Tag Archives: Politics of Education

On Anachronistic Bullshit

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman get anachronistic between shots on set of Marie Antoinette (2006), September 2012. (Pinterest via http://buzzfeed.com).

Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman get anachronistic between shots on set of Marie Antoinette (2006), September 2012. (Pinterest via http://buzzfeed.com).

It’s that time of year in academia, folks. The heart of the fall scholarly conference schedule, between the beginning of October and mid-November (American Political Science Association conference as an exception, though). For the first time in a few years, I’m part of the schedule, as part of a panel on American imperialism and narcissism this weekend at the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians conference here in DC.

The topic is a departure for me. In the couple of dozen or so conference presentations I’ve done since the mid-1990s, I have discussed two interrelated topics. Multiculturalism in the contexts of US history, African American history, and education policy was one, and covered every presentation I did between 1992 and 2003. Education reform in the context of college access, retention, and diversity was the other, and covered every conference presentation or other talk I did from 2004 through 2009.

Bokeem Woodbine, October 12, 2015.

Bokeem Woodbine, October 12, 2015. (http://imdb.com)

I never wanted to be wedded to one topic my whole career. It was the academic equivalent of being typecast, like Bokeem Woodbine (thug) or Anthony Azizi (terrorist). But in the spring of 2003, there I was, doing conferences as “Dr. Multiculturalism,” either for the benefit of eager grad students or to the chagrin of more senior scholars.

No one really discusses this issue in academia. The idea that any of us can decide to move on to a completely different topic as a scholar, become engrossed in it, even become an expert and present and write on that topic, and then move on to the next one (yes, there are consequences, but…). At best, most scholars in academia have variations-on-a-theme careers, covering sports history and society, moving from baseball to football to tennis. Or from Black migration in the early 20th century to gentrification and its impact on Black families in the ’90s and ’00s. (It’s not as if many academicians can’t find the time to pick up another idea!)

What’s even worse are the ways in which we in academia beat up on each other’s work at conferences, and not in a constructively critical way, either (that would be refreshing). The key for me moving on from multiculturalism began at the 1999 Organization of American Historians conference in Toronto. I presented on “The Black Brahmins of Harvard: W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain L. Locke on
Multiculturalism, 1890-1940.” Admittedly, there were a few issues with the paper. I didn’t include any Black women in my consideration (although, given Harvard’s institutional racism and sexism in this period, Black women were almost nonexistent, including at the doctoral level). I had to deal with the Afrocentricity sect, who didn’t see multiculturalism as a fellow traveler, but instead as a Eurocentric “feel-good” understanding of US and Black culture.

Most importantly, I was being “anachronistic.” I had applied a term that hadn’t become commonplace until the 1970s to a previous period in history, one in which the term hadn’t been conceived. It didn’t matter that cultural pluralism had existed as a term since the 1890s and that many in the philosophy and education fields had used cultural pluralism and multiculturalism interchangeably. For this group of cultural and education historians, multiculturalism in my work equalled a no-go zone.

Jesus was a Socialist bumper sticker, an anachronism, October 12, 2015. (http://plus.google.com).

Jesus was a Socialist bumper sticker, an anachronism, October 12, 2015. (http://plus.google.com).

Though I managed a few short articles and a chapter on multiculturalism, time and time again, the question of anachronism came up. And despite all of my documented evidence, more senior scholars at journals refused to accept multiculturalism and Black history in the same sentence. “Surely you must be referring to Afrocentricity or Black Nationalism,” one reviewer for the Journal of American History wrote on a manuscript that he rejected in 2002.

It never occurred to me to call them directly on this bullshit. These same folks will write articles with titles like, “Was Jesus a Socialist?” or “a Marxist?,” or “Nat Turner’s Rebellion and the Birth of Black Nationalism.” Talk about anachronistic! Jesus and Karl Marx are roughly 1,800 years apart, and Black Nationalism is a specifically mid-to-late-twentieth century term. Yet this was much more all right than my early-thirties-self yammering about something as complex as multiculturalism and its role in the thinking and education of African Americans.

Beating a dead horse cartoon, September 2012. (Marc Cortez, http://marccortez.com).

Beating a dead horse cartoon, September 2012. (Marc Cortez, http://marccortez.com).

I’m hardly arguing that academicians who didn’t like my work should have seen my brilliance and allowed me to publish or present more on multiculturalism. Heck, by 1999, I was tired of my former dissertation topic already! A bit more honesty about what really bothered them, though, would’ve been helpful. The idea that ordinary people could be unconsciously participating in multiculturalist activities, in this case, ordinary Black folk, some academicians found unacceptable. The idea that I could write this was unacceptable to quite a few. The fact that my former patron in Joe Trotter wasn’t out there opening up doors for me on my topic left me in a bad place politically as well. I wasn’t supposed to be in academia, after all, at conferences or in scholarly journals. I know now that part of the point was to thin out the herd of competition, to anoint some and shun so many others, me included.

The constant rejection on fairly hypocritical grounds just made it easier for me to publish Fear of a “Black” America in ’04 and move on. Since I am at the beginning of the process of thinking through a new topic, I don’t have mental exhaustion as an excuse for crumbling in the face of soul-destroying, narcissistic opposition. I also have at least one thing going for me these days. I feel I’m old enough now to call numbskulls on their bullshit.

My and Diane Ravitch’s Path to Reign of Error

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Youth

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Reign of Error (2013) by Diane Ravitch, front cover. (http://bn.com).

Reign of Error (2013) by Diane Ravitch, front cover. (http://bn.com).

I first began reading Diane Ravitch in July 1990, the summer before my senior year at the University of Pittsburgh. It was the summer in which I became interested in understanding magnet programs and their relationship with desegregation and diversity efforts, courtesy of my own experience with Mount Vernon, New York public schools and its now defunct Humanities Program. I read both The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973 (1974) and The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (1985) that summer, with education scholar and Ford Foundation director Jeanne Oakes’ Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (1985) sandwiched in between.

It was the beginning of a twenty-year period of constantly intellectual disagreement between me and Ravitch. Oakes’ work captured inequality in terms of race and socioeconomics so much better than Ravitch, whose writings back then often treated these inequalities and distinctions as afterthoughts. When I shifted my research area to multicultural education and multiculturalism, though, that was when I found Ravitch’s absolutist defense of so-called traditional American democratic education and all things e pluribus unum unbelievably stifling. With all Ravitch knew about the politics of education, in New York and with the US Department of Education, how could she possibly defend a system that did as much to control and exclude students as it did to provide something akin to an equal opportunity?

I chalked Ravitch up to being another out-of-touch neoconservative, scared to death of race and diversity and multiculturalism. I said as much at conferences like the American Educational Research Association meeting and other conferences. I wrote as much in my dissertation and in my first book, Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004). Through it all, I always found Ravitch’s writing compelling, but her conclusions wanting, because they lacked perspective and empathy in the context of public schools and diversity.

Then, Ravitch wrote Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform in 2000. Though it contained some of her common themes — overemphasis on the mantra of reform, the need for more testing, support for school choice, denigration of a multicultural curriculum — Ravitch showed growth in this book. She was less hostile to a more progressive curriculum and seemed, for the first time, really, to understand how much race and poverty had shaped the direction and the harshness of school reform going back to 1900. I happily used Ravitch’s Left Back in my History of American Education Reform course at George Washington in 2002. For her book provided a comprehensive and even-handed overview of the politics of K-12 education in a way that any educator of any American ideological perspective could understand.

I’ve finally read Ravitch’s Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013). Reign of Error is Ravitch at her most passionate and energized. If I hadn’t read a couple dozen of Ravitch’s articles from the 1980s and 1990s and four of her previous books, I would think that this was her first book, as there is sense of urgency in Reign of Error that can seldom be found outside of epic memoirs and epic fiction novels.

Ravitch’s argument in Reign of Error is a simple one. Corporate education reform, if allowed to continue unfettered, will destroy public education in the US, and in the process, American democracy. Privatizing public schools (i.e., turning them into “public” charter schools), destroying teacher’s unions, constant high-stakes testing, bypassing school boards and forgetting about racial segregation and poverty — that’s corporate education reform’s agenda. As Ravitch said in Chapter 12 on the fallacies of merit pay for teachers, “Merit pay is the idea that never works and never dies (p. 119).” She could have also substituted the words “school choice,” “creationism,” “standardized testing,” “closing schools,” and “privatization” for “merit pay.”

But Ravitch goes further in her 400-page treatise. That though public education in the US has had its share of problems — the need for more teacher training and time for professional development, racial segregation and high levels of poverty while underfunded — that corporate education reform has compounded these problems several times over. That with corporate education reform, teachers, parents and students will have no say in public education, at least the ones without their own personal foundation with which to endow their own public charter school.

From a writer’s standpoint, this wasn’t Ravitch’s best effort. Her argument is repetitive, one where she likely could’ve cut the main chapters by a quarter (about 100 pages) and made the same points. I likely could’ve become inebriated if I had a shot of vodka every time the words “poverty,” “Gates,” “Walton,” “Broad,” “high-stakes testing,” and “corporate education reform” come up. But given my history with reading Ravitch and with this topic, of course Reign of Error was repetitive — it was like reading my own words on this same topic.

Ultimately, Ravitch’s Reign of Error is a primer for anyone interested in averting the social injustice that is the corporate education reform tyranny of wealthy philanthropists, money-grubbing entrepreneurs and politicians across America’s limited ideological spectrum. For those whom up to now this issue has been of limited interest, or for those who’ve felt the change in public education but haven’t quite been able to articulate those feelings, Reign of Error is for you.

For educators, parents and even students already involved in writing about or protesting against corporate education reform, this book is still for you. Ravitch provides so much ammunition that Reign of Error can be applied in numerous ways to numerous situations. At school board meetings. With #AskMichelleRhee hash tags on Twitter. In job interviews with Teach for America and with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In letters to the editor of the mainstream newspapers and in comments to mainstream TV and radio newscasters. In arguments with neoconservative parents who send their kids to private schools.

“Protecting our public schools against privatization and saving them for generations of American children is the civil rights issue of our time (p. 325).” is how Ravitch ended her Reign of Error. It’s not an exaggeration. But it does beg a question. If we can successfully fend off corporate education reform — and assume that the country will continue to ignore the poverty and racial segregation that Ravitch desperately wants addressed — can she and I then spend five minutes discussing multiculturalism?

The Road to Boy @ The Window, Part 4: Fear of a “Black” America

26 Thursday Sep 2013

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FearBookCover3copy

Given that Fear of a “Black” America was my first book, but one based on my doctoral dissertation, and that Boy @ The Window is a memoir, the road from one to the other may not be that obvious with an initial glance. But despite the intellectual, semi-scholarly nature of my book on Blacks and multiculturalism, there are parallel themes that run between Fear of a “Black” America and Boy @ The Window. Perhaps none are more important, though, than the challenge of authenticity, of fitting in, of being able to mesh the complicated onion that I’ve found myself to be over the years.

I think that was why I decided in November ’98 to turn my dissertation “A Substance of Things Hoped For” into a more readable book. Yes, after all that work to write a 505-page thesis, it would’ve been a shame to just let it sit on my then girlfriend’s coffee table, to be used either as a door stop or a base for her doing her nails. Yes, I still had something to prove to academia. That my scholarship as a historian and educator on the issue of multiculturalism was sound. That the conventional academic wisdom around Blacks, people of color and multiculturalism was paternalistic fear-mongering.

Public Enemy, Fear Of A Black Planet (1990) Album Cover

Public Enemy, Fear Of A Black Planet (1990) Album Cover

And in thinking that last part through, I came up with my Public Enemy-inspired title and thread for the first book. It was about fear in many forms. Elite White fears of a majority-people-of-color US within their own lifetimes. Conservative fears of a K-16 education system that included the cultural and historical perspectives of peoples of color, of the poor, of women, of the LGBT, of so many others they’d rather discard. General American skepticism that any Blacks had ever given any thought at all to cultural pluralism, intercultural education, or multiculturalism/multicultural education, at least before White theorists had thought through these ideas first.

Afrocentrists and nationalists who thought of multiculturalism as soft and utterly unrepresentative of the Black experience — or, at least, what they considered an authentic version thereof? That was as difficult a challenge as any I faced in writing both my dissertation and Fear of a “Black” America. So much so that I made a few interesting decisions along the way. I sought out an agent — yes, a literary agent — for the first book, and found one, too (things were so much easier in ’99). I wanted the book to have an impact beyond academia.

In the writing process, I decided to weave the theme of fear, skepticism, willful and inadvertent misunderstandings throughout the 200-page book. All while covering Black intellectual thought about what we now call Afrocentricity and multiculturalism, Black activism and activities around education and Negro History Week, and the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s. All to show that multiculturalism was/is a part of America’s evolution, even if some folks are gnashing their teeth and wearing sackcloth and ashes along the way.

One thing was missing, though, from my six chapters. Me, in a word. Yes, my argument was crystal clear, my evidence was sound, my notes and analysis lined up well enough by the summer of ’00. Yet, as my one-time agent noted, “there’s not enough of you in this manuscript.”  Bottom line: folks weren’t going to buy the book unless I made it more compelling, which meant putting something of me or about me in it.

So I did. I wrote mostly about my experiences in academia and how they paralleled with some of the critical issues in Fear of a “Black” America. I talked about my Duquesne University students in the College of Education in ’98 and ’99, most of whom were cultural conservatives. I brought up conversations I had with professors skeptical about my scholarship, like Richard Altenbaugh in March ’98 or my former dissertation advisor Joe Trotter in April ’96. I also wrote about my conversation with Estelle Abel over my lack of authenticity as a young Black man in June ’87, having thought about it for the first time in thirteen years. I wasn’t sure if that made Fear of a “Black” America any better, but it made me feel better about my first book.

By the time I’d given my agent the final draft of Fear of a “Black” America in October ’00, I was ready — maybe for the first time in years — to take a look at my life before Pitt, grad school, Spencer Fellowship and becoming Dr. Collins. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to open up the emotional side of that Pandora’s box just yet. But in some ways, I really needed to, precisely because of my experiences with people in grad school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon. And precisely because of my occasional moments of rage and overreaction, if only because Fear of a Black “America” helped me tap into emotions I didn’t know I had.

Teaching Teachers – and Learning, Too

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

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Sad teacher, May 9, 2013. (http://www.guardian.co.uk).

Sad teacher, May 9, 2013. (http://www.guardian.co.uk).

I’ve been in a classroom as a lecturer, teaching assistant, teaching fellow, instructor, or professor off and on since November ’91, and consistently as an adjunct associate professor for the past five and a half years. I’ve taught roughly 2,000 students in that time (not counting the high school students I worked with when I was Director of Curriculum with Presidential Classroom in ’99 and ’00). I’ve probably had about 100 or so difficult to impossible students in that time. But no group of students I’ve taught have been more difficult for me to work with than teachers, actual and aspiring. Yet I’ve learned more about teaching from teachers in my classroom than from any other group of students.

This month marks fifteen years since I taught my first graduate course, History of American Education at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It was my first opportunity to teach since I’d graduated from Carnegie Mellon University the spring before. It didn’t necessarily show. I figured out fairly quickly, though, that the students in this required education foundations courses weren’t the wide-eyed grinders I had during my Carnegie Mellon years.

Twenty-two students in all were in my course, and nearly half of them were already in the classroom at suburban schools scattered through Western Pennsylvania. Most of my students had at least five years on me, and the youngest was my age, twenty-eight years old. I had only one Black student, and a classroom full of ready-to-be-bored White women with low expectations for any history course. On top of that, we were supposed to meet for two hours a day, five days a week for six weeks. And all for the wonderful salary of $1,935!

Canevin Hall (where I taught for four semesters, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, June 5, 2013. (http://w4.campusexplorer.com).

Canevin Hall (where I taught for four semesters, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, June 5, 2013. (http://w4.campusexplorer.com).

I wasn’t intimidated. But I probably should’ve been. I taught the course as if I was teaching a watered down upper-level undergraduate history course, great if the course was only for history majors or high school history teachers (of which I had two or three). With so many actual teachers in my classroom, though, I realized by the beginning of the second week that they were privately critiquing my teaching style. They noted that I lectured too much, that I didn’t facilitate discussions well when I did have discussions, that my paper assignments were too open-ended for a group of classroom and aspiring teachers.

A student who didn’t like their B+ on the first paper assignment aggravated some of the tensions in this first class. She stood up during my review of their first papers and yelled that her master’s “thesis committee didn’t find as many problems with [her] writing” as I did. I said in response, “Well, I didn’t read your master’s thesis or grade it, for that matter.” Just short of losing control of my classroom, I met with the student in the hallway to settle her down (albeit by threatening to report her actions in my classroom to the dean) after that class meeting.

That first semester resulted in a love-hate relationship with the teachers I taught. Most truly liked the way I related US history to the short and winding history of American education. About a sixth of my students tore me apart in evaluations, criticizing everything from my lecture style to how I pronounced certain words with a “New York” or “Black” accent.

This only grew worse in my fall ’98 graduate course. I truly thought I’d drawn the worst group of students ever. Fourteen in all, and none of them seemed interested in earning an MAT (Master’s in Teaching), much less in an ed foundations course. They never seemed to do the readings, much less understand them.

Chicken and broccoli stir-fry over rice, February 2013. (http://slimimzsolutions.com).

Chicken and broccoli stir-fry over rice, February 2013. (http://slimimzsolutions.com).

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, one of my students brought a chicken and broccoli stir-fry dinner to class, which she proceeded to eat during the lecture portion of my class. She continued during the break and into the discussion. No one was prepared. I finally asked, “How many of you have done the readings for this week?” Not a single student raised their hands. I immediately dismissed the class for the week, adding “there’s no need for us to have a discussion this week, then.” I said to the female student intent on eating her way through a three-hour class, “Now you have plenty of time to eat. Don’t bring your dinner to class again.”

I was so frustrated with this group of students. I mean, they were grad students, right? They seemed about as motivated as a group of ninth-graders at a low-performing school, on the verge of dropping out. I decided to do some background checking into my students, and realized that most of them barely met the 2.5 GPA requirement for the MAT program at Duquesne.

That’s when I also realized that some of what my students had said about me during my summer course was correct. I did lecture too much. I didn’t devote enough time to discussion. I never discussed what I wanted to see in their papers. Most importantly, I didn’t meet my students where they were before raising their expectations in their own academic performance. I treated them as if I didn’t care if they learned the material, even though I obviously did care.

I immediately began to apply these minor epiphanies in the last six weeks of this class, with my students more involved as I became more of a facilitator and less of a lecturer. While this group was hard on me in their evaluations, they also noted how their views of history as teachers had changed. Meanwhile, my views on teaching had changed, and for the better.

Remembering Harold Meltzer

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

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Harold Meltzer obituary (via Frank Pandolfo), January 9, 2003. (Westchester Journal News).

Harold Meltzer obituary (via Frank Pandolfo), January 9, 2003. (The Journal News).

Harold Meltzer, my favorite and best teacher of all, died on January 2, 2003 at the age of sixty-six, ten years ago last week. He was all too young and all too bitter about his years as a history teacher at Mount Vernon High School. But then, dealing with entitled parents and unrepentant administrators in Mount Vernon, New York for thirty-five years would do that to most people. Despite that, Meltzer was a rock, the first teacher since my elementary school years that I genuinely trusted with my family secrets and my inner self. He was the first and maybe only teacher I had in my six years of Humanities who actually seemed like he wanted to teach us (see my post “No Good Teaching Deed Goes Unpunished” from May ’11).

I met Meltzer on our last day of tenth grade, after three days of finals and Regents exams, on June 21, ’85. He had summoned fourteen of us to “Room 275 of Mount Vernon High School,” as the invitation read. We had all registered to take Meltzer’s AP American History class in eleventh grade, our first opportunity to earn college credit while in high school.

Meltzer started off talking to us about Morison and Commager — who I now know as the great consensus historians of the ’50s, until the social history revolution made their textbooks irrelevant by the ’80s — as we sat in this classroom of old history books and even older dust and chalk. Meltzer himself looked to be in his late-fifties (he was actually a day away from his forty-ninth birthday), tall and lanky except for the protruding pouch in the tummy section. His hair was a mutt-like mixture of silver, white and dull gray, and his beard was a long, tangled mess.

Met Logo and A full house, seen from rear of stage, at the Metropolitan Opera House (former bldg, 39th Street), for a concert by pianist Josef Hofmann, November 28, 1937. (National Archives via Wikimedia). In public domain.

Met Logo and A full house, seen from rear of stage, at the Metropolitan Opera House (former bldg, 39th Street), for a concert by pianist Josef Hofmann, November 28, 1937. (National Archives via Wikimedia). In public domain.

The way he spoke, and the way his eyes looked when he spoke made me see him as a yarmulke-wearing preteen on his way to temple. The force with which his words would leave his mouth hit me immediately. As much as I noticed how frequently spit would spew out of Meltzer’s mouth, the rhythm of his speech was slow and sing-song, like an elder or grandfather taking you on a long, winding, roller-coaster-ride of a story. Most of all, I knew that he cared — about history, about teaching, about us learning, about each of us as people. Maybe, just maybe, for some of us, he cared too much.

But for at least for me, Meltzer’s eccentric space in which he told Metropolitan Opera House stories and talked about egalitarianism extended beyond the historical. He was the first teacher I had since before Humanities who’d ask me if things at home were all right, and knew intuitively that things weren’t. He was the first to ask me about how poor my family was and about hunger. And he was the first teacher ever to ask if I had a girlfriend. Needless to say, these questions were unexpected. Yet through these questions, Meltzer had begun to crack my thin, hard wall of separation between school and family.

Because Meltzer cared deeply about reaching students — about reaching me — our student-teacher relationship because a friendship after high school and a mentoring one as well. I wasn’t looking for a mentor, and Meltzer was only being Meltzer. Still, his stories about his battles with MVHS administrators, Board of Education folk, and with upper-crust parents who believed their kids were entitled to A’s just for showing up, were filled with lessons of perseverance, patience, and looking beyond everyday headaches in order to reach people. While this wasn’t a factor in my going to graduate school and spending a significant part of my life as a history professor and educator, these stories have helped me over the years.

1972 Dodge Dart Dark Green (similar to '74 Dodge Dart Meltzer owned when I was at MVHS), December 25, 2009. (http://www.fotosdecarros.com).

1972 Dodge Dart Dark Green (similar to ’74 Dodge Dart Meltzer owned when I was at MVHS), December 25, 2009. (http://www.fotosdecarros.com).

But unfortunately, it was a factor in why Meltzer became embittered and took early retirement in June ’93. The end of the Humanities Program, the intolerance of some administrators toward Meltzer as a “confirmed bachelor,” the lack of decency — forget about gratitude — from many of his most successful students. Those changes, these things, all would take a toll on any teacher who’d stay after school day after day to run Mock Trial, to facilitate study groups, to work on letters of recommendation for students. But no, most of my former classmates who had Meltzer between ’85 and ’87, all they could say was that “Meltzer was weird” or that “I didn’t understand” his lessons.

I’m thankful that I did have Meltzer as a teacher, friend and mentor between ’85 and ’02. I’m thankful that I had a chance to interview him for what is now my Boy @ The Window manuscript in August and November ’02, just a couple of months before he passed (see my post “Mr. Meltzer” from June ’09). I’m glad that despite his physical and psychological pain, Meltzer welcomed me with open arms and answered my questions about his life and his career. I just wish that my former classmates and some of Meltzer’s more cut-throat colleagues had taken the time to really know the man.

December Doctoral Decisions

13 Thursday Dec 2012

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Saint Wolfgang and The Devil [Faustian Bargain], by Michael Pacher, ca. 1471-1475, Munich, Germany, February 19, 2009. (The Yorck Project via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Saint Wolfgang and The Devil [Faustian Bargain], by Michael Pacher, ca. 1471-1475, Munich, Germany, February 19, 2009. (The Yorck Project via Wikipedia). In public domain.

It was this time twenty years ago that I decided to transfer from the University of Pittsburgh to Carnegie Mellon to complete my PhD in history. It was a solid tactical decision on many levels. The strategy, however, was a bust, although the reasons for this failure wouldn’t become apparent for several years.

I made the decision to leave Pitt based on at least three deficiencies. One, I was a doctoral student who’s dissertation research would be about multiculturalism, education, and a Black urban community (I hadn’t decided on Washington, DC yet). The only person in the history department with expertise in African American history was Larry Glasco, my advisor, and it had become obvious by the beginning of the 1992-93 school year that his interests had shifted to Afro-Caribbean studies, specifically Afro-Cuban history (see my post “Larry Glasco and the Suzy-Q Hypothesis” from August ’11). Larry’s understanding of such things as Black migration studies, Black education and Black intellectual developments pretty much stopped with the year he took his job at Pitt, 1969 (the year I was born).

Two for moving on from Pitt came out of my interactions with other professors and grad students in the department and in the School of Education. It was obvious during the fall of ’92 that most of my professors found me an enigma, from Dick Oestriecher’s “exceptional Black man” allowances in class (see my post “Dairy Queens, Dick Oestriecher and Race” from February ’11) to some colleagues’ comments about how easy I made grad school look (especially since I had time to talk and go up the hill to shoot hoops).

Hammer & Sickle & Pitt Flag [symbolic of Pitt's history department], December 13, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Hammer & Sickle & Pitt Flag [symbolic of Pitt’s history department], December 13, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

I realized that in a department that placed a premium on American working-class studies, on the supremacy of class warfare and neo-Marxism above any other historical field, that my chances for graduating anytime before the year 2000 were slim. And forget about picking up a fellowship or grant to do my dissertation research or finding a job if and when I did graduate! There were still professors at Pitt — like Reid Andrews (now department chair) and the former department chair Richard Smethurst — who didn’t even think I was “grad school material,” and they said as much. I was an anomaly in an anomalous department (see my “Letter of Recommendation (or Wreck-o-mendation)” post from September ’10).

I did consider doing a PhD in education at Pitt, with possibly Bruce Anthony Jones as my advisor, or someone more senior like Bill Thomas. Bruce, though, discouraged me from that idea, as he was only an assistant professor at the time. It was obvious that Bill Thomas was a popular professor, so much in demand that I’d be lucky to meet with him three times in a semester to discuss his work, much less my own.

And I already had that kind of relationship with Larry. My third reason that led to my decision to transfer to Carnegie Mellon involved a very angry Larry at the end of November ’92. You see, one of the requirements for getting to the end of coursework status was the completion of a quantitative methodology course or the completion of a project in which quantitative methods drove said project.

I decided on the latter, but told Larry that between teaching four sections of US Since 1877 with over 100 students and taking three grad seminars with 1,500 pages of reading per week, that I wouldn’t be doing an independent study with him that fall. I said that I’d carve out time “on my own” to get started this fall, but wouldn’t be prepared to complete the quantitative methods project until the spring semester.

Cartoon on data points & regression analysis involving drug trials, December 13, 2012. (http://www.landers.co.uk).

Cartoon on data points & regression analysis involving drug trials, December 13, 2012. (http://www.landers.co.uk).

So after I presented some of my early findings regarding 1910 census data and infant mortality rates among Black women in Pittsburgh to Larry’s History of Black Pittsburgh class, we met to discuss how far I’d gotten in my regression analysis. I hadn’t done much with the variables yet, simply because I hadn’t had the time in November to do any off-time work. Larry became furious, said that he was “disappointed in me,” and wondered aloud if I’d make it through this year as a grad student. When I pointed out for a second time that I was doing this work in my spare time — not as an independent study course, not for a grade — he finally remember what we had discussed in August.

Larry did apologize, profusely. But I was pissed. “You’re only advising one active student, and you can’t remember what I’m working on,” I thought. With Joe Trotter at Carnegie Mellon attempting to woo me into their program, with me already taking his grad seminar in African American history, and with the writing on the wall at Pitt (where I’d already earned my B.A. and M.A. in history), I set up a meeting with Joe in mid-December to explore the possibility of transferring.

Although it would’ve been a worse decision to stay at Pitt, leaving for Joe Trotter and Carnegie Mellon was just about the worst decision I’d made as an adult (see my post “The Audacity of Youth, Grad School Style” from August ’11). For it set up so many of my other career decisions and choices I’ve made in the two decades since.

A school of education would’ve made more sense for me and the research I wanted to pursue, after all. But I would’ve had to think beyond Western Pennsylvania, taken a year off, and then pointed at Stanford, Harvard, UPenn or Teachers College as possibly better choices, better situations. Chris Rock is right. “Life is long, when you make the wrong decisions.”

We Called Him Mr. Lewis

03 Monday Dec 2012

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

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Screenshot from To Sir, with Love (1967), December 3, 2012. (http://movies.tvguide.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws - pic's low resolution/subject matter for blog.

Screenshot from To Sir, with Love (1967), December 3, 2012. (http://movies.tvguide.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – pic’s low resolution/subject matter for blog.

The dumb technocratic class (Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, Steve Perry, Arne Duncan) and the assholes who fund them (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ExxonMobil, US Department of Education) continue to pump out the mantra that effective teachers are the single most important variable in student performance, retention and graduation. This despite a half-century’s worth of research showing that family income was the far more important piece of data.

But even if Kopp, Rhee and Perry’s snake oil somehow turned out to be true, the fact is, the high-stakes testing movement and No Child Left Behind (and now Race to the Top) has turned effective teachers into lab leaders teaching to state-wide tests. Our current K-12 regime makes it so that ineffective teachers can be seen as effective because they’re only concerned with higher test scores, not actual learning. And some of them, not even concerned with that.

About this time thirty years ago, I had a group of wholly ineffective teachers in my tenth grade Humanities classes at Mount Vernon High School (see my posts “Half-Baked Z and Christian Zeal” from September ’10 and “This…Is…Jeopardy” from March ’11). Mr. Lewis was but one example of an unimaginative instructor. He was our Level 1 Chemistry teacher. We started his class in a very tense situation. There were fifty-one students in our class to start the year because the school administrators had failed to hire a new Level 0 (the highest level for the highest of the high-performing students) teacher for Chemistry. Our future valedictorian and other Level 0 folks spent a month protesting to the head of the Science Department, Estelle Abel, about the overcrowding and the mixing of the two levels. It took nearly two months before the situation was resolved. By that time, November ’84, none of us wanted Lewis for a teacher.

His was a class that could be fun and entertaining, but not usually educational. Sometimes our chemistry education came with errors and miscalculations. Perhaps his mistakes piled up because it was seventh period and near the end of the school day. Or maybe we were tired and inattentive.

Marlboro cigarette butts, September 19, 2007. (bachmont via Wikipedia/Flickr.com). In public domain.

Marlboro cigarette butts, September 19, 2007. (bachmont via Wikipedia/Flickr.com). In public domain.

The truth was that Lewis was a teacher with a serious chemical addiction. His was a chain-smoking world. When he opened up the door to the storage room where the test tubes and Pyrex jars were, stale cigarette smoke entered the room. His teeth were a pasty yellow, and they had a film that seemed to build up on them and in his mouth by the time we had him at the end of the day. On more than one occasion, Lewis would get phlegm caught in his mouth while in the middle of one of his lectures. Then he’d pause as he gulped the phlegm, and then he kept going. It was absolutely disgusting.

One day I met with Mr. Lewis after class to discuss my struggles with the material. He was at the front lab table sitting on a stool. In front of him on the table were fifteen Marlboro cigarettes, all lit and neatly lined up in a row. During our ten minutes together, he smoked one cigarette after another, sucking them down so fast that he had to pause to clear his throat from time to time. By the time I left, he’d gone through twelve out of fifteen, and I smelled like I’d been at one of my father Jimme’s bars. I was more than sure that Lewis’ nicotine dependency was a factor in his inability to teach Chemistry to us well (Cigarettes And Coffee, by Otis Redding).

My grades for the year going into the last weeks of the school year had ranged between an unimpressive 70 and an 87. But with the New York State Regents Exam in Chemistry coming up, Lewis was nonchalant in his attempts to prepare us for the Regents. Lewis went as far as to say, “There’s nothing to worry about” on the subject of organic chemistry. “There will be hardly any organic chemistry on the exam, anyway,” he said. After eight months of listening to his blathering, I thought “That’s it!” The next time I got money from Jimme, I  bought the Barron’s Chemistry Regents exam prep book. It was just before Memorial Day, and I had a month before the exam.

Barron's Regents Exams & Answers Chemistry (2011), December 3, 2012 (http://barnesandnoble.com).

Barron’s Regents Exams & Answers Chemistry (2011), December 3, 2012 (http://barnesandnoble.com).

On my Chemistry Regents I scored a 95, the third or fourth highest grade in the school (the highest grades were a 99 and 97 that year). My score raised my final grade in Lewis’ class six points, from a 79 to an 85. My score left me feeling jaded and disillusioned. “Wow,” I thought. “My teachers really don’t know much more than I do!” I knew that a lot of my Level 1 Chemistry classmates didn’t fare so well on the exams, because they believed Lewis when he said that there wouldn’t be much organic chemistry on the exam. By my own count during the exam, between thirty-five and forty of the 100 questions were organic chemistry ones.

It took having Meltzer for AP US History in eleventh grade for me to trust teachers again. I didn’t need anyone to teach tests to me. I needed a teacher who could help me open up a door into myself and into a world I hadn’t explored before. And millions of students — especially of color and from impoverished backgrounds — need teachers free to do that, without the threat of high-stakes tests hanging over them like a boulder.