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PROFILES
I have a question for suburban residents fighting against educational reform—school choice, charter schools, vouchers, revisions in the tenure system. Which category are you in?
Guilt: the past abhorrent treatment of minorities has led you to “help” the “oppressed” by lowering the academic bar so that students can “succeed” and gain the “self-esteem” so necessary to succeed in life. The result in urban education: a 50% freshman to senior drop-out rate, with a majority of the graduates requiring remedial education as their first courses in college. Your participation in racial dialogue is the monthly diversity lunch which lists all manner of ills to be confronted by others.
Closet Racist: Probably 80% of the minorities you interact with are in subservient jobs—and that is fine with you—you treat them nicely and after all, somebody has to do those tasks and why not the underschooled. Besides, if they were educated, they would compete with your kids, who we both know are already somewhat spoiled and frequently lazy.
Ignorant and Blissful: No fault of your own, you are not aware of the perfect correlation between family income and SAT scores, which leads you to be blissfully unaware of whether your precious school is adding any educational value at all. Since you have the time and money to be involved in your child’s education, much of which takes place outside of the classroom without you even thinking of it as education (trips to museums and abroad, etc.), you have this naïve belief that if parents everywhere were simply more interested in their children’s education, reform efforts would be unnecessary.
Your exercise of school choice was moving to an area where the “schools were better.” You do not realize that people elsewhere, with thinner wallets, simply want an analogous opportunity to exercise school choice.
Frustrated and Conflicted: You are aware of the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the education problem, and, on reflection over a Starbucks cappuccino, you and your friends have decided there is nothing you can do to change things, other than writing a check to ease the pain of frustration. You stay committed to family and job and remain apart from the need for controversy and dirty fingernails. You are rendered numb by the variety and scope of the tsunamis and big rocks confronting America at this point.
Proposal: Here is my request: enroll your children in a conventional urban school system—one where your child must attend the school building within your geographic zone, where showing up for school equals passing, and where many teachers work with an eye on the 2:32pm union mandated end-of-day clock. Then tell me how you feel about education reform.
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Be a Mentor by Monday
Mentoring is all the rage, especially among professionals who desperately want to “give back” without unduly interrupting their money-making activities. And what better way to accomplish the needed interaction between mentor and mentee than through e-mail, Skype, Facetime, Whatsapp, and other communication devices that are oh so convenient. No need to take oneself out of their comfort zone, to walk in the shoes of the young person being saved by the good wishes of the professional.
And many times no real training. Success instead emanates from a big heart and that caring attitude which is so typical of people working long hours to afford their McMansion in suburbia or their high-priced condo in center city. In no time at all, the minority kid will be happily posing for a photo-op, the non-minority arm triumphantly slung around the shoulders of this youngster who has been rescued from a life without hope. No need to delve into the reasons behind the latter; the emotional deficit can be filled by somebody picked from the mentor yellow pages.
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THIRTY THINGS IN A SCHOOL
Accountability without it, regression to the mean, or lower
Books portable repositories of both knowledge and stimuli
Budget Autonomy dollars and decisions must be coupled
Computers for meaningful research
Copiers quick response to situation
Critical Thinking Skills necessary for negotiating life
Dialogue discussions sharpen and broaden the mind
Dress Code delete consumer competition for a few hours
Extended Day/Year more challenges require more time
Goals if you don’t know where you are going, any route is fine
High Expectations better to aim high and fall short than succeed at low level
Hiring Autonomy vision, mission, and implementers must be linked
Intelligent Leadership necessary in any organization
Intentionality important purposes require a deliberative approach
Inquiry is necessary to stay current and to have perspective
Math without skill here, vulnerable to shenanigans of others
Open Doors friendliness and confidence re all constituencies
Orderliness saves time for important things
Parental Investment education is a 24/7 task
Passion makes the hard stuff easier and the journey fun
Phones communication needed among all involved
Purposefulness want to get some things done, and let others simmer
Reading a self-evident must
Small Classes are better for individuality and dialogue
Small School so everybody knows everybody
Smiles are much preferred to anything else
Teachers are the key ingredients to the whole deal
Teacher Talk Time to share ideas and stories and other information
Vision to be able to rise above the day and see the future
Writing helps all other skills, which in turn help writing
**
In addition to reading, writing, and math, learn keyboarding, dancing, swimming, bicycling, cooking. They facilitate social interaction and are sustainable skills/avocations throughout life.
Income Sharing Arrangements
A recent government study indicated the following correlation: for every dollar that federal financial aid provided to college students, tuition rose 65 cents. Which basically means that taxpayers en masse paid for the ability of higher education vendors to build fancy dormitories, compensate their professors at above-average rates and add administrative positions at a disproportionate pace.
Put another way, the net cost to students did not become cheaper, regardless of which combination of numbers one puts together. Current student debt levels exceeding $1.1 trillion, with default rates in the teens, are the bottom line.
Do there exist well-reasoned re-examinations of the cost structure of colleges. Yes, but they are confined to the readership of publications coming from a few think tanks. Higher education still manages, despite lamentably low graduation rates, to successfully use the defensive mantra of “you [the critics] do not understand.”
As a consequence, most providers of money to prospective collegians focus their efforts on the funding side of the issue without becoming activist on the issue of the cost of higher education. It is as if nobody cared about the cost of the car as long as the buyer could borrow the necessary money.
Leaving aside the historical role of outside college scholarship providers, there are now prospective additional entrants, who seem to have both an investor and non-profit mentality. What they do is provide funds to a college student for a stipulated portion of the net cost of college under an arrangement whereby the student repays the funding through a portion (4-5%) of his future earnings for a set number of years. (If there is sufficient financial clout and the energy to spend hours with bureaucratic college officials, the funders may actually come to a reasonably accurate figure on the true net cost of higher education, without in any way changing the obtuse overall nature of college accounting).
The student’s repayment does not go into the fund provider’s pocket but is recycled into funding for additional students. There may not be an attempt to connect inflation rates in either individual income or college tuition, which creates the risk of mismatches, most likely going against the individual. The out from the formula is that the repayment percentage does not change and once the set number of years has been met, the student no longer owes anything, regardless of how much money has been repaid. This means that if the student cannot pay back in a given year, the deficiency is not added to the unpaid balance of the debt.
This particular student funding gambit is labeled an “Income Sharing Arrangement” (ISA). Because it is outside the federal and state loan modus operandi, it may have a dual appeal to funders who are not impressed by the role of government in general and who like the incentive alignment of an ISA. Of course, the ISA is not completely devoid of government influence as it is affected by tax policies relevant to everything it does, whether it be investing or the involvement of non-profit entities or the unique position of higher education with respect to gift tax rules. Undoubtedly there are legal issues related to ISAs as well, which have yet to be decided upon by regulatory bodies or courts.
More importantly, an ISA could be a low-cost replacement for the government’s ultra-expensive Parent Plus Loan option, and much cheaper than conventional consumer credit.
The optics of an ISA seem to have the potential to be unfortunate: wealthy, mostly white benefactors seemingly being repaid (even if not to their own pockets) by college graduates from lesser income minority families. Such an arrangement seems likely to feed opponents of education reform, who constantly put forth the straw man of privatization (and more than a passing reference to racial divisions) to support their bogus case.
My own world in terms of funding collegians has had these characteristics: Hispanic, ESL, First Generation, low income—and more than a few documentation challenges. When I printed out the 15-page description of 13th Avenue Funding, an early non-profit ISA effort, I had a hard time imagining anybody I know—parents, students, school officials—being on the same page (pun intended). There is already enough of a bias against the indefinable legalese of lengthy written documents. There is already a screaming need for more guidance counseling, as in human interaction, not website print-outs.
Perhaps the target audience is those of whatever socioeconomic background who have the characteristics of (1) experience with formal financial commitments, (2) income that is too high for FAFSA-based financial aid but too low to afford the target school of their offspring, and (3) a prior college graduate somewhere in the family tree.
A more specific target audience is students from the handful of urban schools which have moved their standards of academic rigor to a level that matches well with of selective colleges. Said students can benefit at the college level from the money and the support services provided in the ISA approach.
Elsewhere, it is debatable whether the combination of ISA funding and services is relevant to students who have suffered from the generally abysmal academic preparation of most urban high schools in the country, which disproportionately affects urban minority students.
Still, If incentives are properly and consistently aligned, as mentioned earlier, and high quality services are provided, there will be some broadening of the attraction of the ISA. As is true in most cases of policy evaluation, the ISA idea must be looked at in comparison with …….. fill in the blank with other financial alternatives, each with its own combination of positives and negatives.
In any event, it would be incrementally helpful if every ISA dollar was matched ten to one by funding of well-designed college-relevant reform efforts that would be more than band-aids, maybe at least tourniquets anyway, for the broken legs of the current higher education system.
Pending such an effort (which some might say is slowly taking place, through the efforts of multiple change agents and the Obama administration), if an ISA can help students who otherwise could not get to and graduate from college, it is hard to deny its usefulness. The comments above should be regarded as cautionary issues, not an attack on the ISA concept.
Selective Schools
Why do many high achieving minority students not apply to selective schools?
*They are afraid of the unknown. This is a totally rational state of mind, not to be confused with adults refusing to try sushi but more akin to those who believe that somebody with a different style of clothing or speech or set of beliefs is automatically to be either feared or shunned. One response on many campuses is the formation of First Generation clubs, which, among other attributes, can offer the prospective collegian a welcoming hug. This approach, in a way, is also pertinent to the “I can’t be what I can’t see” dilemma.
But wait, the issue here is not applying in the first place. Back to square one.
*Perhaps there is an implicit recognition by the student that his high school achievements are not to be construed as adequate academic preparation for truly selective colleges. This of course leads to the issue of education quality in the nation’s schools in general, with special emphasis on urban high schools. Handling this live grenade requires a series of long essays, not a few words in a blog.
*They are simply unaware that they could be accepted by a selective college. Incredible as it may seem, it is not unusual for an Hispanic graduating from a predominantly Hispanic high school to hear a message that suggests he only can go to the local two-year school or to the world of work. Even a graduate of the community college may not have been apprised of the different four-year alternatives. (Note that if he or she is a skilled athlete or musician or a star participant in important school clubs, they probably have a greater degree of awareness brought to them by those who value their specific non-academic talent.)
*Inadequate documentation to make the student eligible for conventional (government-based, federal or state) financial aid is right up there with cost per se in dissuading a young person from applying to that expensive selective school. The rebuttal which points out that said school can offer a direct scholarship of substantial size is relevant, but the amount, even when really generous, may not be sufficient in the absence of any other aid. Left for another day is the philosophical debate between “a lot for a few versus a little for many” in terms of societal resources intended to support individual students and their college aspirations. Even within the minority community, there are those who advocate financing the equivalent of “free rides” to college for a defined number of projected leaders, as opposed to spreading those dollars over as many students as possible.
*The short bungee cord of a tight-knit family may be restricting the college search to a maximum of perhaps 100 miles from home, if that. Probably the only way this impediment (which many students would not even think of as a true negative) is solved is if the offspring of friends of the family have gone outside the mileage boundary and lived to tell their story of academic and career success.
*Diversity, ah yes, the magical word, not ever to be construed in a negative way. The automatic interpretation in the Latino world is the proportion of Latino students to those of other ethnicities. However, half of Hispanic students (yes, I am using the terms interchangeably) go to local two-year colleges, where they can easily stay connected to their high school friends. Diversity of the total enrollment is misleading at best.
Another large percentage are attending an HSI, an Hispanic Serving Institution, which by definition must have at least a 25% Latino student body. In reality, the percentage is usually much higher. Again, a type of diversity which is open to interpretation. None of this commentary should in any way imply that students are doing anything wrong in gravitating to their comfort zone, but the issue of applying to selective colleges typically circles back to whether those seeking diversity can envision themselves in classes where they are a small minority.
Collectively, the descriptors above cry out for the availability of better prepared, trained, empathetic, readily accessible (for free) guidance counselors, which ideally would be located at high schools, but could be found elsewhere. The issues pertinent to applying to college are all addressable, capability of being put in a framework that is understandable by the prospective college student, who can then choose to apply based on a fuller appreciation of all the factors involved.
Costco etc.
WHY IS COSTCO GOOD AND WALMART BAD?
WHY IS BEN & JERRY’S GOOD AND McDONALD’S BAD?
These are among the critically important philosophical questions of our times.
Costco and WalMart
On my semi-annual shopping trip to the nearby WalMart, I see ethnic diversity that is only matched by the rush hour crowds in a Port Authority Bus Terminal passageway. Income diversity — clearly not so much; one-third of WalMart patrons live completely paycheck to paycheck. They come to the store because product prices are stunningly low (a revelation I know).
One would imagine that those of good heart, the description of all liberals, would applaud such an endeavor as an economic benefit of major proportions to a diverse and needy consumer group. But no, there is constant sniping, and a sneering attitude by many, who prefer the more comfortable surroundings of a Costco, where greater discretionary incomes can buy much larger quantities of everything, including unneeded stuff (which certainly happens at WalMart as well).
“WalMart is the reason that small town merchants are being eviscerated” is a leading complaint. Presumably JC Penney, Sears, Macy’s, Kmart and a long list of other larger retailers never had any impact on their lesser-sized competition. Meanwhile, Amazon, which everybody loves because of its incredibly efficient order/delivery system, is in the process of competitively punishing every retaler with an immobile physical location, and making WalMart itself think more deeply about geographic spacing of its stores in the United States (it is closing a few outlets) and other operational issues.
Next—“WalMart does not pay its people well and its healthcare benefits are poor.” Let’s see, the overall turnover rate in the retail industry is about 50%–in six months, a number which historically has seemed impervious to well-intended training programs and which has argued against arbitrarily paying more than the compensation level at those extinct local businesses. (Nobody ever criticized a clothing store for simply hiring young customers who looked good in their clothes and giving them virtually zero training.) Business owners typically are not persuaded by the logic of pouring money into an approach which has no payback attached.
Ironically, WalMart itself is now ignoring much of the truism concerning retail staffing and is currently injecting both additional training and higher pay into its operating approach. It is doing this, not for political correctness, but for good business reasons, stimulated by incremental competition from below (dollar stores), the excesssive costs associated with such personnel turnover, and the need to create a better customer experience. And it is willing to suffer a decline in profits to accomplish its new approach. Will this revision in the company’s modus operandi ultimately prove beneficial? Who knows: the free market will provide that answer, not any of the critics.
As for healthcare plans, they are the subject of controversy and different approaches throughout corporate and entrepreneurial America alike. WalMart is only different in one respect –it is big, very big: 4500 stores in the USA alone.
Aha, a major discovery: “WalMart buys stuff made by low-paid workers in China.” Now that is an argument clincher, a revelation completely unique to WalMart, a business approach unknown to any other company on the Fortune 500 or 1000 or your neighborhood store. The issue of labor cost and conditions only arises when a person wants to make a political statement; otherwise, and for all the other products in either closet or pantry, the critic is mute. (From a philosophical standpoint, if labor and capital have no border controls, should people? But that is too heavy a concept to tackle in this essay.)
On the other hand, enter Costco and its more affluent shoppers: average household income of $75,000. Does anybody question whether the success of this company has cost jobs at prior suppliers to either wholesale or retail accounts? No, the people are nice (probably higher paid than at WalMart) and there is a pleasantness to the place. I dare say that some of the shoppers would admit, “there are more people like me here” (i.e., different from the situation at a WalMart, with its less privileged clientele).
Because of the good aura surrounding Costco, you do not hear about their sourcing patterns. Of course, neither do you hear anything about conditions relevant to the Far East seamstresses of haute couture dresses and gowns found in ultra chic Fifth Avenue shops.
Does anybody recall criticism of Costco, one of the largest booksellers in America, when the 40,000 employees of Borders lost their jobs. (Does anybody step back from an iPhone because of its sourcing situation? Nah, because we like, no love, the product. All other considerations ebb to nothingness, just as the Sierra Club builder of a vacation home does not omit Brazilian flooring because the Amazon rain forest is being cleared.)
Ultimately, the fundamental philosophical question is clear: who will be the decision-maker on which businesses live, which grow, and which slowly dwindle to nothingness. To paraphrase William F. Buckley, I would rather leave these decisions to the first twenty names in any phonebook than to twenty professors or twenty government officials.
Ben & Jerry’s and McDonald’s
I am salivating just thinking about it: four fluid ounces of chocolate fudge brownie ice cream! And only 270 calories. I will simply ignore the accompanying “nutritional” data: 22% of daily fat, including 45% of saturated fat; 23 grams of sugar, and 17% of daily cholesterol. Thirty days of eating this delicious food will bring joy to heart surgeons. But the perpetrators are good guys, their cows are “happy” and everything is fair-traded. Ben & Jerry’s, gotta love them.
When you “Super Size” your eating approach at McDonald’s, it has a similar deleterious impact on your health. But Mickey D’s is, boo, bad. Why—the company is big, corporate, does nasty things to its cows, and disproportionately promotes its unhealthy food to impressionable kids. Ben & Jerry’s, on the other hand, promotes its products to everybody. See the vital difference!
Meanwhile, please take a look at a chart of per capita sugar consumption plotted against the incidence of diabetes, then go to your local supermarket for an informed shopping experience.
The SAT
When I asked the graduate school student in Urban Education whether her distaste toward standardized tests extended to those given pilots or plumbers, she immediately switched gears to talk about poverty. I did not ask her whether we should water down education standards until poverty is resolved.
Despite the publicity when well-known colleges announce with a strange tone combining pride and defiance that they have dropped SAT scores from their application requirements, the test still means something, particularly given the correlation of its results to success in year one of college.
Professional educators often regard a 1000 combined score for the Reading and Math portions (ignoring the Writing segment, a calamity of sorts, but that’s for another essay) as being indicative of college readiness. Others use 1550 for the three test components combined.
The national average for the latest round of tests was 1490, uh, not good. (My home state of New Jersey weighed in with a 1520, comprised of 500, 521, and 499 respectively). Only 42% of SAT test-takers achieved the 1550 level, with the rate for Hispanics being 23% and that of African Americans, 16%.
Culturally biased questions (perhaps partly reflecting the inadequately diverse composition of the staff at ETS, creator of the SAT), inferior urban education systems, and second language situations are typically labeled as key factors behind antagonism toward the SAT. As an offsetting factor, many entities which work with students having subpar SAT results believe that they can be successful on college campuses where the average SAT is 100 points or higher, assuming there are adequate support services available.
Without in any way denying that the SAT can be improved — which in actuality is taking place (reacting to test question complaints and a loss of market share to the competitive ACT offering, previously reluctant Eastern institutions now are accepting both SAT and ACT results), there is a fear that negativity toward the SAT becomes sloppily conflated with a similar attitude toward standardized tests in general, resulting in reduced academic, and even aspirational, expectations.
If the Complete College America data are correct—5% of two-year college students earn their degree in two years and under 20% of four-year public college students earn their degree in four years—one suspects that defects in the SAT process are not a critical education reform issue, but simply one item on the long list of factors.
Gallup-Purdue Poll
In 2014, the Gallup-Purdue Index polled 30,000 adults with Bachelor’s Degrees. They asked these graduates about what they termed “support” and “experiential” factors, each relevant to what the student experienced at college. These factors were referred to as the “Big Six,” as they connected to how graduates believed their collegiate experiences prepared them for life.
The questions and responses are summarized in the following table:
| Support Factors | Experiential Factors | |||||||
| Had a professor who excited me about learning
63% |
Professors cared about me
27% |
Had an encouraging mentor
22% |
Had a
long-term project 32% |
Had a relevant internship
29% |
Active in college activities
20% |
|||
| # who agreed with all three: 14% | # who agreed with all three: 6% | |||||||
| Number of respondents who agreed with all six statements: 3% | ||||||||
These responses collectively demonstrate a disappointingly low level of agreement that important support and experiential factors are present at college. The data should be interpreted as another call to rework higher education to better serve its constituency.
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Why don’t Americans appear to care about Education
An interesting question!
It was posed by a highly intelligent woman, married but without children, who has a good job that does not overlap with any aspect of the educational system. The query was in response to a conversational observation by myself that America ranks in the 20’s worldwide when it comes to academic excellence.
Okay, here are some possible reasons:
*Americans are implicitly (mostly) arrogant, believing without the necessity for thought that the USA is number one in everything. After all, “we are the best country, right!” Ignorance is an inevitable partner of such an attitude.
*White America has nothing to gain—in terms of money or power—from a better-educated non-white population. An exception is made for those ultra-smart Asians (to some, conceptually thought of as being “white” because of their attitudinal and aspirational overlap) who are crucial to the engineering know-how behind many of the iDevices and social media technical innovations without which we apparently believe we simply could not function.
*The complete acceptance of single motherhood as simply a lifestyle decision is highly correlated with poorly paid, energy-depleted women who are often so exhausted by making ends meet that they are challenged to be there for their children in a way that is relevant to education.
*Relative newcomers to the country have misunderstood our non-national education system and have been less questioning of matters educational than would be true otherwise.
*In much of urban America, it is difficult to confront defensive teachers unions about the necessity for evaluation without appearing vindictive toward labor and minorities. And usually it is equally difficult for minority leaders to go public with productive criticism of their counterparts within the system.
*Taxpayers in affluent geographic areas who have indirectly sent substantial monies to financially challenged sectors of their states have become convinced that much of it has been for naught and doing more is simply a waste.
*The realization that economic mobility is not what it used to be is somewhat discouraging to those who might invest time, energy, and funds in education reform. If the pump cannot be primed in such fashion, why exert on the handle. Better to attack underlying conditions, particularly poverty.
*In the slightly modified words of the iconoclastic educator John Taylor Gatto, the education system actually does a good job once it is realized that the true metric for analyzing outcomes is whether the training of young people to become consumers, and nothing more, has been successful. Note that the big push regarding the growing Hispanic population is how white businesses can better market to them, not how their educational attainment can be lifted. The latter is being accomplished on their own.
Is Silence Golden?
“A Public Service Video for the Techno Generation”
**
Every person boarding the morning commuter bus has his or her earplugs firmly affixed, eyes intently focused on the iDevice in their hands.
Arriving at their financial employer, attention immediately shifts to the multiple multi-colored computer screens surrounding the cavernous room in which millions, perhaps billions, of dollars will be invested, transferred, and/or received with a single computer click, and nary a spoken word is necessary.
At other company offices, it may be information and not necessarily money which flies from one computer to another, each sender quietly ensconced in their constricted corporate cubicle.
Some of the above commuters are students. When in class, their professor silently puts his power point presentation up on the whiteboard. Without discussion, notes are taken by the students, in preparation for the on-line quiz which will follow the last slide.
In each of these cases, lunch is ordered by simply punching some buttons on the iDevice that everyone has at their disposal. To be without such a device is to be ostracized, to be like the fish on the dock, flopping wildly in a world which is no longer home.
For each of the commuters, the day passes wordlessly.
On returning home, he or she checks his or her home tablet, which has programmed the meal now circling in the microwave. A significant other is on their own tablet, while the child born of sudden, soundless sex is mesmerized by the cartoon on his Disney iDevice. When the child has a question, his parents press buttons on their iDevices and their thoughts are projected onto the nearest whiteboard-sized wall. The dog of the house slowly circles the living room, bewildered by his inability to make sense out of the headphones placed on his ears.
A series of pings indicates the various times when each member of the family is expected to wash, brush, and prepare for bed. A good night message automatically appears on the iDevice permanently attached to the night table in every bedroom.
**
As the credits roll at the end, the complete silence is broken: “thank you for watching.”