Achieving the Dream: A North American Development Project

I have been wanting to write a blog post on this whole "Achieving the Dream" initiative for a long time. Its a huge topic and it keeps getting bigger. Unfortunately, although I have been tracking this initiative for several years now, I can't quite figure our what is up with it. It all sounds really nice but the creep factor is pretty high for me: little hairs go up on the back of my neck when I read between the lines. Almost everything about it from the intent to the results on the ground reads as a top-down development project, you know the stuff we anthropologists like to critique the hell out of.

I am trying to condense, here. In essence, the Sallie Mae people ended up making so much money from repaid student loans that the were left with a pile of money to do stuff with. This money started the Lumina Foundation which underwrites the Achieving the Dream movement. (And, yes, the Gates Foundation has jumped aboard.)

Check out this passage from the Lumina Foundation web site under the "Our Work" tab:

Education is the foundation for individual opportunity, economic vitality and social stability. Lumina Foundation's goal is to raise the proportion of the U.S. adult population who earn high-quality college degrees to 60 percent by the year 2025, an increase of 23 million graduates above current rates.

This is the benchmark we must achieve to compete with top performing countries. To accomplish this goal, the United States will need to graduate nearly 800,000 more students each year from now through 2025. Raising college-attainment levels is crucial to maintaining an educated workforce, especially because America's most-educated population faces retirement age. According to data prepared for the Making Opportunity Affordable initiative PDF, the United States is likely to face an unprecedented shortage of college-educated workers by 2025.

To achieve this ambitious goal of increasing postsecondary degree attainment, Lumina Foundation, in partnership with other stakeholders, is focusing on three main milestones of progress:

■Student preparedness. K-12 education systems must prepare students for college success by ensuring that students: academically prepared, have knowledge about the going-to-college process and have access to financial aid information.
■Student success. Student success depends on a high-quality learning environment where programs, policies and practices improve the likelihood that students will attain their educational goals with the skills and credentials for the needs of an evolving workforce.
■College productivity. Postsecondary institutions must embrace a college productivity agenda, thereby changing the structure and delivery of higher education so that they are better equipped to increase the number of students through the educational pipeline.

You will notice that the rhetoric is being parroted by Obama, down to the dotted i's and crossed to-a-t's.

In 2004 the Lumina Foundation gave birth to the Achieving the Dream movement. Now, we are going to drop down to my level. At my college, this has meant we apply for money to fund initiatives to improve "student success". From what I have seen the money only lasts for a start-up period and then the college assumes the cost for continuing the project/program. The big caveat is the "Culture of Evidence" angle. All initiatives must be quantifiable in the world of education statistics--and, yes, I am going to say it. Those educational people have no idea how to collect social science date, let alone analyze it. But they do know how to increase bureaucracy, create their own jobs, and spend money.

Right now, for example, we have a mandatory orientation being tested. All neww students must come onto campus to watch a 40 minute Powerpoint, take a tour, and attend a "resource fair" (a bunch of table set up by the various campus offices). Some how this is supposed to improve student retention by making connections. I suppose the selection bias will weed out the less committed and, in that, it might work in a twisted kind of way. Maybe we can then have a special initiative to seek out and recruit those students who fled because of a low tolerance for bullshit.

In order to show success, we have to meet and exceed expectations for recruitment and retention. And what do you think that means for us faculty?

I have a couple thousand critiques of this stuff. Too much for one post. For now, I will confine myself to giving a shout out to the scope of all this. Go Google "Achieving the Dream" and look at the pages and pages of schools on-board. And while you are at it, try to find one piece of obective analysis and critique of these goals and methods. Just one. Try it.

So, who is making money off this stuff? Because I would bet my windowed office that somebody is.

Corporate imperialism?

Welcome to My World

Enough said?

Now does everyone understand why I rant so much. Any and all expressions of pity, outrage, disgust, and disbelief are most welcome.


(Thanks to the World's Most Beautiful Sociology Professor for her iphone and WTF moment. Just when you think it can't get any worse, huh?)

Ahh the good old days........

More on the the American Graduation Initiative, Obama's Community College Plan, the one of which David Brooks approves:

Undoubtedly, it is a great thing to be talking of more money for Community Colleges. But it is the part of the Initiative that has expectations beyond financial accountability that worries me. Check out this paragraph from the White House Press Release Fact Sheet on the Initiative:

Fund Innovative Strategies to Promote College Completion: Nearly half of students who enter community college intending to earn a degree or transfer to a four-year college fail to reach their goal within six years. The College Access and Completion Fund will finance the innovation, evaluation, and expansion of efforts to increase college graduation rates and close achievement gaps, including those at community colleges. Promising approaches include performance-based scholarships, learning communities of students, professors and counselors, colleges tailored to promote the success of working adults, and funding formulas based on student progress and success as well as initial enrollment. Resources would also be provided to improve states’ efforts to track student progress, completion, and success in the workplace.

Now, really think about what that looks like. We need to find ways in our classrooms to graduate more students who come to an open enrollment institution. Specifically, Obama wants 5 million more Community College degrees and certificates by 2020.

The last statistical data we have for my College, 66 per cent of our students were below the age of 24 with the highest percentage of students being in the 18-19 year old cohort. That means the vast majority of my students just graduated from High School and some 60 per cent of them require remedial courses before they can take a College level class; although they need to have 12 hours to qualify for financial aid (which over 30 per cent of them do--and we are very, very cheap to attend)so they will be in a mixture of remedial and college level if it can be managed. Our poor counselors are very creative and very tired. For example, many of our college classes in Sociology, Psychology, History, and Government have lowered their standards so that you can take them while taking remedial classes; despite the reality that the textbooks are written at a reading level beyond which they are tested to be able to read. Yes, read that again. True dat. So, in short, for a variety of reasons--and there are many--I teach a lot of very young not necessarily conventionally "successful" students and, yes, they disappear. A lot.

In the old days--say, twenty years ago when I first started, we thought that was a good thing. We figured that maybe they needed to go work a few years and figure some things out. Mature a little. Sow their wild oats. Earn some money. Figure out they couldn't earn enough and then they would come back. And they did. And they were better students. And life was good. Or good enough.

But slowly over the course of my career and more so in the past 5 years we have faced pressure to retain them. They track our drop rates. You are a failure if you don't retain them. So, you make accommodations and find yourself thinking more and more about how to keep them even when they don't want to be there--at least not now. Gradually, you are made to feel responsible for their success. And that makes it worse because when you begin to absorb that responsibility they lose it even more. There is simply much more negotiated terrain in your interactions. Case in point, I don't know of one faculty member who has not re-visited their make-up policies in the last five years. I even know faculty who have started to allow retesting. That is right, they let them take the test, again, when they haven't passed the first time.

*Sigh*. Even when you feel compassion for their youth and apparent ignorance, its just so hard because you can't be for them what they should be for themselves.

And in the meantime, you still have a core of good students who do want to be there. Some of them are very, very good. Some of them are positively heroic. Every single Community College Instructor I know can tell you of the single mom who juggles kids and job and shows up with her notebook out and her highlighter ready who hasn't been able to afford a trip to the dentist in years; a young gay man who has been kicked out by his family and is living on friend's couches and pulling all "A"'s or even struggling with "C"'s because he can't get a ride to class; or the young man who showed up for class and told me to wake him up if he fell asleep because he was driving a bread truck all night and he was staying up for my class and he didn't want to miss it. And you just know that you really, really want them to be proud of that degree and not sell it short. And it feels like we are being asked to sell them short.

Of course, the solution envisioned by the Initiative is some kind of special magic which we will be able to do with our teaching which will "engage" students and make them successful, perhaps those alluded to "learning communities". But does any Anthropologist really know of any instance when you can successfully change individual behavior? You can make the condoms available but has anyone truly been able to make someone put them on when its not his/her own idea?

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just give us Community College people the money we need to function properly without unreasonable expectations?

Community Colleges: All that and a bag of chips or two tacos short of a fiesta plate?

A friend of mine sent me David Brooks' column in today's New York Times. I think I was supposed to be energized and excited by it. Just like I think I was supposed to be "all-in" for the Obama administration's latest Community College announced initiatives. I guess when David Brooks is lauding a Democratic President its time to break out the parkas for the resultant frozen hell. But it is still hellaciously hot here in Texas. In my case, that article just opened all my floodgates.

Where do I begin?

Dear Mr. Brooks and Mr. Obama. I have been living under these very perspectives and expectations for a few years now and I would like to hit you both with big sticks. Too bad that I am soooo liberal I feel guilty thinking about acts of violence.

Recently, my Community College has been good enough to send me to two conferences both geared toward improving our success rates. You see, we Community Colleges only succeed in showing a fifty per cent completion rate for our students and it has been decided by the David Brooks of the world that we can do better. And here is my first problem, I think 50 per cent is a great rate. I think we are remarkably successful. After all, huge percentages of our students come needing remediation. (That rate is growing and I can tell in the students who show up in my class, btw.)

Those conferences. Real problem for me. I want to be positive. I want to drink the Kool Aid but my own undergraduate and graduate school experiences didn't prepare me for that. Back then, I was praised for critical thinking. Not in my present life. It isn't valued. Ala David Brooks and Barack Obama, we are to develop innovative measures and we are to be able to, well, measure them. Conference one: ways that I as a faculty member can "engage" my students. Conference two: ways that our college can become more "learning centered" and measure that success.

Here is the perspective we hear at these conferences as written in Brooks' column:

Nor is increased student aid fundamentally important. I’ve had this discussion with my liberal friends a thousand times, and I have come to accept that they will never wrap their minds around the truth: lack of student aid is not the major reason students drop out of college. They drop out because they are academically unprepared or emotionally disengaged or because they lack self-discipline or because bad things are happening at home.

Actually, I have many students who have severe financial issues and struggle to make it but I think of myself as "liberal" so I guess I just can't wrap my mind around that. Sorry broke students when you are choosing between that one hundred textbook and feeding your kids that just isn't the truth.

The second part is what hacks me off the most, simply, because I am deep fried to a crackly crunch with that thinking. It is true many of my students aren't ready for college. They are emotionally disengaged and lack self-discipline. Do you, honestly, honestly think there is a lot I can do about that? Does anyone seriously believe that you can innovate your way to engagement? If they stay out partying to the wee hours of the morning (I know they do. I smell it. If you have inhaled eau de day-after-student, you have taught at State U or JuCo. Its a smell you don't forget) does anyone seriously think that a Wiki will spur different life choices? And, of course, the answer is, yes, large numbers of people think that can happen. They probably don't, actually, teach. And when you teach long enough you realize that a good number of the party kids will, eventually, come back. Sometimes, its all good. Sometimes, its not but, hey, I can't control that either.

Funny, at conferences two, after breakfast while most of the audience was texting their loved ones or just anybody, somebody to relieve the stupidity; embedded in a twenty minute presentation, I thought I smelt the whiff of truth: in our six years of pursuing these innovated initiatives in our measures of our success, we can't show any. Completion rates remain the same. But then I can't really wrap my mind around the truth, so, I probably only think I heard that.

No Soup for Me

Let us instead ask the essential question: how are we to be taken seriously as an academic discipline when our own ethical debates are being conducted unethically?

Seriously, people. Seriously.


(Thanks to the World's Most Beautiful Sociology Professor and Queen of all Seinfeld references for the blog title.)

Yes, we have NO readings...no readings, at all

(Dis)Harmonic Convergence Update: Hear us Horton, "we are here".

I was going to take a bit of a break today, expecting a nasty coming week but........Recent comments by Max, safaa and the post at another anthro blog and anthropolgi, about Open Access and Anthropology have inspired me to, yet again, contextualize the reading/technology issues pinging around the blogs.

So, here goes...in the firm belief that I speak for a silent majority of college professors and contingent faculty at the "lesser" institutions. (I prefer the Lorax image here (I speak for the trees), not the Richard Nixon allusion). We have NO readings, no readings, at all.

We just got the SACS accreditation report on our libraries. They were found to be substandard and severely underfunded. No surprise to any of us faculty. Every year we get lists of journal with a request as to what we can cut, not add. Our institution pays NO money to subscribe to any journal listing service. No JStor and very few books, most dating to the 1960's. I loan students my own books, sometimes never to get them back. Honest.

To suggest that my students can "find articles" to post to a common wiki, ain't going to happen. I hope that they can discuss an issue on a specified set of readings that I provide. And I still maintain there is precious little on the internet that is useful for students of cultural anthropology (the archaeologists do much better, IMHO). It is so pleasing to find others who have already grappled with these issues and are seeking solutions. All the whos on the dust speck of my existence are screaming, "we are here, we are here, we are here". Give us some readings. Please.

(One reason I started blogging was to get comfortable with all the technology enough to begin posting my field interviews. The college won't provide individual web sites for us and I would love to make them available to my students. Toward that end, I explored voicethread, then wetpaint, and I decided to start simple with the blogging. I figure that I am actually privileged to not face the tenure decision and can give freely of my data. Thanks to Max for reminding me of the benefits of my cost/benefit life.)

Anyway, pass the discussion on and beat the drum for a freer approach to knowledge. We at the bottom thank you.

And could you all stop being so interesting, I have dust bunnies to chase, vegetables to buy, and aimless thoughts to drift away on.

Edited to add missing link. Too busy with beginning of semester stuff to be even posting semi-humorous posts. Sorry.

The Bitch in/of/on Contingent Faculty: A Rant in Two Parts, No Harmony

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a discussion of intellectual property rights in the form of the course syllabus "When a Syllabus is Not Your Own" by Jennifer Sinor. It was this passage that got me really worked up:

To decide that a syllabus is not a made thing, not worthy of protection without regard to market value or aesthetic value, erodes the terrain of the classroom, a terrain with a history of siege. I remember in graduate school being mocked by other doctoral students for caring about the classroom. Most tried to "get out" of teaching through grants and fellowships. The real work, I was meant to understand, lay in scholarship. In a culture where teaching is feminized, I see direct connections between the lack of protection surrounding the materials produced for the classroom and the fact that female faculty members tend to have higher teaching loads than their male counterparts, devote more hours to teaching, spend less time on research and therefore publish less, and dominate the adjunct ranks while lagging behind in the numbers of full professors. My syllabus participates in larger questions in academe about what, and who, is valued.

Amen, Sister.

The anonymity of this blog is determined by my contingent status. No tenure and a contract which stipulates COE--Contingent on Enrollment, which at this time of the year has me checking my course enrollments almost hourly (got that kid going off to College this year). And I am, somewhat privileged, 18 years in and with a Ph.D. and I get just over $62,000 for a nine month COE contract in a right-to-work state. For a semester load of 5 courses and 35 hours a week expected duty time--which must be accounted for on a submitted daily schedule form. Still, its much better than say The World's Most Beautiful Sociology Prof who with a Master's and 13 years in is a victim of "compression" and pulls down maybe $43,000. Adjunct faculty (and my, much needed, overloads) are paid at mid $1800 a course.

And, I really did want to teach--all through grad school that was my goal. Add to that the issue of looking into the eyes of a 3 year old and swallowing the knowledge that Mom hasn't time to suck those cheeks because its publish or perish. Couldn't do it. But the cost hasn't just been financial--it is that complete lack of respect. I call it the taint of the Community College. But scroll down to the beginning of this Blog and check out the posted comments by those few brave early souls. This is where the bulk of teaching of Anthropology is being done. By the poor, stressed-out and disrespected. Sinor is right, it is the final measure of disrespect when we lose the product of our own labor.

Which brings us to:

Rant: Part II

Any one noticed the ever more growing wave of anti-intellectualism? I am, also, getting hyper-sensitive to that one. We are "facilitators" not "authority figures" and this tidbit of information, also, from the Chronicle of Higher Education is IMHO an example of anti-faculty, anti-education beliefs couched in "progressive" views. The piece features a Department Chair who is complaining of the SACS requirement of Master's with 18 graduate hours in the field for teaching at the Associate's level. Seems he wants to hire retired business people without the education. So, we want to argue for the value of an education by hiring people who don't have one? *blink* And our own Belle Wheelan of SACS, seems to be agreeing (in a really slippery, slimy, Twister-playing kind of way). I get the administrator point of view, this guy is a Department Chair and he has to staff classes but I am faculty--through and through--and I ain't drinking the kool-aid. If you can't find qualified faculty, stop trying to decrease the qualifications and PAY someone something. Respect Us. Value Us.

Visual anthropologists: Notice Marx is left-leaning (from his perspective) and on the left. I have choices, you know. Just can't "picture" him center or right or right-leaning.

Pedagogical Irony and the Illusion of Inclusion

I am on my college's "elearning task force". (We don't have committee's anymore, we have task forces which is a metaphor borrowed from the military, although I doubt any of our administrators would know or appreciate the rich irony of that--no, I have another irony in mind.). Our Dean of the Virtual College set up an asynchronous discussion forum on, ugh, BlackBoard, to review our policies (which are presented as document checklists) for our Distantly Learning courses and faculty.

Irony alert: no one is participating! We have yet to have a post from any administrator on the panel. Self Interest Alert. We have a couple of posts from a long time and retirement-aged faculty member who owns a piece of land a couple hours from campus arguing for permitting faculty to be located off-campus. And a couple of posts from librarians (who police the open lab areas and offer assistance) who continually witness groups of students taking exams together. Or people (spouses and friends) taking exams for students. Hey, in today's world that's collaborative learning. But, other than myself, that's about it. No responses to any postings. Most of my postings have been about allowing faculty at the departmental level to work out our evaluation. The model presented gives it all to an entity known as the Department Chair (but there are several departments glommed together under a Chair.) No responses to any of these few suggestions and arguments. The site has been up for 3 months now.

In the end, the administrators will make the decisions they want. But doesn't it look good that they had a discussion forum to tackle these issues? I am so proud of us. Embracing both new forms of media expression and models of inclusiveness. Cue Alanis Morisette. Unfortunately, the shadow world of appearances isn't accompanied by any true meaning. Because our emperor is buck naked. And that is definitely a nauseating thought.

Beware the Tonton Macoutes

Autocratic dictatorship, forced relocation, declining standards of living, cronyism, vent for surplus model of economic growth, underdevelopment of human capital, an oppressed peasantry, fake trappings of modernity, poverty, ignorance, inhumanity.

Myanmar under the military junta?
Haiti under Papa Doc?
Uganda under Idi Amin?
Cambodia under Pol Pot?

Nah, its just where I work.

Not just Crooked Timber but Falling Wood

I just had to post something, because that picture of Bret Michaels was making even me queasy. Spent today getting estimates for the tree damage in my back yard. On the 4th this year our fireworks were preceded by storms and heavy rain and not one but two split trees in the back yard. So far, the cheapest offer is $750. Half my extra summer money for the month which, of course, was tagged for other needs. I always tell my students that that is the "oh, shit" moment. The one all societies have to account for. Time to attach some meaning.

Did I piss off my ancestors? Did my envious neighbors feel I needed to be reigned in from my self-centered ways? Had I stepped on the wrong bit of animal feces walking the dog and offended my group totem?

Let's go with Marx. Why the hell can't we college instructors band together, get some class consciousness, force some serious collective bargaining...wait, skip that...straight Marx...let's burn down the administration building and seize control. I need some collective labor in the back yard--profit free. Lots of it.