Loving them to death

May 22, 2007 4:44 AM

My colleagues and I were witnessing the result of low admission standards. Were we expecting too much of young people who scored poorly on the SAT, who were rarely challenged to excel in high school, who were not motivated to take advantage of opportunities to learn, who could not imagine where a sound education could take them?
posted by landis (132 comments total)

That is one of the saddest things I've read in a long time. Great article.
posted by MarshallPoe at 5:01 AM on May 22, 2007

This article took me back to my experiences as a high school tutor/mentor ten years ago in a public high school not far from my employer. I cannot begin to express how disheartening the experience was - students did not welcome or want extra help that they desperately needed. Some were reading at the 3rd grade level in tenth grade. Some couldn't do simple addition without using their fingers. They were sullen and hostile. As time went on, I got to know their stories. One kid's father had been murdered the night before he came for tutoring - drugs. Others went from apartment to apartment, sleeping on floors, eating from the trash outside fast food places. Some kids just slept outside because their mothers were turning tricks all night for drug money.

I came to realize that for most of these kids, no amount of tutoring, mentoring, free meals, and long talks could change their lives. Their stories were already set in stone long before I came on the scene. What amazed me was that they couldn't even think about the possibilities beyond the five-mile radius of their lives. Even when given opportunities to lift themselves up, all they could see was life lived where and how they were living it. I think that they needed help a lot sooner than they got it.

I stuck it out for three years and did what I could. Not one of the kids that I tutored graduated from high school.
posted by Flakypastry at 5:19 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

My father was one of a handful of white professors at *mumble he might read this* predominately black Louisiana university. He spent his life trying to make a difference, and most years would have one or two students who cared enough to be taught. Toward the end of his career those students became more and more rare, though, and by the time he retired the whole situation had made him quite bitter. TFA is depressing but rings close to what I saw my father go through.
posted by localroger at 5:22 AM on May 22, 2007

Terry Lee Brock, a 41-year-old freshman, was shot several times by a woman around 2 one morning in early February in front of the Night Stalker's Lounge. He died a short time later at the hospital. His trial for rape had been scheduled to begin the following week.

When I finished the first sentence, I was thinking, "At 41, haven't you figured out yet that being outside a "lounge" at 2 am is a bad idea?" By the time I finished the third sentence, I mentally shrugged at my reaction to the first.
posted by pax digita at 5:25 AM on May 22, 2007

in front of the Night Stalker's Lounge.

Going to a bar named after a serial killer is always a bad idea no matter how old you are. I stopped going to The Arthur Shawcross Arms here in town after a string of violent incidents.
posted by Mayor Curley at 5:29 AM on May 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

Instead of taking pride in being exemplary students, many were devotees of hip-hop culture.

Thanks, Professor Lamewad.
posted by rxrfrx at 5:43 AM on May 22, 2007 [5 favorites]

Yeah, we listened to bad music in the '80s too. But we bought our assigned textbooks, took professors halfway seriously, got to class on time, and turned in classwork on which we'd expended some honest effort.
posted by pax digita at 6:09 AM on May 22, 2007

Thanks, Professor Lamewad.

I feel for the guy. I teach at a New York State university, and I find students who have picked up hip-hop culture (mainly white but some blacks, Asians, Latinos) to be huge energy sinks as students.

That is, they not only aren't that interested in learning, they disparage the strivings of other students. Laughing at suggestions that they might do something that takes energy, that takes stepping outside their comfort zone to learn.

"Naw, I'm just going to keep it real."

I'm talking about 12-15 students out of hundreds over eight years, so I'm not saying this is a massive trend. But I did see it happening, and talked to the students about it, to discern their motivations.

So I'm not anti-hop-hop music. I am anti hip-hop-as-personal-credo, though.
posted by sacre_bleu at 6:17 AM on May 22, 2007 [3 favorites]

The story of the woman who wanted to be a nurse was really inspirational. It's hard to imagine how unbelievably tough the obstacles some of those students are facing must be.

The prof obviously didn't want to be a high school or middle school teacher. *shrug* That's what you have to be, at least in part, with the student population he was dealing with. I'm not sure how he'll get from there to all HBCUs in his epilogue, though.
posted by mediareport at 6:19 AM on May 22, 2007

I am anti hip-hop-as-personal-credo

No, you're anti a-certain-kind-of-brainless-hip-hop-as-personal-credo. There's a difference.
posted by mediareport at 6:20 AM on May 22, 2007

As a former punk (and now professor), I gotta go with pax digita here. There's a difference. I'm not sure what it is, but there's a difference. I said "fuck the system" a lot too, but in the end I went to school and learned (and dressed really badly). These kids say "fuck the system" and then go hang out at the Night Stalker's Lounge. WTF?
posted by MarshallPoe at 6:21 AM on May 22, 2007

Learning about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs would probably help these teachers cope with these students.

Not that Maslow's is the end-all-and-be-all of educational psychology, but at least it's a start. Really, what use is a newsroom to somebody who is homeless / starving?
posted by rockabilly_pete at 6:25 AM on May 22, 2007

Having worked at middle schools and high schools in the projects here in Brooklyn, I felt dismal familiarity washing over me. If a child grows up going to a school where teachers have to wheedle, cajole, bribe, threaten, and extort students into showing up to class and putting the minimum amount of work into assignments, what do we expect the kids to do when suddenly no one is around to do this anymore?

And when the background noise and danger in a kid's life is turned up to a level that makes school seem to be only tangentially relevant, how can we expect them to take it seriously? I don't know what was worse, the frustration of feeling like the wah-wah Charlie Brown teacher all the time, or knowing exactly what sort of troubles these kids had in their lives that made me sound that way to them.

College is painted as a sort of promised land for these students, a status symbol and end in itself; it matters less what one actually does once one is there. After years of being driven toward this carrot on a stick, they arrive and just watch the stick extend, except now there's no one goading them along after it.
posted by hermitosis at 6:32 AM on May 22, 2007 [3 favorites]

Put aside hiphop. Put aside Black students. But aside fairly low SATs...and just maybe we have kids going into college who ought not go to college. What is the current rate of those students who enter American colleges and do not graduate? I believe it is some 50%. What does that tell you?
posted by Postroad at 6:35 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

These kids say "fuck the system" and then go hang out at the Night Stalker's Lounge. WTF?

As an off-the-cuff answer, I'd say that there's a significant difference between the general anger you felt and the overall listlessness/apathy/purposeful disengagement that's discussed in the article and here.

And I don't think it's confined to hip-hop; it shows up all over the place. But the former (punk) requires some engagement with the system, even if it's negative; the latter is nihilistic in an entirely different way.
posted by spiderwire at 6:41 AM on May 22, 2007

...just maybe we have kids going into college who ought not go to college.

It seems obvious from the article that most of those "students" didn't really want to be there. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water....

Help is not what they need, low-skilled, but decent paying jobs is what they need.
posted by three blind mice at 6:46 AM on May 22, 2007

College is painted as a sort of promised land for these students, a status symbol and end in itself; it matters less what one actually does once one is there.

Totally. I have a 20 year old client who goes to community college and loves to talk about college, how she's going to college, what's up with college. College, college, college. She takes 9th grade reading there. She's paying with loans for what she could have gotten for free in the public schools, though the situation with urban public schools, especially in cities like Philly, Baltimore, Detroit, etc. is a whole different situation and goes a long way to explaining this outcome. In Philly there's three physical assaults on school district employees by students every day. A lot schools here can barely be characterized as schools, and this is after five years of Saint Vallas at the helm.

I had another client with a 4 year degree from a local historically black university. He graduated ten years ago. He was a janitor, which is all he'd done since graduating. He was still trying to pay the loans back.
posted by The Straightener at 6:48 AM on May 22, 2007

That was a very moving and depressing article. Thanks for posting on it, Landis. What is especially sad for me is this re-enforces the idea that by the time people get to secondary education, most are permanently set to a large degree in terms of learning habits and life expectation. There are heroic exceptions, of course and they must be so much more evolved in inner strength as to be superhuman. Negative socio-economic and cultural phenomena would have done their damage long before they ever met Professor Maxwell. ‘Gangsta’ aspects of hip-hop culture, with the materialistic nihilism and lack of self knowledge it celebrates has done untold damage to black communities and youth in general. The self-empowerment and real pride represented by the likes of Public Enemy has long since been replaced with the more easily saleable glorification of criminality, conspicuous consumption, and misogyny. Since there is no way to turn back the clock on this, efforts should concentrate on improving the life chances of children from the start in their own communities so that different outcomes are possible when they are older. Making work, thrift and co-habiting parents normal again for excluded, marginalised and culturally suicidal communities is vital. However, the best efforts will come from the communities themselves if they are empowered to make them possible. Also, low expectations (which Stillman seems to have for both its students and staff) in a racially exclusive environment is insidiously racist in itself. The table at the end suggests that it is an expensive societal fig leaf at the end of a sad road rather than a springboard.
posted by The Salaryman at 6:48 AM on May 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

I felt both simultaneously sympathetic for the author and at the same time repelled by his own blind spot. Sympathetic because in 1983 when I graduate from high school I was an equally slack and dismissive student at a small community college in Alabama and I was wasting the time of the teachers there, and they were good teachers. (I later ended up back at that college a few years later and did appreciate the good ones and worked very hard.) On the other hand, I am repelled by his repeated need for respect based on his title and position. He might be an excellent teacher, and even a good guy, but he still has to gain the respect of other people in his own actions and stances. There are many lauded professor in the world who are downright unfathomably narcissistic jerks that don't deserve anyone's respect. Their work certainly might deserve respect, but they still have to be worthwhile people. Although it would be nice to have people respect positions like professorship and show that respect in the classroom, I can't help but think that respecting a position like that should work both ways. The people who have such positions should respect it as well. It isn't a license to demand respect from people. Although it is certainly a badge of great accomplishment, it isn't a go ahead to be a condescending and petty person.
posted by smallerdemon at 7:00 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

Some not necessarily related thoughts:

Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have both written about how African-American education has slipped since WWII and the increases in federal funding for public education. While it's a somewhat contentious claim and I am not familiar with the statistics myself, the argument makes sense. Standards slip and there is little pressure on the student to make the cut as the institution needs the student body to justify itself. Public schools, or in this case, black colleges, can't just go out and fail 60% of the student body.

Youth culture is always at odds with adult values of moderation, sobriety, duty and prudence. That isn't going to change. Still there is something different with hip-hop, at least the mass market variety. There can be a lot of nihilism in punk, but it lacks the self validation and championing of one's opinion that rap is soaked in. Many people have commented that rap has a shrunken emotional palette, anger fills up most of it. When there aren't that many emotions you can express all that is left is pushing your opinion. Since learning is all about considering that your opinion might be wrong there is an incongruity. I'm not saying that incongruity can't be bridged, but that a lot of hip-hop has an anti-learning bias.

As was remarked in that monster 'you're-so-smart' thread, valuing the accomplishment over the effort, diminishes persistence. The wider culture deserves a lot of blame in how we see accomplishments that come from work as less desirable than those that come effortlessly from talent. Instead of the hard worker having gained something, knowledge, a grade, a certification, we frequently see them as having lost their freedom to study.

And of course, the poverty many of these students come from is terrible. Still, I don't see how keeping students in a school they don't belong in does them any favors. In addition, it devalues the institution.
posted by BigSky at 7:02 AM on May 22, 2007

Professor Lamewad

So, dude in his position is supposed to be conversant re "positive", underground hip-hop the way you presumably are? I'm sure all he needs is a little Black Star and he'll understand why some of his students are sullen, ignorant assholes.
posted by everichon at 7:02 AM on May 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

Yeah, we listened to bad music in the '80s too. But we bought our assigned textbooks, took professors halfway seriously, got to class on time, and turned in classwork on which we'd expended some honest effort.
posted by pax digita at 9:09 AM on May 22

Because you knew the difference between your music and school. How did you learn that there was a difference between learning pop culture trivia and things in school?

Imagine you know nothing, but you are saturated from day one with pop culture. You get to school, and what you learn there simply doesn't resonate with you the same way as pop culture entertainment.

Add to this the confusion engendered when you kids are marketed school supplies that are little more than entertainment merchandise. I don't mean "Toy Story" notebooks, I'm referring to products in stores that are labeled educational, but are in fact very simplistic puzzles that encourage you to learn more about Spongebob or Shrek than anything of real value.

Again, if you already know there is a difference (e.g. your parents are drumming it into you) you'll know it instinctively and can shift your focus. But if you don't have those parents, or your parents don't know the difference, then what?

And before you assume that this is a poor people/underclass problem, how many of you watch 30 minutes of CNN a day or watch the talking head shows like O'Reilly, Hannity, the Daily Show, etc, and count that as being "informed" about world events?
posted by Pastabagel at 7:05 AM on May 22, 2007

Also, low expectations (which Stillman seems to have for both its students and staff) in a racially exclusive environment is insidiously racist in itself. Couldn't have said it better. It bears repeating again, and again, and again.
posted by MarshallPoe at 7:12 AM on May 22, 2007

"So, dude in his position is supposed to be conversant re "positive", underground hip-hop the way you presumably are? I'm sure all he needs is a little Black Star and he'll understand why some of his students are sullen, ignorant assholes."

Thanks for the astute observation, Professor Lamewad
posted by Rubbstone at 7:17 AM on May 22, 2007

I dropped out of college. I never wanted to go in the first place. I don't feel like I missed out on anything.
posted by empath at 7:19 AM on May 22, 2007

I am not a professor, so you may address me as Mr. Lamewad.
posted by everichon at 7:23 AM on May 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

Also, low expectations (which Stillman seems to have for both its students and staff) in a racially exclusive environment is insidiously racist in itself. Couldn't have said it better. It bears repeating again, and again, and again.
posted by MarshallPoe at 10:12 AM on May 22

Single race colleges are insidiously racist too. The problem isn't race, it's poverty and ignorance. The article makes it appear that race is an issue because the context is an all black college which by definition selects out for race. Many high school graduates in predominantly poor, rural, white areas are equally ignorant.
posted by Pastabagel at 7:24 AM on May 22, 2007

I'm not going to argue whether or not the professor is a "lamewad," but I will argue that the crude and nasty thug-worshipping faction of hip-hop subculture is only an extreme manifestation of the materialism, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism that prevails in mainstream U.S. culture.

I work in the children's department of an inner-city public library. The great majority of kids who come here treat the place like an arcade. They come to play video games for hours on end and have zero interest in the other resources offered by the library. Even the kids who read for fun come in and ask for books based on TV and movie characters. Very, very few of them are interested in learning. I wonder if these are the ones who grow up to go to colleges like Stillman.

Also: I don't believe that everyone belongs in college. Earlier generations could make a halfway decent living in factory work (and men, mostly, can still do this in skilled trades), but nowadays, those manufacturing jobs have been replaced by crummy service jobs. It's no wonder people are attending college and performing poorly, if the alternative is working at McDonald's for six bucks an hour.
posted by scratch at 7:25 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

Many of the problems he talks about can be found in other schools with low admission standards, regardless of their racial composition. He needs to go read Pedagogy of the Opressed and quit trying to replicate his own college experiences.

It sounds like he thinks the answer is to raise admission standards until all of the "underprepared" students have been carefully filtered out.

The surliness of the school staff and resentment of the teaching faculty is also ubiquitous.
posted by mecran01 at 7:27 AM on May 22, 2007 [3 favorites]

Part of the problem may be that an acceptable middle ground has disappeared in modern society. At one extreme, there is a huge push from mainstream establishments of the idea that college is the sole path to success for everyone, and that all else is failure. The other extreme is that presented by pop culture: that hard work and learning are for chumps without talent who are just wasting their time, that fame and money are all that matter, and that the way to fame in money is, as BigSky put it, effortless talent.

While it would be good for those who want a college education to pursue it, there needs to be a mean between these two. What about the idea of trade schools, present in other countries and in the US in the past? The idea of a respectable occupation that may not involve college but is good, useful, and rewarding? In the modern world of the two extremes of education, the value of such a thing is lost, but it seems like for many people it may be the better choice.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:28 AM on May 22, 2007 [3 favorites]

Nicely put, Sangermaine. There are still plenty of trade schools, though. But the line between trade schools and colleges is somewhat blurred since many of these for-profit schools have names the Whatsit College for Medical Transcription. (Drives me bananas.)
posted by scratch at 7:32 AM on May 22, 2007

Reading the comments and discussion here, it occurred to me that to plenty of people, discussion as natural as the above, would for many others contain significant chunks of gibberish, and strings of words that are individually recognised, but resist flowing together into the cogent thought they communicate.
That's kind of a sad thought :-(

(I spend most of my days around educated people, somewhat isolated from people who struggle with stuff I tend to assume to be basic. It's always a terrible shock to meet someone and discover how much literacy and numeracy that I assume is normal, isn't, and how many mundane trivial little things thus instead become large obstacles for people).

I guess in the same vein, I often have to listen to hip-hop lyrics several times and think about them before I know I "get" them. I'm sure that's a sad thought to many people too, but... I'm learning it. I am improving.
posted by -harlequin- at 7:48 AM on May 22, 2007

Because you knew the difference between your music and school. How did you learn that there was a difference between learning pop culture trivia and things in school?

Beats me -- I couldn't quite figure out why I was studying American Civil War Era history and my dormmates were taking History of Rock and Roll, yet we were both getting three credit hours. And this wasn't at a little ol' bitty HBCU, either.

On the other hand, I've mentioned in other threads how weird it was that despite my parents' largely blue-collar background, we had books all over the house and my playmates' houses didn't. I think we never thought of "entertainment" as a lifestyle, let alone an educational basis.

And before you assume that this is a poor people/underclass problem, how many of you watch 30 minutes of CNN a day or watch the talking head shows like O'Reilly, Hannity, the Daily Show, etc, and count that as being "informed" about world events?

Oh, we always had Huntley and Brinkely, and later John Chancellor, telling us the nightly news, too.

===

Enough about Pax, though. The thing I looked for and didn't see in skimming the article and its predecessor was something I'd observed firsthand in public school, and which I'm told is worse than ever in hip-hop/gangsta culture: When a black kid tries to perform to expectations in this sort of setting, s/he gets dissed by his/her peers for "acting white." Of course, there's a contrarian view that "acting white" is a myth, despite what I and others have observed.
posted by pax digita at 7:51 AM on May 22, 2007

Around 70% of American graduate from high school on time; another 10% get GEDs and such. Half with degrees go to college. Half of them drop out. Leaving roughly a quarter of the adult pop with college degrees. Cut everything in half or more if you are poor or black (especially male and poor and black). That's to say nothing about the quality of any of these degrees. In many cases, very low.

Yet the return to education has never been higher. And for good reason: you're best chance of entering the middle/upper middle class in the U.S. is to learn to think and write at a college. Roughly a quarter of us can and have the degrees to show it. Trade school for the rest? I don't think so. Maybe a few. Most will end up in low skill service jobs, where they will have to compete with immigrants who are very eager to do the work.

Makes no economic sense. But there you have it. Very depressing.
posted by MarshallPoe at 7:58 AM on May 22, 2007

To be fair, my dad, who teaches high school English in a 99% white farming community, has a lot of the same complaints about his students: very few try, very few care, hardly anyone has ever willingly read a book in their life.

On the other hand, I'm currently attending college myself at a very multicultural but probably predominantly white institution and I don't get any huge sense of desperate apathy from my fellow students.

I wonder if, like hermitosis and the Straightener mentioned, making college out to be the end-all, be-all for everyone does more harm than good. I have personally struggled with the massive disconnect between college and the real world; I can't imagine what it's like for these kids.

Learning a trade might have been a lot better choice for a lot of people who ended up at college. It's less expensive to start with and since you're nearly guaranteed a solid middle-class income it's a lot easier to pay off your loans once you're out. I know way too many people with college degrees who are working for $7/hour in bookstores now.

Also, when he mentions the nasty staff at the college offices, why on earth does the college not fire those people and replace them with others who are pleasant? I have never understood why it seems perfectly okay for a bus driver, or a post office worker, or a college financial aid officer to spend their entire career being a total ass but if you ever acted like that in the retail sphere you'd be out on your ass in two seconds.
posted by Jess the Mess at 7:58 AM on May 22, 2007

These kids say "fuck the system" and then go hang out at the Night Stalker's Lounge. WTF?

No -- where you said "fuck the system", these kids say "The system sure is fucked."
posted by mendel at 8:00 AM on May 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

It sounds like he thinks the answer is to raise admission standards until all of the "underprepared" students have been carefully filtered out.

As long as there's some appropriate venue for the students who want to remediate to the point of being capable of college-level work, I don't knee-jerk reject the idea. I always thought that was more properly the mission of the community (sometimes called the "technical") college system -- to provide an alternative means for people who wanted to achieve intellectual critical mass and acquire college-appropriate skills in a last-chance environment.

I wonder to what degree federal funding drives the goal for matriculating and retaining as many warm bodies as possible regardless of whether they're motivated enough for and/or capable of college-level work? I don't think HCBUs had nearly as severe a problem with college readiness when Maxwell was an undergraduate. I do agree that as low-skilled/high-paying manufacturing jobs have evaporated, the remaining alternatives are the military or skilled trades.
posted by pax digita at 8:06 AM on May 22, 2007

Postroad: ...and just maybe we have kids going into college who ought not go to college.

A friend of mine from high school wasted her parents' money for one year before dropping out and becoming a [Stereotypically Female Profession].

I'd run into her on my way to morning classes, just getting in from the parties the night before. This pissed me off to no end because I was driving myself rather nicely into debt in order to stay there, while she was blowing her parents' money on booze and condoms. Well, when she actually used condoms, that is. Let's not even get into the false pregnancy and fake "rape" soap operas she put us all through. But I'm not bitter. Nooooo. She belonged in college about as much as the lower-quality men they let in at our school to keep the classes from being 70%+ female.

Having lived in Germany and Austria, where trade schools are a valued part of the curriculum, I'd have to say Sangermaine's got it right. There's no reason we couldn't do the same thing here, and make it more comprehensive than the "vocational education" programs some high schools have, and less expensive than the for-profit schools.

Sometimes, I think it just takes a few years to sort out your own personal drama before you're ready to go to college. Being able to learn a trade and work in a skilled profession in the meantime is a much better alternative to what we currently have.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 8:08 AM on May 22, 2007

As time went on, I got to know their stories. One kid's father had been murdered the night before he came for tutoring - drugs. Others went from apartment to apartment, sleeping on floors, eating from the trash outside fast food places. Some kids just slept outside because their mothers were turning tricks all night for drug money.

It's realizing things like these that makes me sometimes feel like encouraging "volunteerism" in the community is just society's way of relieving itself of the guilt over their unwillingness to support greater government action to fix the systemic problems in poor communities.

I was tutoring at a local public school and there was a volunteer group painting the walls. Why the heck didn't the city have enough money to do basic maintanence work on their own schools? This "spirit of volunteerism" was just picking up the slack for what the government should have been doing in the first place. I'm sure it made the volunteers feel good about themselves, and maybe they figured that's what counted.
posted by deanc at 8:09 AM on May 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

And on posting -- yes to Jess the Mess -- why is it these college employees can act like asses with impunity when (true) they'd get fired in 3 seconds if they worked retail? A pleasant learning environment goes a long way. Though from the sound of this article, not far enough.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 8:12 AM on May 22, 2007

You're nearly guaranteed a solid middle-class income...

That's probably the problem right there-- the idea of putting a cap on your potential from the outset (even though it's a totally fallacious idea) seems unappealing compared to the "Potential to DO!! ANYTHING!! and BE!! SUCCESSFUL!!" that most people associate with college. Young people want to feel like the big, amazing thing that is going to make them successful is just over the horizon; I actually respect people who are honest or motivated or defeatist etc. enough to go to a trade school and learn to do something useful-- chances are if they actually ARE talented or intelligent, they'll soar through it and wind up making big bucks one way or another anyway, but it's probably hard to get a sense of that looking around the room on the first day of trade school.

Neither of my parents went to college, and they always made sure I knew that I was going, at gunpoint if necessary. Turns out that simply being told that college is great and a necessary step for all great people didn't cut it for me either. To this day my mom laments my choice to drop out, even as I work and circulate effortlessly in fields which people assume a degree to be mandatory entrance to. Her ideas about college are so ingrained that she can't quite accept that any other way is possible, no matter how well I manage to do for myself.

Maybe I should call her and tell her I've decided to go to trade school and fix air conditioners, just to fuck with her.
posted by hermitosis at 8:16 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

I can't comment on the racial aspect. Both my undergrad school (1998-2001) and my grad school program (2005-2007) were overwhelmingly white and at least middle class. That said, I was a TA at both schools, and I was shocked by the degree of illiteracy displayed by the students. However, most did at least care about eventually mainstreaming into "the system," because the system had been proven to work for most of the people they knew.

I can imagine that if the system had continually beat me or my family down my entire life, I'd say "fuck it" as well.
posted by desjardins at 8:23 AM on May 22, 2007

Well, there's not a whole lot of people that get canned from college staff jobs once your probation period is up. That's probably why.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:24 AM on May 22, 2007

I actually respect people who are honest or motivated or defeatist etc. enough to go to a trade school and learn to do something useful-- chances are if they actually ARE talented or intelligent, they'll soar through it and wind up making big bucks one way or another anyway

A friend of mine who went to hairdresser school immediately out of high school is now making close to a six-figure income working, for all intents and purposes, 3/4-time per week. Me, I'm still paying off those college loans. She's my hero.

The other thing that bothers me is that many desirable jobs for college-educated people presume you have money backing you up. It's the unpaid internship conundrum, except with work. I actually told a NYC publisher last week who wanted to hire me but wouldn't, 'cause I don't live in the city and don't plant to move, that in order to live in NYC on a publishing-industry salary, I'd have to marry an investment banker and I didn't think my boyfriend would like that. (She laughed, at least, and put me on her freelancer roster). It's not just publishing, though.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 8:25 AM on May 22, 2007

Single race colleges are insidiously racist too. The problem isn't race, it's poverty and ignorance... Many high school graduates in predominantly poor, rural, white areas are equally ignorant.

Pastabagel, dealing with the legitimacy of historically-black colleges is a whole other can of beans (that has gone terribly awry on the SPT link), but I have to say that the problem is, in fact, race as it is systematically tied to poverty and ignorance.

I appreciate your point that there are rural white kids who are also racialized and locked out of educational opportunities, and that is an important point. It is no more important, however, than the systematic oppression of blacks from slavery, Stillman's founding in the Reconstruction, civil rights, voting rights, and on into our present day where "urban mothers" (read: black single mothers) are blamed for a host of societal ills, blacks are overrepresented in Medicaid, in AIDS clinics, at homeless shelters, every place but the workplace and on TV.

I understand racism to be a tool of oppressing one group for the advantage of another. There is very real racism against rural whites in the deep south - "trailer trash." But more prevalent in every corner of this country is racism against blacks, and to that end, a private institution dedicated to bringing those oppressed up to fight those mechanisms is not, as I understand it, racist. It is racially exclusive, but cannot be racist without cultural authority. Interestingly, this article further erodes that hope of cultural authority, but I won't go there.
posted by coolhappysteve at 8:28 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

chances are if they actually ARE talented or intelligent, they'll soar through it and wind up making big bucks one way or another anyway, but it's probably hard to get a sense of that looking around the room on the first day of trade school.

The purpose of college is not to make big bucks, it is to become educated. If your goal is to make big bucks, you could just as easily become an electrician or a plumber. You don't waste four years and $100,000 at college, and you can charge nearly $100/hour, depending on your location.

For that matter, you could just start any of countless business.

The reason many people go to college is because they don't know what else they want to do and they don't want o learn a trade or start a business or they aren't mature enough to do so.
posted by Pastabagel at 8:32 AM on May 22, 2007

On the other hand, I am repelled by his repeated need for respect based on his title and position.

My attitude: If you have a problem with me, stop paying for the fucking class, find somewhere else to go, thanks. The school thought enough of me to hire me, I have the credentials and knowledge you're seeking, show respect or leave. I don't have to earn a single thing from you.
posted by raysmj at 8:37 AM on May 22, 2007 [7 favorites]

My experience has been different. The inner-city community college that I teach at is full of kids who love hip-hop and like learning. Usually only one or two people in the 20 person classes doesn't care about learning. Everyone else is into it. Last semester, we even wrote an article together as a class project and its being published. I see more of a problem with exasperated and/or bitter and/or untrained teachers than apathetic students.

I'd also like to point out that there are other benefits to going to college besides getting a degree and getting a good job. A colleague of mine who teaches in the Appalachians relates a story about running into some of her former students who graduated and then went into a low-skilled position for which college was unnecessary. She asked them if they regretted spending the time and money on education and the women were like, "No way! I wouldn't trade that for anything."
posted by Aghast. at 8:37 AM on May 22, 2007 [3 favorites]

Actually, what some of "these kids" needed was for the community to raise taxes to benefit the public schools they came from: fix the heating system, buy decent textbooks and hire competent teachers. Too bad all that starts with raising taxes. ("More parental involvement" is a red herring where every adult in the household has to work long hours to pay the rent and buy food.) But of course it's so much easier and cheaper to blame the students and "hip hop culture": you don't need to fix anything, just build more McDonald's and Wal-Marts for them to work in, and as a side-effect you get to make jokes about the incredibly stupid people who work in low-end retail.
posted by davy at 8:41 AM on May 22, 2007 [5 favorites]

This story was heartbreaking.
posted by Nelson at 8:42 AM on May 22, 2007

The reason many people go to college is because they don't know what else they want to do and they don't want o learn a trade or start a business or they aren't mature enough to do so.

True. Or perhaps because they know they don't want to be an electrician or deal with the hassles of running a small restaurant and would prefer a white-collar desk job.
posted by deanc at 8:44 AM on May 22, 2007

The reason many people go to college is because they don't know what else they want to do and they don't want o learn a trade or start a business or they aren't mature enough to do so.

Agreed. So what do we do to fix these things? They...

• don't know what else they want to do,
which is why we should include at least some kind of job education program at the very earliest ages -- I'm talking middle school here. Personal example? I decided I wanted to be a foreign service officer when I was in 8th grade, and based my educational decisions in high school and college accordingly, all because I heard one speak at a gifted and talented faux "job fair." Not everyone's going to be like me, but at least we should give kids some idea WHAT people do all day in their offices and workplaces, so they can think about what they might want to do and make decisions based on those thoughts
• don't want to learn a trade or
which they might very well want to do after they find out what kind of big bucks hairdressers and plumbers can make
• start a business or they
why not some kind of entrepreneurial training programs, too? make it vocational education -- call it Business 101, or Junior MBA or whateverthehell makes it sound appealing to kids
• aren't mature enough to do so.
because they haven't been exposed to the adult world in the way they would have been less than 100 years ago. I'm not saying put them all to work in the factories if they don't make A's in school, but establishing broad-based job shadowing and mentorship opportunities would not be a bad thing, and probably more useful than getting well-meaning volunteers in to take the place of what should be happening in schools, i.e. basic skills learning, like literacy and numeracy

It'd be a start, anyway.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 8:48 AM on May 22, 2007 [3 favorites]

Working at a college is not like working in retail.

Shopping (especially in the US) is a pillar of society. Malls are far more prominent in people's lives than libraries. When you go to a shop you are happy and excited.

When you go to the university office, you enter with dread; you are sullen and hostile at having to deal with the college, at solving whatever problem you need to fix. (No one goes to the DMV happy either.) Now add the fact that college employees make less than the professors who probably make less than retail employees.

So, if you work in a college (or DMV) and every customer is sullen and hostile, how would your attitude be?

(I've never worked in a college or DMV, but I used to be a professor.)
posted by phliar at 8:49 AM on May 22, 2007

Strangely I had a somewhat analogous teaching experience to Bill Maxwell at an expensive, predominately white, private college. We faced few of the serious root problems (Hip-hop culture, poverty etc.) but poorly prepared and disinterested students were all too common. The pay was roughly minimum wage when prep time was included and successes were few and far between. After a few years I too thought "Why am I busting my ass?" and left the field.
The despair and the end result were similar but the circumstances, and my conclusions, were very different.
Why was teaching so difficult and unrewarding?
1. Advances in technical/scientific subjects have been such that there was simply too much material to teach or absorb in the time frame. We were supposed to teach twice the amount of core material covered by may father in the '40's with half the amount time allotted to cover it.
Without major curriculum overhaul - fat chance...
2. Most of the teaching was by "Adjunct faculty" who were completely unsupported. There were given minimal information on what to teach, no information on how to teach it and no integration with the regular faculty...
Not a recipe for success.
3. Under these circumstances teaching the students who had their act together was difficult but generally worth the effort.
For the rest I was a baby-sitter who was supposed to boost the students' self-esteem, to engage them, to cajole them into learning and above all not to fail them. (The fees, I was constantly reminded, were astronomical - failing was not a good option.) So I found myself essentially in the entertainment business competing for attention with television. As I couldn't compete with Gilligan's Island re-runs let alone the (then) current episodes of X-Files it was time to bail.
Was it bad students, a bad school, bad attitudes, bad teaching? Perhaps - but the main factor seemed to be that there was too much to learn, too little time to learn it properly - and the students were simply overwhelmed.
posted by speug at 8:51 AM on May 22, 2007

True. Or perhaps because they know they don't want to be an electrician or deal with the hassles of running a small restaurant and would prefer a white-collar desk job.

Kids don't like to eat broccoli either. Or they think they don't, until they find out about tasty, tasty cheese sauce. I think there's a lot more ignorance about what actually goes on in the Big Adult World Of Jobs than there is solid, fact-based "I don't want to be an electrician because electricians suck" though processes.

Remember this New Yorker humor column which takes place from the kids' perspective? For all we know, they think Mommy and Daddy go to Candyland all day and then come home and drink a bottle of beer because Candyland is tiring for 8 hours at a stretch, like an amusement park. Ok, that's me being a smartass.

Sure, lots of kids witness their parents suffering through hard, low-paying, miserable jobs and are very aware of what "work" is all about. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to give them perspective on what might be an appropriate, and decently-paid, future job for them that doesn't involve flipping burgers, dealing drugs or doing performance art.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 8:54 AM on May 22, 2007

"Reading the comments and discussion here, it occurred to me that to plenty of people, discussion as natural as the above, would for many others contain significant chunks of gibberish, and strings of words that are individually recognised, but resist flowing together into the cogent thought they communicate."

Yeah, I know. In my 2.5 years here on Metafilter I've taken a lot of shit from people who can't parse my sentences well enough to know what I'm talking about, lambaste me as if I'd said the opposite of what I did, then when corrected on that blame my writing when the problem is their reading comprehension. Not that I'm any great shakes as a litterateur, just that I had expected that one could read a paragraph discussing "diminished expectations" without misreading it is as, say, a death threat.
posted by davy at 8:58 AM on May 22, 2007

Well, bitter-girl, there's a class issue that plays into this. We're really not going to convince middle class kids who grow up in the suburbs to become electricians or plumbers (even though this might actually be the right path for them). College isn't a pathway to a higher income, necessarily, but it's a path to a higher spot on the class-system ladder. Say what you want, but the "social prestige" of working in middle management is higher than that of being a plumber, regardless of the income involved. That said, I do think there should be more of a focus on entrepeneurship. Truthfully, neither the "college-prep" curriculum nor the university curriculum is geared towards giving students experience in this. High-end Business schools cater more to people who are planning to return to the workforce as investment bankers or higher-level executives than as entrepeneurs.

Anyway, there's an amusing side-story I love telling when it comes to the "go to college vs. trade/small business." A family friend worked day and night/night and day working at his own diner (like my family, he's Greek, no surprise). His great goal was to make sure all his kids went to college and became professionals, while they learned the value of hard work by helping out at the family restauarant. Sure enough, one son goes to med school and becomes a doctor, and his daughter goes to law school and becomes a lawyer. His last son said, "you know, I think I want to run the diner," to which is father replied, "Oh no you don't. I didn't work this hard all these years so you could just end up in the low-end restaurant business. You're going to law school." So the last son went to law school, became a lawyer, and married a nice Greek woman who herself was also the child of a diner-owner. The son then quit his job as a lawyer and went to work for his father-in-law with the intent of taking over the diner.
posted by deanc at 9:04 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

“Dear Mr. Kozol,” wrote the eight-year-old, “we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks. You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?”

Jonothan Kozol wrote an amazing article about the absolutely appalling conditions of inner city schools in the US a while ago -- I read it in Harpers. It's well worth reading.
posted by chunking express at 9:06 AM on May 22, 2007

"Actually, what some of "these kids" needed was for the community to raise taxes to benefit the public schools they came from: fix the heating system, buy decent textbooks and hire competent teachers."

The solution to their problem is to raise taxes? Increase property tax in an area with many living in poverty? So now you'll have a community with an unskilled, low education workforce with comparatively high property tax.

That'll bring in industry (and better jobs).

The reason "parental involvement" is so frequently cited is because it's the only thing that works. Big state bureaucracy isn't going to get it done. I won't argue the effects of poverty or poor nutrition. But any improvements will be from care at a local level, and I don't mean local like government, but local like family or individual.

I have seen a lot of state money go into revamping public schools in some very poor parts of the country. Achievement didn't increase. It's important to have facilities in good operating order but let's not kid ourselves and think that an upgrade is a difference maker.
posted by BigSky at 9:06 AM on May 22, 2007

My best friend (who at the time I met her was not only a professional singer but real estate broker who found me the apartment I've been living in for 20 years) grew up in the Bronx ghetto. When she studied to be a medical assistant, she couldn't understand grammar and so I tutored her about what a noun, adjective, verb, preposition were. It blew my mind that she, who didn't know basic language stuff that I took for granted.

These days she and her husband live in Washington DC where they helped run a school/hospital for inner city kids with emotional problems, until it closed down due to lack of funds.

She's inspired me for over 20 years with her loving, brave heart, energy, willingness to do good in the world any way she can. I know she's struggled being loyal to the black inner city culture she grew up in and yet going beyond that with her own life. My feeling is that black Americans don't feel comfortable using the language and thinking style of white intellectuals and being educated to them may appear to be a cultural betrayal, selling out, a white thing.

Spike Lee has been an extraordinary contemporary leader in the black community who has pioneered discussing difficult subjects in his movies. I wonder what he and other black American thinkers see as where black Americans will go with their educational system floundering as it is now?

Ask and ax video, YouTube.
posted by nickyskye at 9:07 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

Did anyone happen to notice the chart at the bottom of the article, by the way? Notice how much lower the tuition is at the University of Alabama (whose African-American students make up about 18 percent of the study body), and how much higher its acceptance rate is, when compared to Stillman? Location of U of A? Tuscaloosa, same as Stillman.

Why did students choose to attend Stillman? Why, when there is a worthy state university nearby, and a perfectly good community college in Tuscaloosa, not to mention a public university with an even higher African-American student population an hour's drive away (UA at Birmingham)? Then there's West Alabama in Livingston. There are also state-run historically black colleges and universities in Alabama. So why go to Stillman? What's the average SAT/ACT score and GPA of entering freshmen at , etc. How many students had parents or relatives who went to Stillman?

I don't find the phenomenon of students not buying textbooks all that surprising, by the way. This is common today, especially on commuter campuses, given the increasing costs of textbooks. Students who reject the texts, however, also typically seem to get Pell grants and loans and they don't pay for the texts--therefore, student don't buy the books. (This may be increasingly true at residential campuses as well. I haven't kept up with that.)
posted by raysmj at 9:09 AM on May 22, 2007

"The solution to their problem is to raise taxes? Increase property tax in an area with many living in poverty?"

Statewide. E.g., Maryland as a whole is rather wealthy; Baltimore City is a dirt-poor ghetto. When voters in Bethesda and Cumberland complain about that part of their tax bill that goes for Baltimore City Public Schools remind them that they pay for the MD state prison system too -- and that they're already effectively choosing to finance the latter instead.
posted by davy at 9:12 AM on May 22, 2007

I realized, much after the fact, that with math classes, if I could locate a textbook, I didn't necessarily need the textbook, but I think the average "student" in Maxwell's former milieu was simply undermotivated, not thinking about how s/he could acquire the basic knowledge without paying a premium for it at the bookstore.

If I were seriously looking to achieve at the collegiate level, there's no way I'd set foot in a HBCU like Stillman. Howard, maybe, but not a hole like this one -- it's better to prove oneself for two years at a community college and get the general-studies AAS on the way out the door transferring to a traditional four-year school with some name recognition -- even if it's somewhat misplaced recognition due to NCAA tails wagging academic dogs. Once you've landed and succeeded at your first postcollegiate job, nobody much cares where you went to school.
posted by pax digita at 9:17 AM on May 22, 2007

BigSky, how amazing that the solution you claim will be most effective ("parental and community involvement") apparently doesn't cost any money. Even that's going to cost money.

And teachers don't want to work in schools where they don't have their own classrooms (many cities have "open floor plan" schools! what were the designers thinking?).

These things cost money. Even if you want better community organizing, you need money to create more stable neighborhoods.

However, if you invoke "parental involvement" and "the spirit of vounteerism," you can always blame it for not happening when things don't improve, and you don't have to worry about having had to pay more money for it.
posted by deanc at 9:18 AM on May 22, 2007

Note too that I recommended hiring competent teachers. This might at first require hiring a few who were not Education majors, and will certainly require paying teachers more.

This article and discussion is reassuring me about having dropped out of the 8th grade; most of what I've learned that can be found in written material I've learned from reading on my own what I'm interested in. (Who's heard of Hagarism?) Of course the problem with that is that I was never interested in trig or algebra and hear "calculus" as something a hygienist scrapes off my teeth, so maybe before I turn 50 I'll take a Math class.
posted by davy at 9:25 AM on May 22, 2007

My son, who is white, goes to a predominantly black middle school. There are several tracks at the school; he is in the advanced tech track in part due to the strong skills he attained as a result of an excellent elementary school education within the public school system. This school encouraged volunteering and welcomed parents into its organization.

The middle school he attends now is a clusterf##ck with the exception of a few incredible teachers and the parents who continue to remain involved despite the school's ambivalence and, in some case, open hostility.

This middle school is a completely alien environment to him.

In one class, a barely competent teacher has been known to bribe the kids with candy to get them to stay in their seats. My son is constantly incredulous at the kids in this class who actually make fun of other kids because their sneakers aren't the "right" brand.

In the very same school, in the advanced tech program, the kids are making extraordinary strides--designing submersible robots, winning on the national level at science fairs and art contests, creating flash movies, designing web sites, writing code, etc.

The school has been broken into several times. A fire was set in the Dean's office. Computers and laptops have been vandalized or stolen.

There is a credo espoused particularly among the hip-hop celebrities that one doesn't "snitch" on someone breaking the law, that "keeping it real" means wearing the right clothes and looking "fresh" rather than becoming a better person...these ridiculous beliefs add to the problem, no question. On the other end of the spectrum, so does the sense of entitlement without effort or consequences a lot of the affluent white kids bring into the mix.

Every one of the kids in this middle school had the same opportunity for education. The difference lies only in the home environment and the cultural attitude. Among those students, black and white, where hard work and education are valued in the home, the level of achievement is exponentially better than those whose parents are not involved and/or not educated themselves.

Poverty is not the factor here. Working full-time may keep a parent from volunteering at the school, but within the home there can still be praise and encouragement for academic achievement. You can't teach a kid who doesn't want to learn, and it's time we stopped blaming the schools and lowering the standards and accept that there are just some people who Dont. Want. To. Be. There.
posted by misha at 9:56 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

deanc,

Yeah, the part about it not costing the taxpayer much is a pretty cool perk, huh?

But what it comes down to is recognizing who has responsibility. There's things money can and can not accomplish. It isn't going to give anyone motivation to carefully prepare a lab report. Lots of very real learning has occurred over the centuries in what we would today consider substandard conditions. Band uniforms are not a mandatory component of learning Spanish.

I note that you are Greek. Let me offer a personal note. My own family has deep roots in education, particularly those of Pontic Greek ancestry. My great grandmother founded about 8 schools in Piraeus and she was very active with the refugees after the Great Disaster. Piraeus at that time was a slum, the refugees lived in ghettoes. These schools were eventually taken over by the government, maybe about 30 years ago. But when she and her children worked in them they were privately funded and operated, they were also very successful. As I'm sure you're aware Piraeus is no longer a slum. Did that change entirely because of small scale, local effort, no. Obviously there are larger economic and social trends at play, but it helps. I would argue it plays a very large part.
posted by BigSky at 10:01 AM on May 22, 2007

Actually, what some of "these kids" needed was for the community to raise taxes to benefit the public schools they came from: fix the heating system, buy decent textbooks and hire competent teachers. Too bad all that starts with raising taxes.

Actually, you could pay for it all and drop taxes if you simply all government contracts to be competitively bid.

If the military procurement system hired people who were looking out for their country's interests rather than looking to get hired by private industry when they retired, we could easily save $20 billion on the military budget alone -- and I believe we could save even as much as $100 billion that way.

However, it's a sad fact -- America would rather kill people in other countries than educate its own children.

See here. Even if you look at the "official" pie chart of government spending, you still see that Americans consider their military to be twice as important as their health...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:10 AM on May 22, 2007

my dormmates were taking History of Rock and Roll, yet we were both getting three credit hours.

Oh please. I teach at an elite university where the students get 1500+ on their SATs and come mostly from elite private and rich public schools. They go on to be doctors and lawyers and presidents and such. We offer courses in the history of rock and numerous other popular music/popular culture topics. The work students do in these courses is as sophisticated as the work they do in our courses on Beethoven and the Rennaissance. They work just as hard, or harder; they read more sophisticated works of theory, and more of it. Some of the brightest students at my fancy-assed university pass through our popular culture classes; some go on to careers in popular cultural criticism or production or scholarship.

The past is no more valuable than the present, and the only difference between "popular" and "elite" culture is who's paying the tab. As art, there is no inherent difference in value between a great symphony and a great pop song. One is arguably a greater force (or indicative of more important developments) in society than the other, and it ain't the symphony.

Equating serious intellectual work on popular cultural content with the dumbest parts of popular culture itself is ignorant, ust as much as casting all pop culture as trivial and uninteresting stuff compared to "great books" and "great works of art" that were pop culture, often, in their own day.

Or do we have to fight the culture wars all over again because some poor students with bad educations have no respect for Western Civilization? Pshaw.

There's a progressive response to this article, which I agree is tragic. But the knee-jerk conservatism about hip hop and popular culture and all the "what we need is trade schools" shit is Old School, to say the least. MC Lynn Cheney is in the House.
posted by spitbull at 10:13 AM on May 22, 2007 [4 favorites]

Great article! Though it made me sad at the end when Maxwell said he quit after only two years. Too bad - a person with his passion will be missed, I'm sure.
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 10:13 AM on May 22, 2007

Why are you discussing kids who "don't want to be there" in re to elementary and secondary education when the article discusses students who "don't want to be there" in re to an $11,000 a year private college? They really don't have to be there. A truant officer will not be checking in on college students, who are young adults (and sometimes older--at 41, your public or private school education is long behind you).
posted by raysmj at 10:14 AM on May 22, 2007

"keeping it real" means wearing the right clothes and looking "fresh" rather than becoming a better person

Not to put too much of a point on it, but do kids still say "fresh" as slang, or are you, as a parent, using a term you think they say, based on your memory of slang from the 1980s? This strikes me as what it would have sounded like if my parents described one of my classmates as "groovy" while I was in high school.
posted by deanc at 10:19 AM on May 22, 2007

Or as I tell some of my students, don't let the "how can you get credit for studying pop music?" fools get you down. Ask them how they can get credit for memorizing and regurgitating facts anyone can look up and never be asked to do original research or have an original idea evaluated, as is true in many science majors until the end, if at all. The irony is, of course, that most of the students I see in pop music courses do go on to medical school, law school, business school, PhD programs and other professions of significance that require discipline and creativity.
posted by spitbull at 10:21 AM on May 22, 2007

Maybe there are few vocational schools these days because people seem to think colleges are for vocation training, rather than education, which leaves actual vocation schools looking like a half-assed college you only go to if you couldn't cut a real college?
posted by -harlequin- at 10:22 AM on May 22, 2007

And I will add that the best student I've ever taught at the undergrad level was a Singaporean neuroscience major who did amazing work on Singaporean nationalist rock videos for which he worked harder than almost any other undergrad I've ever taught. He's now doing an MD/PhD at a school you've heard of. Last year, a South Asian immigrant econ major wrote one of the most fantastic papers I've ever seen, on Bollywood cinematic conventions. Smart is smart, and hard working is hard working. The stereotypes are not helpful.

End of sermon.
posted by spitbull at 10:25 AM on May 22, 2007

Except to add that Ms. Bollywood is now doing a PhD in econ at an Ivy League school.
posted by spitbull at 10:25 AM on May 22, 2007

Thinking we need a better trade school system is conservative? How so? I'm the biggest, bleedingest-heart liberal there is and I still think they're a great idea.

deanc: We're really not going to convince middle class kids who grow up in the suburbs to become electricians or plumbers (even though this might actually be the right path for them).

Ok, I can buy that, but...

College isn't a pathway to a higher income, necessarily, but it's a path to a higher spot on the class-system ladder.

...bingo. Here's the problem. We don't respect tradespeople in this country nearly enough. But I suspect we might if there was more and better vocational training, and kids got to see their peers succeeding or having fun with their training. Why? The only interaction a typical American middle manager has with a plumber or electrician is when s/he's clogged the toilet or blown every fuse in the McMansion. And at the high school vo-tech level, the honors-class kids all look down on the auto-shop kids until they build themselves a super-boss muscle car from scratch and land all the girls. Or whatevs.

The German system, where kids are separated into different tracks very early on academically and socially isn't necessarily the solution. What we need is a system that encourages *all* kids to try out different kinds of professions. Techy kid? Have them intern with a web design firm. Gothic Theatre Dork^TM? Let them run lights at the community theatre one summer for credit. Make it a part of the actual curriculum, the same way many schools are making practical money management a required class.

It's also a good way to get community businesses and leaders involved in the school system and have a handle on what's really happening there, whether they have kids or not. Hell, give them a little tax break for taking on the teen-interns. I know a small business like mine would scramble to apply for some ready & willing teen girls -- wait, that just sounded wrong, sorry. Even if I had to train them extensively to be of use to me, it'd be worth it to have someone around who's got a better handle on current pop culture.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 10:32 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

(than I do)
-- end thought --
posted by bitter-girl.com at 10:34 AM on May 22, 2007

Yeah, the part about it not costing the taxpayer much is a pretty cool perk, huh?

From a marketing perspective, yes, in the sense that you can say "money won't help," not spend any money, and then when things don't improve, no one has to be held accountable, because no money was spent. You can then say, "well, the community wasn't organized enough and the people weren't good enough." Feel good initiatives that cost no money and don't accomplish anything are winners all around for politicians.

Improving the system takes money. Buildings are, literally, crumbling. Any parents who care about the education of their children who have the means available immediately leave the city in search of a better school district. If you want better contributions from the community and more parental involvement, that's going to cost money, one way or another. However, just sort of blaming the parents and using the shortcomings of the family as an excuse to say "well, money won't help," is just an excuse to do nothing.

I live in DC, incidentally. Probably one of the best things to happen is going to be the mayoral takeover of the school system.

Taxes ... that'll bring the industry (better jobs)

Forbes once had some study on "the most free states" in terms of economic freedom. That meant low taxes, few regulations, etc. Maybe even low cost of labor. The winner? Kansas. Forbes, however, remains headquartered in Manhattan, whose taxes pay for infrastructure and creating a place where people actually want to live (and, yes, in many cases, send their kids to school).
posted by deanc at 10:35 AM on May 22, 2007

And at the high school vo-tech level, the honors-class kids all look down on the auto-shop kids until they build themselves a super-boss muscle car from scratch and land all the girls.

Keep in mind that one of the reasons for the decline in vo-tech education is that vo-tech is much more expensive than a college-prep-school education. For one, the vo-tech teachers are expensive-- they obviosuly have skills that are easily transferrable to industry, and thus schools are competing industry for talent. Next, the facilities required to have kids take those classes require a heck of a lot more space and materials-- large workshops, machine tools, etc. That's a lot of money.

By contrast, BC Calculus? Requirements: 1 teacher, 1 blackboard, 15 textbooks.

I suspect that a lot of school districts decided to do some major cost-cutting under the guise of "we're so elite because we're offering college prep curriculum to everyone!"
posted by deanc at 10:40 AM on May 22, 2007

Where are all these industrial jobs we would presumably training the non-elite to fill in vocational programs?
posted by spitbull at 10:42 AM on May 22, 2007

Not industrial, spitbull. Professional. We might not all need web developers (!) but we all need haircuts, and car tune-ups and toilets that work. Expanded: there are a lot of arts organizations, nursing homes and animal shelters who could use teen volunteers to stretch their budgets. It doesn't just have to be training Joe to work down at the Ford plant.

I don't know about you, deanc, but I'd much rather my tax dollars go to luring vo-tech teachers to schools than to some of the "education" majors I've met in my time. (Apologies in advance to any MeFi education majors, but come on -- at least at the public university I attended, all the education majors were girls who couldn't think of anything better to major in, and who didn't want to scare off the Future Investment Bankers of The World by being women's studies or underwater basket weaving majors).
posted by bitter-girl.com at 10:57 AM on May 22, 2007

It sounds like he thinks the answer is to raise admission standards until all of the "underprepared" students have been carefully filtered out.

Absolutely. Because the alternative is defrauding students by charging them college tuition for high school classes.

No one should have to go into debt to take a 9th grade math class.
posted by straight at 10:57 AM on May 22, 2007 [2 favorites]

Chiming in with much of what has already been said, I think the major issue here has very little to do with music or skin-color. What the author of this piece doesn't seem to understand is the obvious connection that poverty seems to have on these students, and their lack of motivation in school.

Look at what happened when he put the basket of toiletries out on his desk? Students came and took them. They were only travel sized toiletries, at that. This isn't the kind of thing you'd see at a large, public university, and never at a private school. There is an obvious, immediate need being showcased here. The connection, to me, is obvious, and as someone pointed out before, this has a lot more to do with homelessness, poverty and teenage-pregnancy than it does with anything else.

I find the article to be particularly defeatist, and unfortunate because it's tone and emphasis on HBCUs seems to reinforce a general stereotype of African Americans as lazy. That stereotype is patently false, and I'm sure that this professor's black students from his former, more wealthy universities performed up to his standards.

To be honest, it was somewhat hard to stomach this professor's glib portrayal of a two-year stint at an HBCU, as well as his superficial look at what he believes to be the issues for these kids. Perhaps these kids aren't doing so well because people like Professor Maxwell have been giving up on them their entire lives--questions of "college isn't right for everyone" aside.

Did he even consider staying for one, four-year term and seeing a student through; to actually investing himself in his commitment to returning to an HBCU, or did he give up halfway through, just as the students he laments seem to be doing?

Poor article. Poor analysis.
posted by dead_ at 11:09 AM on May 22, 2007

Discouraging and intimidating others who are trying to achieve something was pretty common when I went to high school in Detroit and did not take honors or AP courses. Once I switched to a different track, it was night and day. Interestingly, nearly all of the kids in the AP classes were from middle class families.

I got a scholarship to a boarding school and left my inner city public magnet school. I did this because I knew the level of education I was getting was abysmal. It was supposed to be one of Detroit's premier high schools and when I met kids from places like IMSA (Illinois Math and Science Academy) or NCMSA (North Carolina MSA), I was embarrassed.

It has been my experience that talented, dedicated minority students get out of such environments as quickly as they can. They don't go to historically Black colleges because they can get into top 20 universities and get decent financial aid and scholarships.

So in some ways these schools are in a double bind because of the socio-economic status of their students and the students who could be leaders and set high standards won't go anywhere near them.

This article brought up a lot of issues I have struggled with personally, but I think the focus on race is a red herring. It's about class, income, and people's ideas of what is acceptable or possible in their lives.
posted by eisbaer at 11:10 AM on May 22, 2007

Improving the system takes money.

You live in DC, right? The public school system there spends and has spent more money per student than anywhere else in the country. The teachers are among the highest paid in the country. And the school system gets worse with each passing year.

It doesn't take money.

Oh please. I teach at an elite university where the students get 1500+ on their SATs and come mostly from elite private and rich public schools. They go on to be doctors and lawyers and presidents and such.

So your sample is students who can get into such a school. I would say that whether or not pop culture studies is valid, these students have earned the right to study it.

The students who can barely read and do arithmetic have not earned it. The problem with these students asking their teacher "why should I learn this" is that they don't ask why they should know all the things they know about celebrities, why they should buy so-and-so's new album, or why TV is showing them the things that it is, and why they want to watch.

They only seem to ask why they should learn things that (a) are difficult at first, or (b) people in authority tell them to learn. In other words, in many cases they actively resist learning. The system is not responsible except to the extent it does not call out the parents or the kids on their embrace of the stupid and resistance to education.
posted by Pastabagel at 11:17 AM on May 22, 2007

You live in DC, right? The public school system there spends and has spent more money per student than anywhere else in the country. The teachers are among the highest paid in the country. And the school system gets worse with each passing year. It doesn't take money.

Because, you know, the walls are going to paint themselves, the falling ceiling tiles will be replaced by magic, and the buildings are going to construct classrooms with doors and walls for free. Or we could rely on "parental involvement" and "the spirit of volunteerism" to solve these problems and them blame them for not fixing everything for free.
posted by deanc at 11:24 AM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

Look at what happened when he put the basket of toiletries out on his desk? Students came and took them. They were only travel sized toiletries, at that. This isn't the kind of thing you'd see at a large, public university, and never at a private school. There is an obvious, immediate need being showcased here.

I went to a private university. Whenever someone sponsored an event with free food, it was mobbed. If someone offered free soap and shampoo, I would have taken it, and I know most other students would have too.
posted by Pastabagel at 11:25 AM on May 22, 2007

Could be true, pastabagel. However, I suppose what threw me off was her embarrassment at taking them, as well as the way the professor described "word getting around."
posted by dead_ at 11:29 AM on May 22, 2007

I guess what I'm saying is I understand what you're talking about: the typical "starving college student." It just seems that there is perhaps more of a reality and urgency to the word starving in the case of some of these kids.
posted by dead_ at 11:32 AM on May 22, 2007

They were only travel sized toiletries, at that. This isn't the kind of thing you'd see at a large, public university, and never at a private school.

Again, although it appears no one is bothering to read the articles in any detail or check out the relevant facts elsewhere, Stillman is a private school.
posted by raysmj at 11:35 AM on May 22, 2007

raysmj: I read the article, I missed that detail. Apologies. I'll revise that statement to read, "and never at a wealthy private school."
posted by dead_ at 11:37 AM on May 22, 2007

It's tuition, as I've also tried to point out, is also significantly higher than that of nearby universities and a respectable and growing community college in Tuscaloosa (where you'd do just as well to study if you want to become a nurse). Why do the students go to Stillman? It was their only option as far as scholarships, they thought they'd feel uncomfortable in a predominantly white environment, what? The author never says, and never lets on that there are seemingly affordable and not especially selective options nearby (Alabama isn't all white, by any stretch of the imagination, but I could see being uncomfortable with unfortunately lingering racism--but then some students go to Stillman and trash the place--what gives. And UAB, down the road, doesn't have any negative Civil Rights Era/Jim Crow baggage--it was, to the contrary, a rather progressive force--why not just go there)?

My point is, this article doesn't give us as much insight into higher education, and the lower-income black experience in higher education specifically, as it really could. I can't see the big picture here, or even a more complete smaller picture of Stillman.
posted by raysmj at 11:46 AM on May 22, 2007

Its tuition, not it's--god.
posted by raysmj at 11:47 AM on May 22, 2007

My point is, this article doesn't give us as much insight into higher education, and the lower-income black experience in higher education specifically, as it really could. I can't see the big picture here, or even a more complete smaller picture of Stillman.

Hitting the nail on the head right there.
posted by dead_ at 11:53 AM on May 22, 2007

So your sample is students who can get into such a school. I would say that whether or not pop culture studies is valid, these students have earned the right to study it.

The students who can barely read and do arithmetic have not earned it.

Popular cultural studies is a broad field encompassing mainstream intellectual trends in a dozen or more disciplines. It's not a cherry on top of a cake. One no more "earns" the right to study it than to study math or social studies -- and no less either.

My point in describing my own experience at an elite school where popular culture studies are not some "gut" option for jocks and burnouts is to questions whether content is relevant here. The teaching of math and science and English composition is no better than the teaching of popular culture at a bad school, or a school with unprepared students and third-rate faculty. Popular culture as an academic subject is NOT the cause of anything negative here, nor is it a joke meant to appease underprepared students.

Just because the kids are into hip hop doesn't mean hip hop is to blame for them being poorly educated. And it has nothing to do with whether hip hop and its "culture" is an appropriate topic for scholarly research of serious coursework.

Mostly I'm just shocked to see the impulse here to blame the kids. Our entire society fails poor children of color from birth on, most especially in our public education and welfare systems. Examples of exceptions don't disprove the general rule. A college that serves a disadvantaged population has terrible challenges that can't be easily overcome to confront, every day. Aren't we glad someone is even trying?

Might I point out, also, that the article describes students in a journalism major? That IS vocational training, for the most part, and properly so. If you can't write, you have more immediate educational needs in this society than any serious college can offer you. But it makes sense to see work that is primarily the application of one's mind and skills at expressing what one thinks within a spectrum of vocational training. opportunities.
posted by spitbull at 12:20 PM on May 22, 2007

I wish someone could tell me what "hip hop" is, because it's either destroying our youth or saving them (and here I thought all it meant was breakdancing, emceeing, graffiti, and djing!)
posted by iamck at 12:23 PM on May 22, 2007

Because, you know, the walls are going to paint themselves, the falling ceiling tiles will be replaced by magic, and the buildings are going to construct classrooms with doors and walls for free.

DC public schools spent $16,000 per student in 2007. That's more than most DC area private schools charge. And they don't have the proverbial falling ceiling tiles. Of course, the administrators don't line their pockets with tuition money either.

In other words, DC would be better off if they used their budget to send the kids to private school. The problem is not money. The problem is that they don't really use the money for anything that matters. The solution to that is not more money. The solution is less money for stupid things and more oversight.
posted by Pastabagel at 12:24 PM on May 22, 2007

Great (if depressing) article, great discussion. I have a bone to pick with this comment:

On the other hand, I am repelled by his repeated need for respect based on his title and position. He might be an excellent teacher, and even a good guy, but he still has to gain the respect of other people in his own actions and stances. There are many lauded professor in the world who are downright unfathomably narcissistic jerks that don't deserve anyone's respect. Their work certainly might deserve respect, but they still have to be worthwhile people. Although it would be nice to have people respect positions like professorship and show that respect in the classroom, I can't help but think that respecting a position like that should work both ways. The people who have such positions should respect it as well. It isn't a license to demand respect from people. Although it is certainly a badge of great accomplishment, it isn't a go ahead to be a condescending and petty person.

Sorry, but that's utter bullshit, and a perfect example of the kind of self-defeating mentality that keeps some people from getting anything out of college. Those professors are not paid to be nice to you or to respect you or to earn your respect. They are paid to teach you (and perform other professorial activities, like publishing and doing the dreaded administrative work). I've been at both ends of this; I've taken classes from assholes who I wouldn't have given the time of day to outside of the university context and I've taught asshole kids who were openly uninterested in the subject and the class and didn't even bother to study. You know what? The situation was exactly the same from both ends: if the student doesn't study, he or she is fucked, whether it's from stupidity or excessive coolness or an aggrieved sense that the professor "didn't earn my respect." When I was that student, I realized that and studied my ass off, because it was my ass on the line, not the professor's—the professor gets paid regardless. Anyone who's too dumb to understand that gets what's coming to them.

Insisting that your teacher be a wonderful human being who shares your values and respects all living things is as silly as expecting the same of writers, artists, CEOs, or cab drivers. Professionals are paid to exercise their profession, not to be nice. When mommy and daddy patted you on the head and sent you off to college, it was time to grow up and learn that.

Actually, what some of "these kids" needed was for the community to raise taxes to benefit the public schools they came from: fix the heating system, buy decent textbooks and hire competent teachers. Too bad all that starts with raising taxes.

Yup.
posted by languagehat at 12:38 PM on May 22, 2007

Pasta, sooner or later, the issue of improving schools is going to involve a politician standing up and saying, "we need money to make these specific improvements." Until we realize that simple fact-- improvements cost money, we're never going to get anywhere. Cute as it is to see shiny-eyed volunteers come in on a saturday morning to repaint the peeling walls, it made me angry because I pay money in taxes to ensure that the government does this.

Whichever way you slice it, schools don't improve unless you have money. Yes, that money has to go to the right places. But someone can always say, "yeah, well, we spend all that money and scores don't improve" because they can't tangibly say where the money should go, so they assume it's all wasted. You can hem and haw and say that student test scores could be improved if we just made this or that change to teaching methods. You're never going to get around the fact that you can't improve the physical plant and working environment without money. When the roads are crumbling, no one says, "yeah, well, we already spend too much on the roads." They say, "let's spend money to fix the roads." Why should school buildings be treated any differently?

(If you have specific information about why DC schools cost so much per pupil, let's hear it. Don't just think I'm going to assume, "oh, it must all be wasted.")
posted by deanc at 12:38 PM on May 22, 2007

When I was that student, I realized that and studied my ass off, because it was my ass on the line, not the professor's—the professor gets paid regardless.

So, so true. I had my share of bad teachers who, to this day, I think about with disdain. But at the end of the day, I was the one who needed to pass the class, unless I wanted to drop it, and I knew the prof wasn't going to help. My lack of respect for the professor's teaching did not free me from the obligation to learn the material and study for the tests.

Bill Maxwell could have been a poor teacher who looked down on his students. How does that free students from their obligation to read at grade level and do their assignments? Teachers are one of the last professionals (along with physicians), where we still address them by their title rather than by first name. We are expected to give them respect, until proven otherwise. They can lose our respect, but they certainly don't have to earn it from us.

Also, while people sound like they're pretty down on HBCUs, Howard still attracts good students. As of the time I graduated high school back in 1992, my classmate who chose to go to Morehouse was, by all accounts, a perfectly prepared student who knew as much about what he wanted out of his future as anyone else. It strikes me though that the number spaces available at HBCUs exceeds the pool of qualified students interested in attending HBCUs.
posted by deanc at 12:50 PM on May 22, 2007

Increase property tax in an area with many living in poverty?

No, make sure all public schools get only federal money (no state or local cash) and all have the same conditions for all students in the country. Everyone depends on a well-educated, well-employed, unimprisoned population. You have to educate everyone, not just your kids.

And make sure a lot of the money goes into babysitting, daycare, study hall, extra tutoring, keeping kids out of bad homes for a few more minutes or hours before and after lessons every day if they need it. Maybe school six days a week. If you do it right, there will be a hell of lot fewer bad homes to worry about in a couple of generations, and the investment will be returned in higher worker productivity, lower unemployment, and lower crime and imprisonment rates.
posted by pracowity at 1:23 PM on May 22, 2007

What languagehat said.

One problem with the old vo-tech approach is there aren't as many vo-tech jobs to graduate them to. And those jobs there are are so "uncool" we import "illegals" to take them.
posted by davy at 1:24 PM on May 22, 2007

make sure all public schools get only federal money (no state or local cash) and all have the same conditions for all students in the country.

Do you really think that would solve the problems faced by urban public schools? If every school district got the same amount of money (adjusted for local costs) per student you would still have high performing districts and low performing districts. Suburban school "A" could allocate more of it's funding towards academics than urban school "B" because "B" spends more of it's resources on babysitting, security, breakfast programs etc...than school "A". Some urban districts would even lose money as they are funded at a greater level (per pupil) than many of their suburban counterparts.Even adjusting for that the suburban schools would solicit funds from the parents via fundraising for programs not covered by federal funding. The problems that urban public schools face go way deeper than funding issues. Besides, I'm not sure America is ready for a program of mandatory parity mediocrity.
posted by MikeMc at 3:07 PM on May 22, 2007

Why are we on "urban" public schools now? Yikes. The author said the students he's talking about mostly come from the Black Belt area of Alabama, which is overwhelmingly rural.

I'm white, but goodness, if hearing everything associated with African-Americans called "urban" doesn't annoy me. Are some radio people, say, under the impression that black people from the country don't sing?
posted by raysmj at 3:42 PM on May 22, 2007

Those professors are not paid to be nice to you or to respect you or to earn your respect.

I'm not asking them to be nice to me. I'm asking them to be decent human beings and good teachers.

I am asking them to respect the positions they hold as much as anyone else.

But automatic respect of a title? Or a position someone holds? Why should I? I work in a university and I see how many of these positions and titles are decided, and it's brutal and vicious and often has very little to do with academic achievement.

You're mistaking me asking for people to be decent for asking people to be nice. They are not equivalent. There are smart, strong, ambitious forward moving people that are very decent people, I work with a lot of them. There are smart, ambitious ass holes that don't deserve my time or respect. (I work with some of those as well.)

...the kind of self-defeating mentality that keeps some people from getting anything out of college.

As I mentioned, I went back to college five years after I left from attending right out of high school. I got significantly more out of it after having matured and worked for five years. In nearly all cases (but not all) I had great respect for my teachers, professors, teacher's aides, and anyone who worked with me. College was a fantastic experience for me and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Those professors are not paid to be nice to you or to respect you or to earn your respect.

Actually, they are paid to earn my respect. If I am a student then, effectively, I am a customer of the the teacher's. I'm not asking him to tell me I'm always right. I'm asking him to teach me something. To correct me when I am wrong. To introduce me to new ideas. To make me think for myself. To impart to me his passion for his field enough that I am passionate enough to find out more. Does a lousy, passionless professor that hates his students and belittles them at every turn deserver my respect because he has professor in front of his name? No. That's not what I'm paying for when I walk in the door. (And yes, like millions of others, I paid for my college out of pocket while I worked 40 hours a week. I wanted my money's worth. Mommy and daddy never patted me on the head and sent me off to college.)

If I'm paying for an education, make me work hard. Make me earn it. If you do that, then you're working hard and earning my respect. If I'm a lousy student, then that's my fault. I'm wasting my money and my time being there. And I have been a lousy student in my time. I have wasted my own money and my own time and the teache's time. Ultimately, though, I learned to be a good student. I worked hard in class and got a lot out of it. I had amazing, tremendous, passionate teachers. I also had some despicable idiots that through whatever route the took ended up teaching and hating their students and their subject. I dropped those classes. No one benefits from that. It's a waste of time, effort and money. I'm hardly going to stick it out in one of those idiots' classes just because it's Professor Idiot.
posted by smallerdemon at 4:46 PM on May 22, 2007

Actually, they are paid to earn my respect. If I am a student then, effectively, I am a customer of the the teacher's.

You don't pay your professor. The university does. You presumably pay for an education, you little snot.
posted by raysmj at 5:22 PM on May 22, 2007

If I am a student then, effectively, I am a customer of the the teacher's.

And this is what's wrong with America today. Everybody thinks of themself as a fucking customer.
posted by languagehat at 5:28 PM on May 22, 2007 [3 favorites]

And I belittled you due to the language. The "I want to work hard" is not the attitude of 99.9 percent of those with the "I'm paying you" attitude. They want a grade for that, much like fries.

And no, you don't pay a university to receive instruction from professor to be passionate a la some image in your head from a movie. You are paying the university for instruction from specialists in a certain field, who most certainly do have other aspects of their jobs (the exception being in teaching college cases, and the subject of the FPP is a teaching college). It's the teacher's job to try to do that as well as he or she can under the circumstances, and in proportion to how important the university or college sees that as being part of his or her job. (If tenure is based on production of research and the receipt of grants, you'd be a fool to concentrate mostly on teaching.) Some professors are not natural born teachers, some are. But being all movie-ish doesn't equate to helping you learn more. It's more up to you all the college level, always has been.
posted by raysmj at 5:37 PM on May 22, 2007

You don't pay your professor. The university does. You presumably pay for an education, you little snot.

:) Yey! Name calling.

"note: Help maintain a healthy, respectful discussion by focusing comments on the issues, topics, and facts at hand—not at other members of the site."

At least that's what my preview box has below it.
posted by smallerdemon at 5:58 PM on May 22, 2007

The problem is not apathetic students. It's not even colleges, really.

It's economics and globalism. Our education system cannot hope to keep up with shifting economic realities.

As for trade schools? Shit.

There are few "viable" trades left in this country. Not any that pay well. Most of the technical trades have been off-shored.

There is no manufacturing economy here to speak of... the middle management jobs that most mediocre college grads counted on are scant except in high tech. And those are getting sent off shore now.

This is happening in once good stable creative professions - like design - that only really required Art College degrees. If I still worked at Ad Agencies I would have been - or would be soon - laid off with no hope of getting rehired at 45 years old.

This trend is NOT good.

Kids are not all that stupid. They can see this reality. But there is little out there to help them. So they retreat into the talent/Fame career path because that is the only viable career path they can see. And it is largely fantasy.

And now these kids are getting out of college with out a road map. With a useless education. And even though their white counter parts are just as clueless... they are white and will get the few jobs that are there.

Black kids have been hit hardest becuase they were the ones who were fed the longest most empty stream of the Self Esteem education experiment.

Black popular youth culture embraced the worst darkest most violent aspects of their reality on the fringes without any kind of intervening cultural filter that was present in white culture. The empowering message was "be angry." But outside a few creative based careers that won't get you anywhere.

The intellectual black role models were not comodifiable or not sexy enough for the new youth market. Anybody that stepped up and said "whoa wait a minute this pissed off anti-intellectual attitude is going to fuck up your future" was shouted down as a racist or a hopeless fuddy-duddy.

Anyway. We let young black kids slide because we felt guilty or we didn't know what to do. Or we didn't care. While depressing it's no big surprise.
posted by tkchrist at 6:02 PM on May 22, 2007

You want respect, dude, you have to earn it! Or learn how to recognize when someone's being a smart-ass.
posted by raysmj at 6:03 PM on May 22, 2007

[back & forth]

smallerdemon: "Yey! Name calling..."

raysmj: "...Or learn how to recognize when someone's being a smart-ass."

This is Metafilter, land of Reading Incomprehension. You're lucky he didn't accuse you of death threats.
posted by davy at 6:10 PM on May 22, 2007

I must also note for Editorial Clarity that I was educated as a Slacker of the Seventies Generation. I'm no finger waving grandpa.

I rarely took home a book (shocking, huh) and though I went to college it was largely an exercise in socialization, getting laid, and beer drinking. I am not proud of this.

But I'm not really ashamed either as I have been fortunate that I have been served well by my "education" in that, though I was late to discovering or inventing my career, it is one that is tailored for a slacker (though starting up my own business did take years of 14 hour days).

Today I am very well paid it for my experience. I work maybe 30 hours per week, if you can call it that, and do what I want when I want. I hope to whittle this down to a grueling 25 hours per week and then retire. It is ideal.

But there is not much of that rope left for the up-and-coming generation I'm afraid. You kids will end up having to work way harder than me to get there.
posted by tkchrist at 6:13 PM on May 22, 2007

If I am a student then, effectively, I am a customer of the the teacher's.

Anyone who broadcasts that attitude to their teachers is sure to get the education they deserve, no matter how much they pay.
posted by hermitosis at 6:50 PM on May 22, 2007

The problem is Bill Maxwell.

Driving my 13-year-old, unairconditioned Chevy Blazer past the guard house, I became apprehensive when I noticed about a dozen male students wearing baggy pants, oversized white T-shirts, expensive sneakers and assorted bling standing around shooting the breeze. At least two had "jailhouse tats" on their arms, crude tattoos suggesting that these young men had spent time behind bars. They carried no books or anything else to indicate they were on a college campus.

I got a good look at their faces. I wanted to remember these young men if any of them showed up in my classes.

So upon arriving he judges people on their attire, decides they are criminals and had best remember their faces ... opening minds is his goal?

Things don't go much better as the flame out starts immediately.

The room was noisy, and two who had been in front of King Hall were horsing around. I put my books on the table and raised an arm for silence. When only a few students paid attention I raised my arm again, and this time I yelled.

"All right, knock it off! Take your seats and be quiet!"

I could not believe that I had to yell for college students to behave in a classroom. This is not going to be a good experience, I thought, unfolding the roster and preparing to call the roll.

So his bias was confirmed and his choice
to yell at the class was their making.

Yes Bill, blame your students.

By the beginning of my second year, I would find myself alienated from most of the senior administrators and most of the longtime staff members who were responsible for the day-to-day operations of the institution.

My alienation, a colleague told me, was the result of a disease found at most HBCUs: professional jealousy.

Poor victim Bill, first students now the staff ... I'm beginning to suspect the constant might not have much to do with race, priviledge or SAT scores.

After a week, I faced another problem that my seasoned colleagues knew well but failed to warn me about: Most Stillman students refuse to buy their required textbooks.

Jesus Christ the savages. Could you fling more blame Bill.

Our professors - whether we liked them or hated them - were gods

Well this may be your blind spot Bill ... you aren't exactly saintly material and your ideal of being revered as a god is ... disconcerting.

Few efforts in academia are tougher than trying to teach English majors how to write like journalists. English majors tend to believe that complicated prose and obfuscation are smart. Clear prose - the bread and butter of journalism - is considered unsophisticated and incapable of conveying deep thought and important ideas.

I had a hard time getting students to use short words instead of long ones: "ended" instead of "terminated;" "use" instead of "utilization;" "aim" instead of "objective."

What to make of this ... he laments the fact his students can't write or spell and now he believes limiting ones vocabulary to shorter words is the rule of thumb for proper journalistic writings.

I hardly ever saw anyone take notes during lectures in the English class. Instead, I had to regularly chastise students for text messaging their friends and relatives and for going online to read messages and send messages. The college issued free laptops to all students who maintained a passing grade-point average.

When I confronted students about text messaging, I was met with hostility. I even had a few students leave class to make calls or send text messages.

Chastise and confrontation ... George Bush diplomacy in action ... outstanding Bill.

Professors who had the best success connecting with students, especially below-average male students, emphasized friendly, personal and supportive involvement in their lives.

This style of teaching, which I grudgingly adopted, was unlike anything I had used during my previous 18 years of teaching on traditional campuses such as those of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northern Illinois University. On those campuses, professors were respected for their achievements and position. Subject matter usually was taught without developing strong personal relationships between students and professors, and professors may not have cared if students liked them.

I doubt the students noticed the disdane you held toward them.

The same four I had seen when I drove onto campus nearly two years earlier were milling about on the lawn. I parked my car and walked over to the group.

"Why don't you all hang out somewhere else?" I asked.

"Who you talking to, old nigger?" one said.

"You give the school a bad image out here, " I said.

They laughed.

"Hang out somewhere else or at least go to the library and read a book, " I said.

They laughed and dismissed me with stylized waves of the arm.


Telling people that their mere presence is sulling the image of the school is not productive, not nice, not respectful and very self absorbed.

Again he is issuing orders, demanding, condesending and is amazed he garnered a reciprocial level of respect.

Bill you were a piss poor teacher who will blame inability to do the job on everyone and everything BUT yourself.

The man was unhappy and met with unhappiness. Big fucking surprise.
posted by phoque at 6:58 PM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

"If I am a student then, effectively, I am a customer of the the teacher's.

And this is what's wrong with America today. Everybody thinks of themself as a fucking customer."

There is nothing wrong with this. When I am handing over money how else would I think of myself?

Teachers do not have some god given high rank. They work for money and they are accountable for their salary (ignoring tenure for the sake of discussion). Thinking of yourself as a customer is nothing more than keeping in mind that you deserve value for your money. Sure there are universities that value other skills of professors more than their teaching, but most professors get paid at least in part, for teaching. I hope that every student in America who is paying tuition considers themselves a customer.

The university is simply the institution that makes the transaction possible.

------

"There are few "viable" trades left in this country. Not any that pay well. Most of the technical trades have been off-shored."

Come on. This isn't true. There has been a lot of outsourcing and manufacturing in America is very weak but it still isn't true. There is infrastructure here that is in some disrepair and will need to be fixed.

One example is the power industry. More power plants need to be built and others will need continued repair and maintenance. This means welders and electricians. There will always be a need for linemen.

Electricians and plumbers will always be needed for construction. They are licensed and their jobs have some protection from illegal immigrants.

I don't know what you consider 'pay well', but all of these do at least OK around here and some do pretty good.
posted by BigSky at 7:17 PM on May 22, 2007

Somebody give BigSky some respect already.
posted by chunking express at 7:58 PM on May 22, 2007

Electricians and plumbers will always be needed for construction. They are licensed and their jobs have some protection from illegal immigrants.

Have you worked construction lately?

I just bought a new condo from a builder that we had used before. things have changes so much in the last ten years you wouldn't recognize the trade.

The projects that don't outsource or sub-contract three or four times are very rare. Even with Plumbing. Actually ESPECIALLY with plumbing.

Usually you have one Licensed guy. He subcontracts out (he has to do like five jobs simultaneously to compete and stay in business) and has most to the real work done by un-licensed low paid immigrants... then he "inspects" it.

The well paying jobs that used to be for skilled journeymen laborers are drying up fast.

Some areas of the country may be slightly different but the trend is generally the same and growing.
posted by tkchrist at 8:00 PM on May 22, 2007

see, that's why i do all my plumbing and electricity myself. just me and my trusty hammer.
posted by spiderwire at 8:14 PM on May 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

As someone who has in the last decade been both a student and a professor ...

Students are not customers. As a student, you are paying for the time of a group of experts in various fields. Those experts are obliged only to give you the information, and to assess your uptake of that information; they are not obliged to babysit you, answer the same question ten times an hour, or spoonfeed you the information. It is your responsibility, and yours alone, to make use of that information in such a way as to get a good grade on said assessment.

Case in point: in my third year of university (as a student), there was a case of academic misdememor, which meant that of a class of 200 students, 4 passed. They failed 98% of the students outright, as was their right and duty to the other students taking the program.

I took several classes where the expected failure rate was around 70%. And that was normal, expected, and fine. You knew that it was a hard class going into it, and that you would have to work yourself to the bone to pass, let alone do well. And that was fine. Everyone got their money's worth out of that subject - I would personally say it is up among the top 10 most valuble classes I took while I was at university. I scraped through that class by the skin of my teeth.

Education is not a customer-provider transaction, except in the sense that money changes hands somewhere along the line. It requires a lot of effort from all the parties involved - and if you don't put in that effort, well. You fail. And that's the value you've put on your money.
posted by ysabet at 8:51 PM on May 22, 2007

tkchrist,

Fair enough.

I haven't spoken to my friend who is a licensed plumber in a few years, but he did all his own work and never mentioned anything about immigrants working in that capacity. This was in a section of the country that had an absolute abundance of immigrant labor as well. But times change.

A few years before that I delivered building supplies, and from what I saw, they were doing a lot of the sheetrock and roofing, some of the masonry and that was about it.

-------

ysabet,

I don't see how anything you said contradicts student being customers. In fact, this is in agreement with it:

"It requires a lot of effort from all the parties involved - and if you don't put in that effort, well. You fail. And that's the value you've put on your money."

No one ever implied that a grade or babysitting or professors overlooking a cheat was part of the service.
posted by BigSky at 8:58 PM on May 22, 2007

The idea of a "customer" does imply a transaction of a nature that puts the person on the receiving end of the education in charge. As in, "If I want the seats to be green, they will be green, you moron." "I didn't want lettuce and pickles on this sandwich, and it's undercooked. Please go back to the drawing board." "I wanted this latte with soy milk and it's too hot, god damn it, I said I didn't want it so hot. And where's the spiffy but pointless-from-a-taste-perspective froth art that they do in the hipper cities? Where's the @* manager." You bark orders like that to a professor, and most will be withdrawing you from the class involuntarily (or asking the dean or chair for permission to do so, depending on rules).

Also, most collegiate education is heavily subsidized in some way, via taxpayers, religious denominations, grants (more important than you'd imagine even at the most expensive universities), etc. Of course, many corporations are heavily subsidized by taxpayers now as well, but they're typically subsidized in order to quote-unquote produce jobs that will supposedly pay for those subsidies. Education has been seen as a means to an end for jobs as well (and it provides students with credentials for jobs), but there's more to it than that--educated citizens are also more likely to participate in communities, to vote and vote in an informed way, etc. You can't easily put a price tag on that.

I'd also say that you don't always realize the value (or lack thereof) of what you've learned in college until later. This doesn't typically happen with, say, cars, soap or DVDs. You may go back and buy that film that everybody hated when it came out but is now considered a classic, sure, but more folks will have to be told by some authority or metafilter or whatever that the work is now considered a classic.
posted by raysmj at 9:30 PM on May 22, 2007

The *#@$ manager!
posted by raysmj at 9:31 PM on May 22, 2007

The 6-year graduation rate at Stillman is 29%. Holy shit. My family is also from Pireaus. My grandfather worked his whole life at a kiosk selling candy and magazines, and sacrificed everything to give my father a good education. I'm going to thank God tonight for everything my parents and their parents did for me. Race, economics, and politics aside, at some point every person has to step up to the plate and seek the embetterment of their own situation. To value education, and to be a good person. The fact that the opposite is happening in this country today, and systematically so, is really, really sad.

I think the professor was brave to write that article. I wish he could have wrote it and continued his work at Stillman. It would be convenient to brush this away by attacking the professor, but with such a low graduation rate from the school, and keeping in mind the support that he indicated was there from the administration in terms of increasing his role at the school, I doubt that the nature of the problem is a failure to connect in terms of his teaching style. Besides, it's easy enough to blame the people that are there to help, by saying that they're not helping. The real issue is that of personal responsibility on the part of the students. And criticizing your own cultures, and your peers, will always be looked down upon.

I work with a lot of people who act the same way as Maxwell's students, despite being older. This article makes me realize that this problem is endemic in american culture on various levels; for what it's worth, it definitely exists in the black culture as well. It's not even about being stuck in college and failing to connect on an academic level. It's a kind of pointless bravado that has superceded the idea that a core set of good, ethical values could actually exist; a cross between "who are you to tell me what to do" and "what's the point anyway". As an art form, sure, this is espoused in hip-hop. But there's no need to argue over a causal connection between the kind of music one listens to, and the kind of life one live. If anything, gangster rap glamorizes a life not worth living. The fact that good teachers who have an opportunity to open doors for their students are just walking away, however, is just depressing.
posted by phaedon at 5:45 AM on May 23, 2007

phaedon,

I agree entirely.

Another belief that gets entirely too much play in rap is viewing romantic relationship as a zero-sum game. All too often the depiction is that for one person to win the other must lose. If that's where someone is coming from how can sacrifice and duty be meaningful concepts? Now, that's overstating the case by a lot. After all the article pointed out that many of the students had either adopted a sibling, or were providing for a family at a young age. It takes a lot of love and determination to be there in that way. Still, when so much of the culture champions individualism and luxury it forms psychological incentives pointing in that direction. When someone doesn't get what was hoped for in return for their sacrifices to family, which is inevitable, it makes it easy for them to seem like a chump, in their own eyes. No doubt this happens in all cultures at all times, but I can't help thinking that a lot of mass-market hip-hop increases the tendency.
posted by BigSky at 8:05 AM on May 23, 2007

good article. not a great article, but a good springboard for discussion.
i agree with an above poster who said race is a red herring. the real issue is culture. One of the determinants about whether a child is gonna succeed or not is whether their culture values learning or not. Most Asian cultures do. I'm pretty sure Jewish culture does. They aren't afraid of being "made white."

I don't know how to get to these kids either. It's a tough problem, one that's entangled with class and money. If they just could see that people in power are educated. Maybe Barack Obama will help with that. But a lot of people seem to wanna just write him off as 'too white'. Too bad.
posted by Miles Long at 10:01 AM on May 23, 2007

ysabet, it strikes me that your university is not preparing its students well to take the classes it is offering. Either that or lots of students sign up for the class without being qualified for it. Either way, a a breakdown of the academic system.

I do believe that teachers don't have to do anything to "earn" my respect, but, seriously, some professors will, come the revolution, be the first up against the wall for rank disregard of their duties. I'm looking at you, Dr ----, teacher of vector calculus.

phaedon and BigSky, the fact that we can all point to being members of not only a family but an entire community who pitched in to encourage education means that when we say, "oh, the community should be able to deal with this," is just a statement from our privileged points of view. If these were isolated, small pockets of failure, we could even be tempted to say, "oh, it's their problem." Because of the sheer magnitude of the problem -- urban and rural -- with situations like what Flakypastry describes where not a single student he worked with graduated from high school means that it's our problem. (similar to the adage, "when you owe the bank a million dollars and you can't pay, it's your problem. when you owe the bank a billion dollars and you can't pay, it's the bank's problem". Our country is the bank and a huge segment of the population for whatever reason isn't getting an education is the billion dollar loan in default)

Another belief that gets entirely too much play in rap is viewing romantic relationship as a zero-sum game. All too often the depiction is that for one person to win the other must lose.

Granted, a terrible attitude. But this differs from much of non-hip-hop-related pop-culture how? Someone once painted on the wall of my college dorm's basement a quote from that notorious hip-hop thug Gore Vidal-- "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
posted by deanc at 10:08 AM on May 23, 2007

Mostly I'm just shocked to see the impulse here to blame the kids. Our entire society fails poor children of color from birth on, most especially in our public education and welfare systems.

Man, come on. The society didn't make them set trash fires in their dorm. Martin Luther King Hall. There's gotta be some personal responsibility. It's actually more disrespectful to say that people have no choice in what they do.
posted by Miles Long at 10:08 AM on May 23, 2007

Actually ESPECIALLY with plumbing.


Small derail

At lunch today the plumber on site gave me some insights.

He is a 35 year veteran of the trade, husky and grizzled haired.

He plainly stated that the existence of real plumbers was disappearing. He theorizied that it was because of flexible hoses, thus the need for the art of pipe fitting was reduced.

Also flexible hoses don't require plumber certification to install (at least here in Quebec, where damn near everything construction related is heavily regulated by the government)

He also explained that these hoses are prone to failure at a rate that simply does not exist with copper pipe.

The problem with the hoses, according to him, is the fittings.

They fail the same way a car radiator hoses tend fail. You take a metal outlet, place a rubber or synthetic material over it and attach with a metal or plastic fitting it weakens the material. Pressure comming on and off the fitting causes the usual rupture near that weakened point.

He then illustrate his point with a war story.

There was a residential job in Saint-Jerome (community north of montreal) that his company had bid on.

Another company from the south shore (area south of montreal and said perhaps as embellishment and showing of proper regionalism) came in with a bid at half the price.

He knew the guy had bid with flexible in mind.

He didn't think much more about it until a few months later when he got a call.

It was now February and the family had headed for a vacation in warmer climes.

Upon their return they were met with a wonderful ice waterfall encompassing the second story balcony and extending down to the ground.

One of the hoses in the master bath had ruptured at a fitting and nature beautified the chaos but not to the delight of the house owners who then tasked the good plumber to replace it all in copper :)

Sure couldn't convict flexible with this antedote ... but I thought his views were interesting.

He taught me something ... in that he gave me something to consider ... he raised questions and exposed me to the possibility for difference I did not even know existed.

/derail

I hold this plumber in much higher esteem than yelly, hip hoppity staff alienating, everyone is jelous of me, journalism must only contain simple words, Bill (I demand and judge) Maxwell.
posted by phoque at 2:44 PM on May 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

damn right, phoque. some of the smartest people i know never finished high school, but can fix anything by looking at it and figuring out how it works. schooling is not the only sign of intelligence or skill.
posted by spitbull at 7:39 AM on May 24, 2007

It's actually more disrespectful to say that people have no choice in what they do.

Good thing I didn't say that.
posted by spitbull at 6:05 AM on May 26, 2007