, which in my experience, has this group of students essentially aspiring to be some version of me. Even the brown-nosers in both groups tend to have the motivation necessary to be better students, or at least, to look like they’re better students.

It also has helped over the years that the several hundred high school and graduate students who’ve been in my classrooms have actually wanted to be there. Doing a week in Washington to learn how Capitol Hill really works, or a summer course at Princeton on AP US History or taking one of my undergraduate course over the years at the University of Pittsburgh, UDC and UMUC, those students (and their parents) made the choice to take those steps. Those students wanted to get into a college of their choice, to be well prepared, to make themselves better students, and perhaps even, better people.

History graduate students have choices, for the most part, in terms of which graduate seminars they take and in their specific cultural, geographic area and time period focus. In my experience teaching school of education courses, though, at Duquesne and George Washington University (courses like History of American Education, Multicultural Education or History of American Education Reform), the students I’ve taught in those courses chose to be there. They chose to read as many as eight books in eight weeks, to write term papers and research papers and do original research. Those students wanted to become better as teachers, as researchers, and in a few cases, to become college professors themselves.

Ready and waiting: 500,000 Germany supporters await the arrival of the country's World Cup stars, Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, July 15, 2014. (AFP/Getty via http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/worldcup2014/).

Ready and waiting: 500,000 Germany supporters await the arrival of the country’s World Cup stars, Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, July 15, 2014. (AFP/Getty via http://www.dailymail.co.uk/).

So what’s different teaching undergraduate courses with undergraduate students? Well, they’ve tended to complain the most about general education requirements, ones that require them to take a course in US or World History (my African American History students are generally happier about taking the course). But that’s not all. A fair number have treated me as their enemy, not as their professor or a teacher invested in their learning. Of course these students were in school to complete a degree. But college was no longer an aspiration. It was now a reality, with all of the responsibilities and complications that come with the five-year march toward a four-year degree. For traditional college-aged students, there have always been competing interests, the need to organize a life that involves working 15-20 hours per week and some semblance of a social life, and attempting to figure out a major (often not history).

With my adult learners, those pressures come from at least three directions. The personal pressure to perform academically, the workplace, familial and parental pressures, and the pressure of learning how to be a college student on the fly. Add to this mix the general lack of academic preparation for college for those over twenty-five. All of this has frequently led to a combination of insufficient motivation to learn — even when I’ve explained the “what’s-in-it-for-them” piece — and a quiet hostility toward the process of college matriculation. For this group as a whole — traditional college students and adult learners — aspirations can frequently turn into Being and Nothingness, or rather, a state of being and meaninglessness.

This mindset has been the most difficult aspect of my job as a teaching professor over the years. It’s somewhere between extremely hard and absolutely impossible to teach students whose minds have been closed to learning or self-improvement, whose idea of an education is a piece of paper and a rubber stamp. That most of those students who’ve made my work most difficult are undergraduates isn’t surprising, though. That’s part of the job.

Still, there are times where I miss those days when I taught or worked with high school students fully motivated to get into college, who already had a sense of where they wanted their lives to go. There are times when I miss a grad student angling for a higher grade or with a real interest in my writing and research. For better and sometimes for worse, at least they’re interested in the learning enterprise.

K-16 Education Reform and the Unlevel Playing Field

23 Friday Aug 2013

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President Barack Obama speaking college affordability and a rating system, University of Buffalo (NY), August 22, 2013. (http://sfgate.com).

President Barack Obama speaking college affordability and a rating system, University of Buffalo (NY), August 22, 2013. (http://sfgate.com).

The shape and direction of education reform in America’s public schools and in US higher education is such that one can only conclude that this is the century in which social mobility will be limited to a precious and lucky few. With high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind on the K-12 side, and the rise of for-profit online institutions in postsecondary education, we’re well on our way to a two-tiered system of education. One tier for the affluent, who will attend private schools and elite colleges, and a much lower tier for the rest of us, who will increasingly receive a watered down public education and have ever more limited higher education options.

The Problem With Mainstream K-16 Reformers:

The problem is, though, most reformers actually believe that their efforts at reform will result in a fairer and more level playing field for our kids and for first-generation college students of every stripe. They have an unwavering desire to make testing the cornerstone of curriculum revisions and the key determinant in measuring teacher effectiveness, and thus, tying future funds to school performance levels. Or, in the case of for-profit online higher education, they believe that financial aid in the form of student loans, accelerated classes with a curriculum strictly geared for current job market trends and lack of academic support is the shape of their river. Leaving vulnerable millions of first-generation students — particularly low-income adult learners (many of whom are of color) — to dropping out of college with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to pay off and with few good career prospects.

Mock Time Magazine cover with Michelle Rhee alleging her full knowledge of cheating scandal in DC Public Schools, April 14, 2013. (By a college student whose mom is a 7th grade teacher -http://www.susanohanian.org/)

Mock Time Magazine cover with Michelle Rhee alleging her full knowledge of cheating scandal in DC Public Schools, April 14, 2013. (By a college student whose mom is a 7th grade teacher -http://www.susanohanian.org/)

These reforms go further in providing an unlevel playing field. One where only a privileged few get to go down Mount Everest in a helicopter. The rest of us, meanwhile, must climb up Everest, ill-equipped for the climate while dodging rock slides, avalanches and other land mines all along the way.

An Unasked Question About K-12 Reform:

That reformers don’t see this is one thing. That they don’t even ask the questions that they should about their reform endgame has been the real problem for years. For example, they don’t ask the simple question, “Will high-stakes testing and teacher effectiveness measures close the achievement gap and make it so that students regardless of race and family income will be well prepared after graduating high school for college or for workforce training?”

The answer to this, of course, is no. High-stakes testing cannot and will not close the achievement gap or lead to students graduating high school better prepared for college and the 21st century working world. Teachers and administrators will continue to devote more of their time and efforts to testing than to other aspects of their jobs, for fear of losing their jobs. Reformers will continue to use the mantra of testing to siphon those precious and limited taxpayer dollars out of state legislatures and school boards to cover the costs of test development and test-based teacher evaluations. And students attending the allegedly worst performing schools will continue to lose good teachers and move from school to school in search of the promise — but not the reality — of a quality K-12 education.

Reformers like Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp and Dr. Steve Perry (not to be confused with Journey’s lead singer) don’t ask this question. They are too busy procuring funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, the Wallace Foundation and the US Department of Education to discuss the shape of their reform river. They are much more interested in proving a strong correlation between teacher effectiveness and student achievement via test scores, because they believe this is the way, truth and life for K-12 reform. And pretty soon, we will know that this correlation either doesn’t exist or is a weak one at best, under some rather ideal circumstances.

An Unasked Question About Higher Education Reform:

Futurama poster "A Mindless Worker Is A Happy Worker," August 23, 2013. (http://d3.ru)

Futurama poster “A Mindless Worker Is A Happy Worker,” August 23, 2013. (http://d3.ru)

For-profit institutions involved in online higher education do no better in asking fundamental questions about their endgame. University of Phoenix, Kaplan University and Capella University don’t ask, “Is an accelerated online college format that is highly dependent on underprepared first-generation college students, provides few or no academic support services and is heavily subsidized by federal student loans the best possible postsecondary education for these students?” Of course it isn’t. Over the past 20 years, these institutions have been too busy figuring out ways to increase the enrollment of low-income students to ask this question. They have been more interested in drawing in as much federal student loan aid as possible to cover the costs of student enrollment to ask whether they are providing the best services.

For those not-so-lucky students attending these institutions, they face a great distance between the promises of this new higher education regime and its brutal reality. For-profits promise an online education that is tailor-made for students’ job and career aspirations, one even more alluring because it is an allegedly convenient fit for the demands of any adult lifestyle. For-profits seem to be proud of the fact that fewer than 20 percent of their students complete a degree eight years after they first enroll in one of their courses. For those few students who do manage to complete a degree, many are finding that their narrowly focused degrees don’t match up with their career aspirations.

Irony and Shame:

The irony is that for-profit online higher education has all but moved away from testing at a time when the only thing that matters in K-12 education is testing, from a child’s first week in kindergarten to his or her last day of 12th grade. The ironic shame of it all is that reformers in both K-12 and higher education never ask the question of what we should expect at the end of the reforming rainbow. Their reform efforts are purely about making a profit, for themselves or for others. The rest of us, meanwhile, can’t wait for Superman, with reformers stealing his powers on both ends of the K-16 spectrum, and placing kryptonite for real reform at every turn.

—-

I wrote all this months ago. Now, with President Barack Obama offering a formalized version of accountability for higher education institutions that connects market-relevant degrees and employment to college success, him and his administration are pushing the two-tiered agenda even further. Private elite colleges can easily opt out of this Race to the Top-esque rating system for higher education costs-to-employability ratios, and create their own measures around affordability, degree-attainment and career pathways. Or not, for that matter.

Public institutions — the ones tied most directly to US Department of Education funds — will have little choice but to go down this money-wasting path. One that in the end will do nothing for first-generation students, students of color, older students, heck, any student who comes from a humble background. “It’s a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say.

The Myth of the Earnest Adult Learner

15 Monday Jul 2013

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Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, with Allan Aynesworth as Algernon (left) and George Alexander as John (right), St. James Theatre, London, UK, February 14, 1895. (Ramac via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, with Allan Aynesworth as Algernon (left) and George Alexander as John (right), St. James Theatre, London, UK, February 14, 1895. (Ramac via Wikipedia). In public domain.

One of the great myths in higher education is that of the adult learner as earnest student. Aside from the fairly obvious differences in lifestyle between a high-achieving, straight-to-college seventeen-year-old and a 34-year-old mother of two who works as a paralegal, the fact is that most adult learners act in the classroom like many traditional college students. Except that they are often academically and socially unprepared for college, not likely to attend a traditional college — with the resources necessary to help them become successful students — and are much more susceptible to dropping out of college because of the challenges they face in the classroom and in their own lives.

Myth vs. Reality:

This myth of the earnest adult learner has become a big one over the past thirty years, especially in light of the rise of for-profit postsecondary institutions like University of Phoenix and DeVry Institute. Anyone who has seen an ad on TV, in a newspaper or online can describe the mythical adult learner. Someone who’s 24 years old or older, often a paraprofessional or attempting to rise in a white-collar occupation like nursing, accounting, or information technology. A person who may be married or a parent or in the military. A potential student that has somehow been let down by traditional two-year colleges and four-year institutions, because the 10-week quarter-system and 16-week semester-system didn’t fit their real-world schedule.

The myth doesn’t fit at all with my own experience. As someone who has taught hundreds of adult learners off and on over the past 15 years – especially the past five – the behavior of older students in the classroom is really no different that than of traditional college-age students. Like 17 to 24-year-olds, the over-24 crowd is typically disorganized and lack the reading, note-taking and study skills needed to keep up with the pace of a college course. Like students who attend more traditional college settings such as Princeton, the University of Pittsburgh or Howard University, the adult learners I have taught miss deadlines, plagiarize their papers and cheat on final exams.

One of multitude of "I Am A Phoenix" ads, July 15, 2013. (University of Phoenix).

One of multitude of “I Am A Phoenix” ads, July 15, 2013. (University of Phoenix).

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone in higher education. Ad after ad sells college to adult learners as a service or a product that will lead them to a higher paying job. Period. College for them is hardly about forming new friendships or discovering themselves or their calling in life. The mythical adult learner is way too busy for such trifling pursuits. No, it is all about a piece of paper that they can wave around to get a promotion from junior accountant to accountant or from nurse’s aide to nurse.

Yet this too is a myth. Most adult learners are not really paraprofessionals or in low-level white-collar careers, poised for career advancement. They work at Walmart or Dunkin Donuts, as tellers at Wachovia Bank or as security guards with G4S. Some are active military or ex-Armed Forces, but many more are underemployed or even unemployed. Most are part of America’s rising welfare and working poor, or struggling to stay working-class or lower-middle class. At best, finishing a four-year degree would make them more employable than they would be otherwise, but not to the point that they should expect to become a doctor or an architect.

This background leaves most adult learners socially unprepared for college, but not because they cannot relate to college students between the ages of 17 and 24. They simply do not see school as a personal journey or even as an opportunity for educational advancement. It is a means to a new career and a higher income. Relationship-building to find a potential employer would not make any sense to most adult learners, as they are often segregated in virtual or physical classrooms with other adult learners, and not in classes with the sons and daughters of potential employers. Forming a bond with a professor would seem ridiculous, because they tend to see their often part-time instructors as customer-service representatives.

Adult Learners vs. Traditional College-Age Students:

This isn’t much different than the mindset of most traditional college students. I have taught a couple thousand of them over the past two decades, and in my experience, most of them view college as the means to the start of a great career making good money. The difference, really, is that there remains a wider diversity of thought about the higher education experience among younger college students than among those over 24. The quality of their education, the bonds of friendship or relationship they form with each other and with their professors, what they are able to take away from their college experience beyond their degree. All matter much more to so-called traditional students than they do to adult learners.

Student debt cartoon (although this is hardly the only stressor adult learners and other nontraditional-traditional students face), May 2, 2012. (Phil Hands/Wisconsin State Journal).

Student debt cartoon (although this is hardly the only stressor adult learners and other nontraditional-traditional students face), May 2, 2012. (Phil Hands/Wisconsin State Journal).

What is also similar is the idea that college is 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th grade for both groups of students. Both are just as apt to come up with myriad excuses for missing a paper submission deadline or for failing an exam. They had a big project at work that took up all of their spare time. They had a bad cold or the flu or strep throat or mononucleosis. Their computer crashed at the last minute, or they lost electricity or their Internet access went down. What I don’t often hear from traditional higher education students — but do expect to hear from adult learners — are excuses about children in emergency rooms, bad marriages, sick spouses and older parents, foreclosures on homes and cars breaking down on highways. For some, sometimes more than once in the same semester. Adult learners are as good at whining as traditional students.

The biggest myth on this end, though, is that younger college students face fewer obstacles to a degree than adult learners because 17-to-24 year-olds don’t have real-world problems. That’s completely false. Nearly two-thirds of traditional college students work part-time or full-time to cover everything from beer costs to their student loans and college tuition. Less advantaged students have pressures from parents and family around income loss, poverty and healthcare. Though most younger college students aren’t married, don’t have kids or work at the bottom rung of a career ladder, they do confront many of the same real-world financial and familial pressures.

Ending the Myth of the Traditional:

Are there any new innovations, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), that would help adult learners achieve their degree — if not educational or academic — aspirations? It is really too early to tell with MOOCs. What is safe to say, though, is that adult learners as a group need to break out of mindset that higher education owes them flexibility without them taking responsibility for their own education. Higher education institutions, meanwhile, do need to recognize that adult learners have never been traditional, and traditional college students aren’t traditional anymore. Myth-busting on both the student side and instructor side would be a good place to start to make college aspirations and success a reality for adult learners.

My Take On K-12 & Higher Education & Corporatism

08 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Pink Floyd–The Wall (1982), February 16, 2012. (http://free-education.info). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low res and related to blog subject.

We often treat K-12 education and higher education as if they have nothing in common, as if they possess completely separate values and have developed in complete isolation from each other. But in this age where the American technocratic and the plutocratic elites want to privatize everything, there are clear connections behind and between emerging trends in corporatized K-12 education reform and with the rise of for-profit colleges and universities. These trends and connections aren’t good ones for the mass of American students, particularly for those who are poor and of color.

It’s pretty simply really. Both public education and postsecondary education have been under attack from profiteers and the politicians who do their bidding for at least a quarter century. In particular, the issues have been how to improve public schools so that poor Black and Latino kids can graduate high school on the one hand, and how to modify higher education so that the adult version of these kids can obtain a serviceable certificate or degree on the other. With these changes comes the theme of a watered-down education for the poorest twenty-five percent of Americans. It’s the new pathway to a sub-living wage job and tens of thousand of dollars of student loan debt.

A better way of presenting this reality, though, would be to overlay my own educational journey as a poor African American growing up in Mount Vernon, New York onto this corporatized educational insanity. I would’ve gone to public school to be sure. But instead of the SRA exam test that I took every year between third and sixth grade (not a high-stakes test evaluating teaching effectiveness, by the way), I would’ve seen some sort of comprehensive reading/mathematics test from at least second grade on.

Overcrowded classroom (with DOE Chancellor Joel Klein) with two teachers, PS 189, Brooklyn, NY, September 16, 2009. (Craig Warga/NY Daily News). Qualifies as fair use – blog subject with no comparable picture.

Given where I grew up, instead of having a group of veteran Black teachers for most of elementary schools, I would’ve ended up with some teachers from Teach for America or The New Teacher Project. For the technocrats surely would’ve held my teachers responsible for the sixty-percent poverty rate at my elementary schools, um, I mean, the low test scores. Teachers from these alternate certification programs tend to be well-meaning, perhaps even extremely smart, but not passionate or fully trained teachers. Certainly not like the highly dedicated African American teachers I had at Nathan Hale (now Cecil Cooper) and William H. Holmes Elementary, who held us all to high enough standards to prepare me for a gifted-talented magnet school program known as Humanities.

Of course, given the resources devoted to high-stakes testing, and the constant practice tests, there would’ve been the virtual elimination of music, art, PE, and creative writing. With that shift, there wouldn’t have been a Humanities Program, just a few classes for the best and brightest students. Instead, the option of a private charter school or a KIPP program may have been a possibility. With an average cost of $10,000, however, I doubt a $1,000 or $2,500 voucher would’ve made it possible for me to attend the one, and with KIPP schools being all about discipline, I would’ve thrived there about as much as fish thrive in the desert.

I would’ve moved on to middle school and high school, received algebra in ninth or tenth grade (if at all), struggled to enhance my reading, writing, science, math and other skills, and otherwise would’ve goofed my way to a high school diploma. Would I have taken an AP class, or had a Meltzer as a history teacher, or taken the PSAT or SAT? I’m not sure, but highly unlikely. Still, I would’ve graded with a diploma, with proof that my education was the equivalent of an average ninth or tenth grader’s, confirmed by a decade of standardized state tests!

Then, after three to five years of struggling to find full-time work above minimum wage, or after several years in the military, I’d make the choice between  a University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, DeVry University or some other for-profit college. I’d discover quite quickly that I was wholly unprepared for even the most watered-down online college curriculum, taking courses in a four, six or eight-week format (instead of the typical ten or sixteen-week semester format).

Romanian Army POWs from Battle of Stalingrad, February 3, 1943. (http://ww2incolor.com).

There would’ve been no agonizing choice between Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, no switch of majors from computer science to history, no big moment in my development as a person. All because I wouldn’t have had the kind of earth-shattering experience that attending college full-time and in-person often can be.

Somehow, if I’d somehow survived the first semester or first year, I might’ve eventually graduated, albeit with a degree that will be of limited use in obtaining a good living wage. And with $70,000 in student loan debt and a degree from a disreputable for-profit college, forget about me going to graduate school to be a professor.

That’s what this K-16 system will lead to. Money flowing into the hands of illegitimate technocrats, testing companies, charter schools and for-profit institutions. Money and influence flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Teach for America. A permanent, if slightly better educated, low-wage underclass. That’s the now and future construction of K-16 education if we allow these trends to continue.

Grading and the 21st Century Professor

03 Monday Sep 2012

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Between a rock and a hard place, The Simpsons (movie), September 2, 2012. (http://clubsnap.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws –  low resolution.

The Chronicle of Higher Education and other prominent periodicals have been talking about the precarious rise of grade inflation for more than two decades now. Article after article and story after story has shown professors at elite and public institutions lowering their standards and bending into advanced yoga positions to give students higher grades than they’ve earned. All to ensure a minimum of contention over grades and maximum scores in student evaluations of their courses.

But what of the many professors who don’t want to lower their standards but so far, who can’t ignore a student’s lack of attendance or participation, their late assignments or attempts at plagiarism? For those college instructors, they can expect more grief and stupid ass excuses from students, not to mention lower evaluation scores.

Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand by David Cerney (1997), Prague, September 2, 2012. (http://swick.co.uk/). Qualifies as fair use – pic has low resolution.

For tenured professors, particularly those at research universities, this doesn’t matter at all. For some tenure-track professors, instructors at teaching-focused liberal arts colleges, and the army of adjuncts that are the majority of instructors at the college level, this could mean the difference between steady employment and homelessness. It’s a sad situation when folks aren’t secure enough in their jobs to actually do the most difficult parts of their jobs, to evaluate a student’s performance accurately and to confront students whenever they violate an academic code of conduct.

It was part of the deal that I made with myself when I began teaching my own sections and then course as a graduate student twenty years ago at the University of Pittsburgh. To be fair and flexible, to be tough when necessary, but to be compassionate when the circumstances called for it. For the vast majority of the 2,000 or so high school, undergraduate and graduate students I’ve taught since ’92, that has been a workable philosophy. It’s even gotten me the occasional praise and recognition for being a very good professor.

Of course, I faced the occasional student who complained to me about their grade. Most of those students were C students looking for a C+ or a B, or a B+/A- student hoping for an A. Really, prior to my current faculty position, I had only had three complaints of any major consequence. One was from a student who managed to never show up for my US History to 1877 sections the spring semester of ’93, who failed the final exam so badly that I let him get away with his attempts at cheating — his cheat notes were that bad!

The other two came from two students in my History of American Education graduate course in the summer of ’98 at Duquesne University. One thought that someone as young (and as Black) as me could give her a grade lower than an A, while another harassed me with emails for a month because her A- in my course ruined her 4.0 average. Though an adjunct, I stood my ground, knowing that I had the support of my department chair.

Since starting my current teaching position in January ’08, I’ve faced a couple of dozen situations in which students have complained about their grades. I think I’ve only taught three courses out of about twenty in the past four years in which I haven’t fielded any complaints from students about their grades.

Most of these complaints have been really ones about me not accepting every cockamamie excuse for a late assignment or plagiarism. Excuses like their Internet or their access to the university’s online classroom platform being down. Or not knowing that cutting and pasting ten pages’ worth of other people’s words for a ten-page history research paper was in fact blatant plagiarism. Or that their jobs, last-minute deployments (which were hardly last-minute), children (who in many cases were teenagers), three car accidents in two weeks or other life challenges managed to get in the way of them submitting multiple assignments on time, even with extensions. But somehow, when I’ve held these students accountable and assigned an appropriate grade, I’m the bad guy.

That the students I teach these days are technically adult learners (I say “technically” because they don’t act like adults when they complain about their grading) actually makes this matter worse. Whether in the military, married with children, or working a full-time job, these students in their twenties, thirties and older tend to complain, beg, threaten me and then beg again. It’s exhausting to constantly have to persuade students to read my syllabus in order to make them understand that the rules and rubrics I’ve laid out are the reasons for their F, D, C or B.

But no matter the vitriol I provoke from assigning a grade, I also have to be careful in my language, emotions and tone. That is the reality that is teaching in many higher education institutions today. It is unfortunate, for there are many students who don’t understand that being a student requires being a responsible and ethical adult. Whether seventeen or seventy, whining, complaining and threatening your professor for a higher grade is completely unacceptable, and deserves at least a little sarcasm in response.

College Isn’t For Everyone

07 Thursday Jun 2012

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

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Sterling Memorial Library (cropped), Yale University, New Haven, CT, September 3, 2008. (Ragesoss via Wikipedia). Permission granted via licenses with GFDL and Creative Commons cc-by-sa-2.5.

In May ’05, I attended a conference in DC hosted by the Council for Opportunity in Education on college access and college success. Jay Mathews, an education columnist with The Washington Post, was a guest speaker. Mathews spent most of his talk telling educators that the public doesn’t care for our extensive analysis of what does and doesn’t work in K-16 education reform. “Readers only care about two things,” Matthew said — testing, and “how can I get my kid into Harvard, Yale or Princeton?”

I certainly didn’t like Mathews’ smug and dismissive talk, but he was right about one point, however inadvertent on his part. That most Americans don’t think about education news unless it either confirms their worst fears — that public education is a waste of taxpayer dollars — or confirms their highest hopes — that an Ivy League school (or the near equivalent) accepts Tyler or Courtney as students. Little else matters for most of the American reading public, because columnists, reporters and editors like Mathews have long since abandoned the idea that education is a playing-field leveler for most people. “College isn’t for everyone,” is the common refrain in Mathews’ world, and in the world of most right-thinking Americans.

What does go unreported and underreported, though, is that most Americans with the money and knowledge to give their kids every advantage possible, and do so in a rather ruthless fashion. All while denying other kids in their community similar opportunities, deliberately or otherwise. Over the past thirty-five years, property taxes and other taxes that cover the costs of a public education have been slashed, as taxpayers revolted in places like California and New York in the 1970s and 1980s.

That alone has meant two things: the contributions of the federal government to public education increased to make up for these long-term tax cuts, and the ability of most American school districts to provide all of the necessary resources for students has gone down. This opened the door for the politicized hammering of teachers unions as too powerful, and the growth of the testing mandate since the early 1990s, further weakening public education. Need I even mention public charter schools as the suggested alternative for Americans of lower-income?

Gated community, Houston, TX area [but virtual gates in education for years], February 13, 2012. (Chelsea Lameira via http://www.houstonagentmagazine.com)

But that’s only part of the story. There are plenty of parents who take even more advantage of loopholes based on money and knowledge. They hold their kids out of school a full year before kindergarten, giving them an extra twelve months to become proficient readers before they’ve ever stepped into a classroom. They pay for tutors and Kumon early on, but not because their kids are struggling with reading, writing and math. No, these parents pay for this extra help to give their students the ability to score in the top percentiles on tests that will label their children as “gifted.”

Some parents even transfer their children to different schools within a district with the “right” demographic mixtures to ensure their student’s success and their ability to be noticed. Some parents will begin the process of preparing their kids for the SATs and for AP courses via Kaplan or Princeton Review as early as fifth and sixth grade. And all to ensure that, in the end, their kids will have the post-high school choice of an Ivy League school, or at least, an equivalent elite school, like a Stanford or Georgetown.

These parents, the majority of Americans who would only readily agree with Mathews’ worldview on education news, aren’t evil. But, then again, we all know what the road to Hell is paved with. And in this case, these advantages on the one end point to the severe disadvantages on the other end, no matter how rare it is for the likes of Mathews to write about.

I’m not talking about poverty from birth to eighteen per se, although I could go there in detail. No, it’s the end result, the young adult or over-the-age-of-twenty-five person who finally decides after years of educational neglect to take advantage of the twenty-first century, to go to college after struggling to finish elementary, middle and high school. Most of these students never knew a tutor, never had a parent who understood the loopholes in public education of which to take advantage.

These adult students come into college — often a for-profit institution like University of Phoenix, a

University of Maryland University College administrative offices, Largo, MD, July 2, 2010. (Donald Earl Collins).

community college or a public institution like the one in which I teach now in University of Maryland University College — as raw and unpolished. These students are often long on enthusiasm, yet short on the skills and especially knowledge they need for success. And they have a sharp learning curve in order to get there. One in which these students have to learn in a year or what it took the most advantaged Americans eighteen or nineteen years to learn. The graduation rates of these institutions illustrate how difficult it is for most adult students to climb Mount Everest in their shorts, and all in the middle of a blizzard.

“College isn’t for everyone,” I hear Mathews and millions of other smug Americans say. Of course it isn’t. Especially when you make sure that it isn’t, through money, knowledge and cunning politics.