To Raise Graduation Rates, Focus on Poor and Working Class Kids

In spite of the concerns of “to be determined”, the first two proposals are right in line with what we’ve known about the sociology of education since James Coleman’s work of 50 years ago. Socioeconomic integration raises the cultural dynamics of K-12 education. Our focus on “neighborhood schools” (which pairs too easily with de facto segregation) works in the opposite direction. The challenge with the TRIO program solution is that by the time its participants make it to college, they’ve adopted a host of poor skills and knowledge gaps that are very difficult to remediate.

If only the problem were as “easy” as stupid and lazy. The true challenge runs much deeper in the social structures we’ve built that perpetuate inequality.

Sounds like you have doubts that a silk purse can be made of a sow’s ear when the sow is from a pigsty whose inhabitants do not value silk purses and resent any of their members trying to get or become one.  

Old news in terms of research. We’ve known for a long time low SES impacts postsecondary success negatively. In practice, it is apparently easier to engage in racial profiling to develop a mish-mash of programs for the at-risk groups. Attention to correct postsecondary at-risk conditions needs to start at least in middle school. A child who can’t read in the fourth grade will be remediated and at college-level reading when s/he is 20 years old after a semester of remediation – really? Not to mention all the other social skills that are lacking. 

The report seems to miss an obvious proposal. Examine the research on what works for retaining and graduating low-income students and then replicate those things. The third proposal touches on the idea but assumes that it’s just TRIO and GEAR UP that work. We should look for the ”positive deviances” in variety of institutions and settings. What’s happening at those community colleges that are the very best in the nation in terms of graduation rates? Which four-year public universities have the best graduation rates and what are they doing? Same for private four-years. It’s probably not actually worthwhile looking at the very elites, like the Ivy League. Take one UC campus like UCLA or UC Berkeley and you’ll find that they enroll more low-income students than the entire Ivy League combined. 

Actually, it sounds like neither you (jffoster) or tdb489 understand what Kahlenberg is recommending based on the report.  Perhaps you don’t recognize the silk threads that exist in low-income communities and therefore are apt to miss the opportunity to weave many more silk purses with some careful cultivation.  Your assumption (at least what I detected as an assumption) that low-income students are bereft of capacity to achieve academic success is exactly the prejudiced attitude that contributes to maintaining a system that discriminates unfairly against low-income students.  Being poor or working class does not equate to being “stupid” per tdb489 nor being a sow’s ear per your comment.

As a working class, first generation college student who graduated from one of the most selective undergraduate colleges in our nation, I recognize that my educational preparation did not match that of my much more affluent classmates yet I successfully completed my BA, earned both a masters and doctorate with honors and have worked successfully for 30+ years in higher education.  I am not unique or special – just lucky to have had the chance to attend a first-class undergraduate college that prepared me far better than my local community college could have done.  There are many more working class and low-income students who can replicate and even surpass my academic success if given the opportunity to attend first-class undergraduate colleges.  The recommendations listed above can make that opportunity more likely for other students.

This post and the ensuing discussion appear to me to be rattling about in a silo. What do Mr. Kahlenberg and the commentators think about the arguments put forward by other Chronicle bloggers (such as Richard Vedder and Peter Wood), that the students who do complete college end up with a largely empty and valueless “education”? The President’s airy demand that the country achieve an arbitrary college completion rate begs the question of what value that completion brings–apart from the value to institutions hungry for more tuition dollars. Indeed, the arguments about the bubble in higher ed suggest that increasing attendance and completion through the inevitable student grants and funding for remediation will only dilute the content of higher ed further. Perhaps this time it will be different … But that seems an argument that Kahlenberg et al. must at least address, if the dreamed-of 60% completion is not to undermine its own worth. In the absence of such an engagement with the fundamental questions, their proposals sound more motivated by a desire to reengineer society than to improve education. Which I suspect is the case.

 I, too, continue to question the entire ‘Obama’ proposal for higher graduation rates.  Wrong metric + wrong goal = wrong means suggested.  

We collectively might want more equity based on merit, rather than the circumstances of birth, so we might want to give lower SES more of a boost so that opportunity is indeed equal.  I support that.  

But that doesn’t mean more should go to college & graduation – wrong goal, wrong metric.  Instead, the goal should be to provide them a better foundation much, much, earlier.  Plenty of studies devoted to the importance of earlier interventions providing more bang for the buck – not just in terms of educational attainment, but lower crime rates, etc.  For my 2 cents, we should insist that K-12 do a -much- better job than it has in the last 50 years.  Unfortunately, public education has become a battlefield between & among adults – administrators & teachers who want more compensation for the same outcomes – and children, who not only don’t come 1st, they come last, behind the adults: politicians, unions, administrators, parents, etc., i.e., those that vote now.

As others have pointed out, putting more people in schools doesn’t necessarily provide them with any better education – plenty of studies suggesting they don’t, and certainly not in any fields that will actually add to the US economic capacity in the world: our economy, and the world’s, don’t ‘need’ any more folks concentrated in studies where we already have a tremendous surplus of talent.  Just look at the job market for higher education – part-time adjuncts more & more the norm, with even more being supplied to the market every year.  Talk about an incredible miss-match between supply & demand … driving labor costs down … And on the other side, we actually import much of our educated talent from overseas: engineering, math, science, etc.  And health care in particular.  We might help ourselves collectively if we steered more of our young folks into these arenas, rather than ones that are overcrowded – and have been for a long time.  (Yes, there are business cycles where we have too many engineers, then not enough … but the intermediate health careers have been crying for more talent for years – nurses, aides, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, etc.)

I continue to ask for any good evidence that higher education actually -causes- improvements for society, rather than being an adjunct, or merely correlated, stat, beyond a certain threshold.  We have plenty of highly educated waitrons, taxi drivers, longshore workers, etc.  They didn’t ‘need’ a degree to get & keep a job, and other than reporting that they feel like they are better for it, no proof that that has some net benefit for society as a whole – again, after some threshold has been reached.

Don’t get me wrong – I believe that higher education -can- provide a benefit to individuals.  I’m just convinced that it is -not- of net benefit to some individuals, e.g., those who incur significant undischargeable debt that becomes an albatross for each them, and us.  And I’m not convinced a continued push for more ‘graduates’ will actually improve anything.  From some of these ‘graduates’ I’ve had to hire, and then fire, I don’t see the piece of paper signifying much of anything, other than an ability to get thru a process, and pick up some bad work habits along the way, because they’ve been rewarded for mediocre work, or worse.

Please, let us in! We’ll be good

If the Big 12..er..10…11? Wants BYU in the conference, they are going to have to make it a sweet invitation.  Independence is working out pretty well for BYU.  We had a lousy schedule and a lousy start to last year, and still ended up ranked #25,26.  Next year’s schedule will be better and the team will be better.  As a fan, I love the ability to see ALL BYU’s football and basketball games!  GO BYUTV!!!  As an indy, BYU has just as good of chance to make a bcs bowl as it would in the B12, and without the problems that go with conference membership (ie the Sunday play fuss).  Besides, by 2013 the bcs is likely to get rid of bcs AQ status anyway in order to ease all the conference commotion we’re currently seeing.  Then there will be very little incentive indeed for BYU to join any conference.  Our other sports are doing very well in the WCC, thank you.

The whole thing about fan bases is that it is directly related to exposure.  When the Southwest Conference folded and the Big12 was created TTech, TAMU, and Texas fan bases increased while the other Texas schools lost fan base.  This is circular reasoning.  Houston and SMU and perhaps Rice make huge sense for the Big12.  Texas does not want to share the state’s hs talent with it fellow Texas schools, but I believe firmly that the Texas legislature is going to have to tell the big dog to back off.  It is in the interest of the State of Texas to get SMU and Houston and any other Texas school into the conference.  I think that will be a good thing for all.  As they say, Texas is a whole other country.  We need to use that to our advantage to stabilize once and for all this conference.