Tag Archives: Higher Education

What Being #1 Is and Isn’t

24 Thursday May 2018

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#1 (cropped), May 24, 2018. (http://www.modern-senior.com).

Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, Harold Ekeh, Micheal Brown, Elmont Memorial High School, and Mirabeau B. Lamar High School must be very proud of themselves these days. And they all should be. After all, Ms. Uwamanzu-Nna joined Mr. Ekeh as being the only two students in the history of this high school to gain acceptance to all eight Ivy League universities — in back-to-back years, in 2015 and 2016. Mr. Brown was four-for-four in his quest for Ivy League admissions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania in 2017-18, and went 20-for-20 in college admissions overall. Uwamanza-Nna and Ekeh each went 13 for 13 in their applications to colleges ranging from Johns Hopkins and New York University to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

They are among a very short list of above-the-rim, high-achieving high school students who have the distinction of winning the college entrance lottery. They have credentials (and with full rides, the means) to attend any and every elite institution in the US. That’s just it, though. In so many ways, this narrative of American education as one of  “winners and losers” merely reinforces a society of haves and have-nots narcissistically competing for limited and segregated resources.

With a closer look at Uwamanzu-Nna’s, Ekeh’s, and Brown’s backgrounds, it becomes obvious that despite their amazing achievements, their success was predestined. Both Uwamanzu-Nna and Ekeh’s families are from Nigeria, and both moved to the US when they were of elementary school age. Uwamanzu-Nna’s father remained a physical therapist after moving to the US, while Ekeh’s parents “left comfortable lives in Nigeria” to take jobs at a Target store in Queens to provide opportunities for their five children. Both families picked places within the Sewanhaka Central High School District to live. The district is made up of a group of Long Island bedroom suburban towns within Nassau County, including Elmont.

Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna standing next to a picture of 2015 graduate, Harold Ekeh (cropped), Elmont Memorial High School, Elmont, NY, April 5, 2016. (CBS2).

This decision for the two Nigerian families could not have occurred by accident. The Sewanhaka Central High School District and especially Elmont Memorial High School has long had a reputation of providing an atmosphere of academic excellence and being a welcoming environment to students from immigrant families. Uwamanzu-Nna and Ekeh both benefited from such an environment and from families willing to sacrifice in order to push their children to win the academic lottery. In the US, getting into any Ivy League institution — much less all eight — is the pinnacle of being #1.

Brown’s case is a little less obvious in terms of advantages. But clearly Brown’s mother’s continuous efforts to enrich her life and her son’s life academically and socially were critical to his high-flying success. “When I was in elementary school, I saw my mom graduate from community college and that just meant a lot to me,”  Brown said to USA Today last month. Involvement in extracurricular activities in school and year-round after school programs like “QuestBridge, Emerge Fellowship and Breakthrough Collaborative,” where Brown got to mingle with students of color with college aspirations, must’ve helped with both his academic motivations and preparations. This more than made up for whatever deficiencies Brown faced in his education because of growing up in the Third Ward in Houston (where several of my uncles and cousins on my mother’s side lived between the mid-1970s and the early ’00s).

There are a couple of ways to look at Uwamanzu-Nna’s, Ekeh’s, and Brown’s success. One is to take the route of racist jealousy. “It’s a little obnoxious because you can only go to one, you can only take one full ride, and you are taking a spot from someone else who worked really hard,” co-anchor Holly Morris said on her FOX5 DC morning show. There was a huge backlash in response. The response implied that Brown’s achievement was a sign of showboating, that Brown was merely an attention-seeker. Keep in mind, the media sought Brown out, not the other way around. Keep in mind, Americans obsess over obvious measures of success. But somehow, if you’re Black, you can’t be joyful and in the moment over such success, even when the press is shining a floodlight on you.

Micheal Brown and his mother Berthinia Rutledge-Brown sharing the news of him getting into all 20 schools to which he applied, Houston, TX, March 31, 2018. (https://www.rawstory.com/).

Another way to look at Uwamanzu-Nna’s, Ekeh’s, and Brown’s achievements, though, would be to see their stories as a positive for them as individuals, but a negative for our society as a whole. With the increased emphasis on standardized curricula, standardized testing, and standardized individual teacher evaluations based on this testing has come an obsessive focus on the individual in education. The savior teacher as superhuman, somehow able to make every student into a proficient test-taker. The grinding student, ready to score a proficient or higher score on every school district, state-level, and national standardized test. The tiger mom-esque parent, willing at a moment’s notice to spend money that most Americans do not have to tutor and drill their child into excellent test scores. All involved in education for the greater good, but more and more, for their greater good. All without knowing about what their children have really learned, whether their students can really work in unison on a common goal, or if their kids can create, innovate, or think independently of a test-taking script.

I’m sure that Uwamanzu-Nna, Ekeh, and Brown’s have learned a lot in their respective journeys to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. But what does this measure of achievement mean for them down the line? Is it merely their ability to meet the right people and find job opportunities looking for them around every corner as a result of their academic achievements? Or do their achievements mean anything beyond the material, for them and for the rest of us?

The “winners and losers” narrative also plays itself out in insidious ways for parents at the have-nots end of the scale. Because America’s educational resources are unevenly segregated by race and social class across its 14,000 school districts, the opportunities for winning this competition are also segregated. School district boundary hopping has become more prevalent in recent years. This as the competition for better-resourced schools has become more intense, all in the wake of the Great Recession and the resulting reduction in education budgets.

Unlevel playing field (soccer in this case), August 5, 2013. (http://funatico.com).

One famous case of boundary hopping occurred in 2011. Kelley Williams-Bolar, an African American, Akron, Ohio-area mother, was arrested for and convicted of falsifying records to enable her two daughters to attend a more affluent school district in the area for two years. (Williams-Bolar’s now deceased father Edward L. Williams was a legal resident of the Copley Township district at the time.) The real crime here is that a patchwork public education system based on income and place of residence exists at all. That it also promotes an obsession with competition and mostly pre-selects students to be #1 in the line for the elite university is worse still. That is why Uwamanzu-Nna’s, Ekeh’s, and Brown’s achievements look so remarkable. They won an educational game that in so many ways our society had rigged for them to lose.

Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, Harold Ekeh, and Micheal Brown are among a truly lucky handful. Their parents found a welcoming home in a diverse suburban community with well-resourced (if somewhat segregated) schools, or enriched their child with resources not available to most kids in poorer and segregated urban school districts. They won the competition for #1. For most Americans, though, the education game is rigged, as the system reproduces and reinforces residential, racial, income, and academic inequality. Not to mention, the American idea that there should be winners, losers, and a grinding competition to show who won and lost.

Responses to My Piece in The Atlantic

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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On Labor Day last week, The Atlantic ran my piece “Why Making College Free Isn’t Enough for First-Generation Students.” It was a culmination of thoughts I had gleaned from the latest, research, from working on education issues in the nonprofit world, from my time as a professor at various universities, from my own college journey, and is in some ways, a summary of Boy @ The Window.

The response over the past week has been much more than I expected. It was definitely overwhelming in terms of the number of people who shared their own first-generation stories. I found myself wading through emails, nodding my head in agreement or shaking my head at the crap that some of my readers had to put up with to attend and graduate from college. These emails — as well as comments on the article on The Atlantic website — made all of the work putting the article together worth it.

A couple of stories stuck out for me. One was from a first-generation student who attended college a few years before my own 1987-91 run at the bachelor’s.

I read your article in the Atlantic, I was shocked at the similarity of our college experience. I like the Columbia investigation tale, they told me they didn’t believe me that my family income was so modest…Georgetown offered me the most money. I went to Georgetown in 1982, graduated in 1987, was homeless for a time, embarrassed about my modest financial background, grew up very fast in all areas, to enable completion of my studies.

Among the things that struck me was the shame of poverty the person felt then and years later. Living in a country like the US, with the constant mantra of hard work, faith, and ability all lead to prosperity, means that anyone not doing well might as well be a laughingstock standing naked in front of their high school graduating class. Or should contemplate committing suicide. It shouldn’t be purely on first-generation students to open up about their experiences before universities and states put resources into leadership and youth development organizations, mental health services, and fully-funded, need-based aid beyond tuition (covering food, housing, and books) to maximize opportunities for this increasingly larger group of college students.

I know the unofficial rule about not reading comments sections for articles, especially if the article happens to be your own. But given the personal nature of “Why Making College Free Isn’t Enough for First-Generation Students,” I wanted to see what folks had to say. Some accused me of self-aggrandizement, of “patting myself on the back” for having graduated with a degree from Pitt in four years. Another went on to call me “exceptional,” that most “sixth-generation” students couldn’t have done what I did. Both comments seemed vaguely envious. I took no joy in writing about being homeless for five days. Especially since I knew so many others under similar circumstances haven’t completed their degrees.

Some of the comments I received on Twitter were of the nitpicking variety. One was from an education professor whom told me to “read her book” because I didn’t nuance the fact that non-financial aid programs for first-generation students cost money and other resources. Really? No kidding! Another pointed out there were more aspects to Hillary Clinton’s higher education plan than free college tuition, while a third commented that I didn’t discuss Pell Grants as part of my financial aid packages. All true, but given the comprehensive nature of the piece, I didn’t think it necessary to write a magnum opus or someone else’s version of combining my experiences with today’s data on first-generation students.

Many of the comments in The Atlantic’s Comments section, though, were of the more stereotyping variety. Comments about my Mom as undeserving of welfare because of the number of kids she had. Comments about my father’s alcoholism. Assumptions that because my father wasn’t in the household, that I lived in a “broken home.” Stereotypes about affirmative action, about “big government,” about “welfare cheats” versus law-abiding “tax payers.” I could address all of these well-meaning race-baiters one-by-one, but I’ve challenged these assumptions in the piece and even in my blog, anyway.

One of my readers emailed me in expressing their assumptions about me and about first-generation students in general.

What makes sense is for first-generation students to go to colleges more oriented toward their needs, even if those colleges are less ‘competitive.’

Navigating a huge bureaucracy isn’t easy for anyone. What it takes is the emotional strength that comes from being raised in a functional, intact home…But rising up the ladder has to be seen as, for most, a gradual process, not a “rags to riches” one.

I guess this person missed the part where I noted that 50 percent of all first-generation students are White, and that technically, I did live in a home with either my father and my Mom or my idiot stepfather and my Mom growing up. Part of the problem in understanding the needs of first-generations students, though, are people like this reader, many of whom are college administrators who also make sweeping assumptions about students who aren’t middle class and White. Heck, the main indicator of success for students is parent’s income and wealth, not hard work, ability, or whether their parents live together or face substance abuse issues.

And that’s kind of the point another emailer made about her own college journey as a first-generation student.

I went off to a private college — which I picked without any idea about getting a job or learning a profession. My mother…naively believed that a degree would guarantee I would be more employable. I was one of maybe 2 scholarship students on my small campus and I was miserable. None of my friends there worked and for them, living “poor” was hip. I was the only one desperate not to be broke (because mom and dad couldn’t bail me out). I stayed there for 2 years even though I did poorly academically because I didn’t even know I could transfer schools. I thought if I left, I was giving up on college altogether. In reality, it took me almost 10 years to finish college (finally, at a state school) and I lived in poverty in the meantime…I still can’t eat ramen noodles because I grew so ever-loving sick of having them all the time.

In her case, I would eat ramen noodles any day over canned tuna fish. Twenty-eight years later, the smell of it still makes me queasy.

So, thanks to all of you who read the piece, disagreed with some or all that I said, shared your stories, commiserated with me, and/or misinterpreted my article and why I wrote it. Much appreciated!

What Can Brown Do For You (Now)?: 60 Years Come & Gone

16 Friday May 2014

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What can brown do for you?, Brown Squadron, Relay for Life, 2007. (http://www.behance.net/).

What can brown do for you?, Brown Squadron, Relay for Life, 2007. (http://www.behance.net/).

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the great Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision (1954), a Monday that lived in infamy among White supremacists in the South for decades, as the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional basis for Jim Crow segregation by a 9-0 vote. But six decades later, the Brown decision is in a coma and on life support, with a DNR order hanging over it, waiting for a close relative to sign. This after the Supreme Court ruled in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014) last month that states like Michigan can amend their constitutions via majority vote to ban affirmative action. With this 6-2 decision, the Roberts court effectively ended any serious efforts at racial inclusion and diversity in public institutions, especially public K-16 education.

While deliberate exclusion of people of color, women and other minorities from America’s public institutions remains unconstitutional (and illegal, by the way — see the Civil Rights Act of 1964), this last court decision has now made it possible for public institutions to refrain from making any effort to include anyone other than White males in admissions and hiring policies. Yet there has been a long road to travel for us to reach this point, as it has taken lobbyists, law makers and lawyers roughly forty years to wound, disable and incapacitate Brown.

Bill Schuette, (Michigan’s attorney general), with Jennifer Gratz (of Gratz v. Bollinger decision [2003] and the XIV Foundation, outside Supreme Court, Washington, DC October 2013. (Susan Walsh/AP via New York Times).

Bill Schuette, (Michigan’s attorney general), with Jennifer Gratz (of Gratz v. Bollinger decision [2003] and the XIV Foundation), outside Supreme Court, Washington, DC October 2013. (Susan Walsh/AP via New York Times).

If one were old enough to remember the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision (1971) — the one where the Supreme Court upheld widespread busing as a methodology for public school integration — it would have seemed that the matter was settled, at least legally. After all, in the seventeen years between Brown and Swann, the court had consistently ruled in favor of policies that made racial integration the centerpiece of a strategy to bring equal opportunity to America’s public institutions. And especially during President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s administration and with Congress, between the Civil Rights Act (now weeks away from turning fifty), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) and the Higher Education Act (1965), it seemed that segregation was itself about to be dead and buried.

Well, segregation — and the structural and institutional racism that supports it — is alive, as much as the evil undead can be alive and unwell. And the forces and people who never wanted desegregation — or worse, integration — in the first place have worked my entire lifetime for this moment. They simply took the NAACP’s legal strategy to end Plessy with Brown, just so they could strangle it while sleeping, right through the Supreme Court. Including the:

– Milliken v. Bradley decision (1974). Limited desegregation efforts in Detroit to its city limits, making it possible for suburban areas to refuse to partake in school desegregation efforts across the country.

– Bakke v. University of California at Davis decision (1978). Racial quotas for seats at colleges via admission policies found unconstitutional – race can be accounted for as part of admissions decisions, but no actual numbers should be involved.

– Missouri v. Jenkins decision (1995). Forcing the Kansas City school district to spend $200 million per year since 1990 (after 13 years of court battles) for magnet schools and busing was too much (beyond court’s remedial authority) — and forced the lower court to accept a less expensive (and less effective) desegregation plan.

– Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger decisions (2003). The split decisions upheld race as one of a plethora of criteria public higher education institutions like the University of Michigan Law School and the University of Michigan (undergraduate division) could use in their admission process, as racial diversity and equity remained a laudable goal. But the court ruled that ranking race and other factors with a numbers system was the equivalent of a quota system, making this formula — but not the policy — unconstitutional.

Flatlining EKG, March 2010. (http://potashinvestingnews.com/).

Flatlining EKG, March 2010. (http://potashinvestingnews.com/).

Now Brown is truly hanging by a thread, and with it, the ideal of racial equality and equality of opportunity for visible minorities. I don’t want to hear about  the Texas state system’s socioeconomic admissions policies or Richard Kahlenberg’s tired argument about getting at racial diversity through the economic. Most poor students can’t afford even public institutions like the University of Texas at Austin, and Kahlenberg’s center-right argument disguises the issue of racial and economic inequality in K-12 public education.

Let’s face it while we’re still fighting — and yes, we need to keep fighting on this front. On this issue, the folks on the side of colorblind racism and segregation have all but won. Brown may well remain the most important Supreme Court decision in the history of the US. With the Schuette decision, though, we might as well find a priest to administer last rites.

Lies We Tell Each Other When In College

04 Saturday Jan 2014

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

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Every lie is two lies quote, Robert Brauilt, January 4, 2014. (http://izquote.com).

Every lie is two lies quote, Robert Brauit, January 4, 2014. (http://izquotes.com).

I thought about posting this at the beginning of this week, but decided against it, figuring that I should end ’13 on a more positive tip. But it must be said that one of the critical issues that we in higher education face in terms of college retention and success is the sheer lack of honesty surrounding student performance, especially in the first year or two of any student’s enrollment. No, I’m not talking about grade inflation — for students doing okay, especially at elite colleges, that’s another rampant issue. It’s about the lies students tell themselves, each other and their loved ones about their performance prior to either being caught in a web of them or, worse still, dropping out altogether.

As a college student and as a professor, I found and find it fascinating and disheartening when I’ve learned of the fantasy life of a student’s alleged good grades being shattered by reality. I fell into this trap myself during my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh. I only tell part of this story in Boy @ The Window. Yeah, I was nowhere near dropping out after a 2.63 GPA first semester (A in Astronomy, B- in Pascal, C in Honors Calc I, and a C in East Asian History), but I relied on an annual GPA of a 3.0 or higher to maintain my academic scholarship.

Yet from about the second week in December ’87 until I received my grades from Pitt on this date twenty-six years ago, I maintained the lie that my GPA was “around a 3.2.” The main difference — I gave myself a C+ in Honors Calc and a B in East Asian History. Mind you, I hardly showed up for either class most of the month of November! I was homesick, heartbroken, and unhealthily horny (and on two occasions hung over) most of the last six weeks of that semester.

The lies we tell ourselves (self-deception), Scientific America, February 4, 2012. (Richard Mia).

The lies we tell ourselves (self-deception), Scientific America, February 4, 2012. (Richard Mia).

So I told my former classmates like Laurell and Erika that my GPA was a 3.2. I told my dorm mates Samir and Chuck the same. It was a mild lie, I realized even at the time, and I knew that if I buckled down, that I could overcome my own lie, especially since I could lose my scholarship if I didn’t. And with a 3.33 second semester in Winter ’88, I did pull my GPA over the 3.0 mark, and in the process, decided not to tell any lies that big ever again.

But over the years, I’ve learned that I was hardly alone in the lying-about-my-college-experience category. The first time I figured this out was at the end of ’88, twenty-five years ago this week. It was a lunch outing with Laurell, her friend Maria and former classmates JD and Joshua at a pizza shop in the Fleetwood section of Mount Vernon. After the previous sixteen months of the Phyllis obsession, rage and grade-raising campaign, homelessness and financial struggles, I was finally fully on track for graduation and potentially, grad school. With this group of former classmates, though, almost all White, all but Laurell with upper middle class resources, I realized too that their struggles, or blues, weren’t exactly like mine.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

There was a lot of “everything’s goin’ well” type of discussion going. Yet I got the sense that things weren’t all that great. Then JD admitted that he was a semester away from academic probation at Berkeley. His engineering classes were kicking his butt. From the looks of things, he was doing much better athletically than anywhere else, having bulked up to 190 with twenty extra pounds of muscle. Josh then admitted that his academic and social life wasn’t exactly going as planned. “I don’t know which one is worse,” he told us. He’d grown four or five inches since MVHS, good enough to put him around five-five or five-six. Laurell, of course, had a killer GPA at Johns Hopkins…and just loved things there. What she didn’t mention, between home and school, was that she was on the verge of burnout, 3.6 average or not…As for me, I talked a bit about some of my new friends and a couple of my classes. Nothing, though, about the drama of the previous year.

Umm, New York style pizza, Vesuvius Pizza, Brooklyn, NY, January 4, 2014. (http://yelp.com).

Umm, New York style pizza, Vesuvius Pizza, Brooklyn, NY, January 4, 2014. (http://yelp.com).

Given how they had reacted to my previous revelations of tiny nuggets from my life while we were in high school, I knew that they would have nothing to say about overcoming homelessness and my Phyllis obsession, much less my now 3.2 GPA overall. At the same time, though, I thought it better to say nothing at all than to tell half-truths and bald-faced lies about my college performance and experiences.

I’ve seen so many students do what I and my former classmates did during our first semesters of college over the years. They lie to me about their issues with my courses, they lie to themselves about their performance and preparation. Mostly, they lie to their friends and family to protect themselves from embarrassment. They lie until the truth of their performance shows up, in their grades, in academic probation, in suspensions and expulsions, in dropping out, in other myriad and dangerous ways.

And we in higher education encourage these lies, as if the money and grade trail won’t expose the reality of struggle and failure for so many. This is where we as educators and administrators need to be much more proactive, to encourage students to seek help, to tell the truth and not bury themselves in a coffin of lies.

Grad School & My Most Special Summer Reading List

31 Saturday Aug 2013

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Just a small sample of the books I read/re-read summer before grad school in 1991, August 31, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Just a small sample of the books I read/re-read summer before grad school in 1991, August 31, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

For me, August 28 this week was significant for any number of reasons. It wasn’t just that it was fifty years to the exact day and date that the March on Washington occurred and MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech. Or that is was fifty-eight years to the date that White supremacists lynched Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at some flat-butt White girl. This past Wednesday was also twenty-two years to the day and date that I began my first day of graduate school as a master’s student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of History.

Of course, I didn’t discuss this earlier this week (it would’ve been incredibly arrogant on my part to bring this up three days ago). My big steps for myself were infinitesimal when in measured comparison to the beginning of the two-year height of the official Civil Rights Movement. But even on an afternoon in which I attended my first course and meeting about teaching/advising assignments for the semester, it did feel like a bit of a triumph. Especially when considering what I had to do that spring and summer to get into the program with funding in the first place.

I didn’t learn that much that day. Except the low contempt Joe White and some of the other professors held toward pedagogy and teaching. “You already know more than your students,” White said as advice to us who’d be TAs that semester. I was lucky to not be among them for my first year. I was a GSA assisting in the advising of history majors, some of whom were my fellow undergrads just a few months before. But even then, I thought two minutes’ worth of advice on viewing students as empty vessels was insufficient training for learning how to lecture and facilitate conversations with upwards of 100 students spread out over several discussion sections each week.

I had other things on my mind at that moment, though, including the relief that I’d survived a summer making $5.20 per hour as a full-time employee with a Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic project in which the project investigators were far more psychotic than the patients. Aside from that, I thought about how the previous four months had served as my preparation for the White world of grad school.

I’d done a lot of reading that late spring and summer, spurned on by boredom, disappointment in my weirdly evolving friendship with Elaine, and a sense that I needed to read to fortify myself against the neo-Marxists in my eventual field. So I read. I started off with Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), believe it or not, the first time I’d ever read it. Like so many before me, it made my views of the man less black and white than it had been before. I then picked up W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk (1903), the first time I’d read that book since I wrote a book report on it for Mrs. O’Daniel’s class in fifth grade. Unsurprisingly, I got much more out of it in May ’91 than I did in May ’80.

I didn’t stop there, as my reading took me on three different tracks in June, July and August. One was the “I didn’t get to read this before” track, as I read Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Song of Solomon and Beloved (didn’t understand it then, and still don’t get the big deal about it now). Along with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969), bell hooks and several others on Black Women’s literature. Then, I decided to go back and reread some James Baldwin and Richard Wright that I’d first read for high school, and added Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to the mix. On the non-literature track, I ended up reading Franz Fanon, Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) — at least, I put a significant dent in it — Derrick Bell’s And We Are Not Saved (1987), and other writings on Black history and culture (broadly speaking).

But the third track would end up taking me on a path toward my dissertation topic and my first book, Fear of a “Black” America (2004). It started with articles on multicultural education that took me to James Banks’ theoretic constructions of what multicultural education ought to have been, but wasn’t. I also found myself reading books like Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (1991), Molefi Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea (1987), Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (completely indecipherable in a circular firing squad of a thesis kind of way) and Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-education of the Negro (1933). I was reading anything that could inform my thinking about K-12 and higher education and how it played the role as both equalizer and oppressor for so many Black folks over the years.

It was easily the most reading I’d done on my own since the year before I’d gone into seventh grade, middle school and the Humanities Program. I wanted to read all I wanted to read before spending the next few years drowning my brain in hundreds of books and articles that I’d absolutely need to read as a historian. In the process, I may’ve radicalized myself a bit for the otherwise hum-drum experience of reading mind-numbing accounts of history in which the authors didn’t seem to see their own sense of high-brow White maleness.

And with all of it, I surprised myself. I realized once again that my Black classmates and 616 neighbors were wrong about me not being Black enough. Their “Black” wasn’t my “Black,” of course. But all those books confirmed for me that there were many ways to be Black that folks who didn’t read could barely understand.

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.

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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

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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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.