The Inner Life of the Poor

This essay first appeared in the Summer, 2013 issue of Dissent. I reprint it now for I think it is especially relevant in these times of brutal social policy and the day-to-day dehumanization of vulnerable people both within and at our borders.

***

            The poor are pretty much absent from public and political discourse, except as an abstraction--an income category low on the Socioeconomic Status index--or as a generalization: people dependent on the government, the “takers,” a problem. Neither abstraction nor generalization gives us actual people waking up exhausted, getting kids off to school; trying to make a buck; or, in some cases, past the point of trying. And if we lack images of living, breathing people, we doubly lack any sense of the inner lives of the poor. There are occasional journalistic profiles and some powerful urban ethnographies and fictional portrayals, but in general,  the poor are invisible and silent. Because of the various layers of segregation in our society--from work to schools to places of worship--few of us reading this have opportunities to live and work closely with people who are at the bottom of the income ladder. We don’t know them. And because we don’t know their values and aspirations, the particulars of their daily decisions, and the economic and psychological boundaries within which those decisions are made, they easily become psychologically one-dimensional, intellectually, emotionally, and volitionally simplified, not quite like us. This fact has huge implications for public policy, education and work, and civic life.

            There are, of course, times when the poor burst into public life more fully formed: trapped miners are interviewed, a farm hand or day laborer rescues a child, a Fannie Lou Hamer or Cesar Chavez has had enough. “I am sick and tired,” Hamer famously said, “of being sick and tired.” 

            I’ve been interested in the psychological diminishment of poor people for a long time. My personal history as the son of working-class immigrant parents sensitizes me to it, and my teaching in low-income communities and my writing about education and social class has me thinking and thinking about it. Let me offer a portrait to get us closer inside this issue. 

***

            Joanie (not her real name) tended to my stepfather when he was in a board and care facility. He was cognitively impaired and could barely talk, but Joanie comprehended him and communicated with him. She had a really good way with him, fussed over him, and watched out for his safety with a hawk eye. But you might not get to see those qualities outside the facility. Joanie, a thirty-seven-year-old Mexican American, is a tough woman, walks with authority, dresses in loose sweats, T-shirts, windbreakers, and running shoes. She is wary and quick with invective if she feels wronged. 

            Ten years ago, she was taking classes at a community college and got a certificate in early childhood development, but soon found that she preferred working with the elderly. She enrolled in a for-profit occupational college and got a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) certificate, which put her in debt she’s still paying off.

            Around the time she was finishing that certificate, Joanie got into a fight with another woman over some guy, and the woman grabbed a broken bottle off the street and slashed deep into Joanie’s right cheek. Joanie couldn’t afford adequate medical care, and the wound didn’t heal properly, leaving her with pain and sensitivity that continue to this day. Worse for Joanie was the disfigurement. She should just kill herself, a relative told her, for no man could love her. When I first met Joanie about five or six years after the injury, part of the right side of her face was darker and redder than her lustrous bronze skin. A birthmark, I thought.

            Officially, there are close to two million home health care workers in the United States,  and who knows how many more off the books. It is one of the fastest growing occupations in the country.  Most are female. Many are immigrants, particularly in larger cities, and there are significant numbers like Joanie, native born with varying levels of education. Their average wage is $9.70 per hour, and their annual income is $20,500. But the majority, like Joanie, do not have regular employment and move from one home or facility to another. It is hard work with limited, if any, benefits, and it is unsteady.

            All the while I knew Joanie, she was dependable and upbeat, but it’s only been in the last five or six months that she has slowly opened up about her life. It began when I started urging her to go back to school, to go to the community college she attended and get her records, so that we could see how far she was from an Associate of Arts degree. I’d pay for any cost. Her response was a mix of interest and reluctance: It was so long ago. What would I do with those courses?It’s such a hassle over there. But she knew she needed to move beyond where she is now. O.K. I’ll do it. Yes.Weeks would pass. More ambivalence. More resolves to go to the college. This kind of paralysis is familiar to all of us as we try to break a habit, lose weight, or get out of a bad situation. But when poor people do it, we have a tendency to give it a particular gravity, to make it an explanation for why they are poor.

            During this period, Joanie started talking to me about politics. Maybe all this talk about going back to school triggered such discussion. She drew on her own history but also on liberal and left-wing media, Jon Stewart to Pacifica Radio. I had known Joanie for years and had no inkling of her engagement with social issues.

            I didn’t let up on those transcripts. You need more security, Joanie. Do you want to still be piecing together a living day by day when you’re forty-five? You’re smart and so skilled with old people.She’d agree, seeming more resolved--but still no follow through. What can seem so simple to those of us who have crossed a line in the social order or who have always been on the advantaged side of the line can be almost insurmountable for people like Joanie, not because of weak character or laziness or any other of the easy explanations we hear, but because of despair.

            One day while I was watching Joanie play a board game with my stepfather, she turned to me and started crying, talking and crying. Her face hurt all the time, she said, and she was disfigured, and she’d never be able to fall in love. She knows she needs to get more education but doesn’t know where… or how… or for what exactly. She has no money. She’s on the outs with her family. She’s treated like shit. “When you’re shunned by society, it’s awful. Nobody wants you.” The pain and sadness poured out. I had pushed and pushed and tapped into deep hurt, a long history of trauma and assaults to the self that was intensified, embodied by her injury. She was both an outcast and physically unlovable. During the time I knew her, the damage to her face continued to resolve itself--the injury was barely visible--yet she still saw herself, felt herself, as scarred.

            I won’t go into detail about what I said to her and the various interventions I tried to help her find--except for one. A friend of mine was teaching a course at a local community college on Saturday mornings, and I put the two in touch and urged Joanie to attend. Joanie could walk to the campus. 

            It’s a course for people who are coming back to school: a mix of advice, group counseling, and nitty-gritty help on navigating the system. For example, my friend would be able to access Joanie’s earlier college records online and evaluate them for her. Joanie went. And went again the following week. She connected with the instructor. She made some acquaintances in the class. And she began to talk about having a “foot in the door” and finishing the college education she started so long ago. She wonders if she could become a social worker. 

            There’s a lot that can go awry. Joanie might not to able to support herself, or might land a full-time job that makes school difficult. But what strikes me is how the simple act of walking onto that small campus twenty minutes from her house and signing up for a class that provided no graduation credit, how that action had such consequences for Joanie, disrupted years of forlorn paralysis. “You lose hope,” she said. “You can’t expect anything.” But now there’s a pitch to her voice that I haven’t heard before. A life of hardship, a long history of insult and disappointment wears you out, can clamp down the desire to be competent, to grow, to reach right beyond what you can currently do. That is what happens to a dream deferred. But when it suddenly seems possible to extend your reach, well, that’s the fundamental experience of opportunity, and it can be liberating.

***

            It shouldn’t even need to be said that one can find among people with significantly limited financial and material resources a wide array of thoughts and feelings. The content of those thoughts and feelings will differ person by person and may well differ on average from the thoughts and feelings of people who are financially secure--among the poor, there will be more anxiety about basic health care and putting food on the table. But in terms of the general architecture and categories of thoughts and feelings, we share a common humanity: we all feel sadness and pleasure, try to solve problems and make plans, take stock of what’s in front of us, find refuge in imagination.

            While this claim may be psychologically true, it is not at all a social or ideological given. Historian Michael Katz has detailed the ways we in the United States have stigmatized the poor through our definitions of them (for example, as undeserving or morally weak) and through the policies we establish to provide assistance to them, such as our narrow and punitive welfare system. Appearance, race, language, and neighborhood are intimately involved in this construction of the poor as different and inferior. The poor, writes Katz are “strangers in our midst: Poor people think, feel, and act in ways unlike middle-class Americans.”  The label “the poor” itself becomes a categorical term freighted with deficiency. 

Part of the way we establish our shared humanity is by what we imagine goes on inside the head and the heart of others. If we are separated from a group not only physically but psychologically, then it becomes all the easier to attribute to them motives, beliefs, thoughts--an entire interior life--that might be deeply inaccurate and inadequate. And it is from those attributions that we develop both our personal and public policy responses to poverty.

            Because the invisibility of the poor is ultimately a sociological and political phenomenon, I am interested in places or occasions where poor people become more fully present, actors on the societal stage, and their thoughts and feelings play out in ways that can have a positive effect on the direction of their lives. Social movements provide such a space. Cultural projects do as well--in churches and community centers, women’s shelters, prison arts programs. And, in my experience, second-chance educational programs and institutions--literacy centers, adult schools, many community colleges--can also play this role. These are complex places, however; given the intricate relation in our country among social class, educational resources, and academic achievement, the adult school and community college reflect educational inequality and can contribute to it. A lot of students never complete a certificate or degree. But some institutions do better than others with similar populations, so the quality of governance, services, and teaching matters. These institutions are among the few places in mainstream society where poor people can become more publicly visible and display to their advantage multiple dimensions of their lives. As illustration, I’ll draw on examples from one community college I’ve been studying over the past two years--in fact, it’s the place where I directed Joanie. 

            Like many second-chance programs and schools, the college is a modest place, and it draws on one of the poorest populations in the region. As you begin to spend time on the campus and talk to people, one of the first things that strikes you is their raw desire to be involved and their pleasure at the opportunity. “I’m doing something better for myself,” one woman says proudly. A man who never finished high school observes that “this is the first time school has meant anything to me.” “From the first day on campus,” a second-year student says, “I was in the zone, man. I loved it, and I’m still in love with it.” I think of Zoe, a middle-aged woman I met during the first week of classes. She is lively and chatty but turns serious when she talks about the basic math course she has to take. This time, she says, she wants to learn math, really learn it. She waves her hand--blue nail polish, cigarette--across the campus. “I didn’t know it would be this good,” she says. “This is nice.” 

            As students begin to invest in particular areas of study, this desire channels into occupational or academic fields. It’s notable how often you’ll hear the word “love” used, as in “I love welding.” A fashion student quips, “I’d rather break my head on this than anything else.” When I asked a young man what it is about physics that grabs him, he says he’s captivated by “the wonder of it.” As students get more courses under their belts and begin to acquire more substantial knowledge and skill, they develop a sense of competence and confidence, a kind of cognitive momentum that gets expressed both volitionally (“Nothing’s going to stop me,” the physics major says) and as intellectual curiosity and a desire for further mastery. After a field trip to a state-of-the-art welding shop, a student said he found all the new advances “overwhelming. . .there is so much more to know,” but he adds quickly that the trip “motivated” him, for he “loves this stuff.” “You will grow in a way,” one woman muses, “that you never in your mind would imagine.”

            For some people, this return to school is intimately tied to existential goals. They talk of wanting to change their lives, to “do right by my kids,” to “turn my life around,” to “be somebody in this world.” There is regret, reassessment, commitment. A man reuniting with his wife and daughter after prison writes, “Now I have something to live for and someone living for me.” What is fascinating is that, in some cases, this commitment begins with an epiphany, a light bulb going on. The insight can hit in the flow of powerful events--a guy lands in jail for the umpteenth time, a loved one leaves you or dies, a seemingly stable job is torn away. It also can come while walking down the street or, as with one young woman, looking out across the retail store where she worked and imagining herself still there in ten years. People say things like, “What am I doing?” “What’s my purpose in life?” “Why did God put me on this earth?” 

            The existential dimension of schooling is powerfully illustrated through Sam, a mid-twenties African American man I’ve interviewed extensively. He was raised in foster care, bounced from one house to another, fathered a child at sixteen, got into trouble with the law, and spent several years in the criminal justice system. He eventually entered an occupational program at the college, got involved in student government, began tutoring on campus and working in a summer enrichment program for middle-school kids, and is now taking liberal arts courses and preparing to transfer to a four-year college. The tutoring and summer work with middle schoolers has so engaged him that he wants to teach or in some way work with people in need. There is much to say about the interior life of this young man, but I’ll focus on his ongoing struggle to come to terms with a terribly impoverished childhood. He has sought family surrogates for some time, occasionally finding temporary solace with a relative, a girlfriend’s family, teachers. “I’ve always wanted to belong somewhere.” 

            His yearning for deep connection is profound, and as he has moved successfully through the college, this yearning has blended healthily with his achievement as a student, a tutor, and a member of student government: “It’s like I have a big family, and I belong here.” Still, as his day draws to an end, and he heads for home, memories and desires flood in: “all of my past insecurities of feeling inferior or not feeling wanted start to trickle in, and I become depressed and feel like, ‘Why do I have to still be alone?’” He attempts to counter these feelings with cognitive-behavioral techniques that he found on the Internet. Two foundational questions consume him: how to be a man and how to create a good and meaningful life.

            Growing up on the streets and on the football field--he was a standout athlete before his troubles with the law--the definitions of manhood he absorbed are ones he rejects now. He is methodical and thoughtful as he fashions a new definition for himself, one that includes helping others, being respectful toward women, reuniting with his daughter (“Knowing that she’s depending on me, I have to work hard”), having the ability to make and fix things (something his trade has afforded him), having an effect on the world. All of this--human connection, coming to terms with hurt and loss, growing into manhood, doing meaningful work, making a difference--reminds one of Freud’s dictum about the key to the good life being love and work.

***

I could write a companion essay on the inner horrors of poor people’s lives--and we get a glimpse of those horrors in Joanie’s story. Poverty wreaks terrible psychological damage-- depression, fear, fury--and the result can range from withdrawal to violence to self and others. A number of the people whose lives are represented in this article grew up in--and, in some cases, still struggle against--this harsh psychological and social reality. But here I offer an account we hear much less frequently, a multidimensional story of motivation and intellectual engagement, of existential deliberation, of achievement that leads to the shaping of one’s future. 

How do we create the conditions in our institutions--or create new institutions entirely--that will enable more poor people to have the opportunities experienced by those we just met? I’ve been using the community college as an example, but what I’m going to write has relevance to other public institutions as well. 

If they are truly public, then our institutions should be run with a deep knowledge of the motives, aspirations, cognitive capacity, and inner and outer barriers of the full range of the people they serve. In the case of the community college, such knowledge would affect the scheduling of classes and services, the distribution of financial aid and emergency loans, the provision of day care, the training of staff and faculty, the function of the library and the provision of Internet access, and more. Effective colleges are responding in this way. Some of these accommodations would require new resources, but others would involve a redistribution of current resources and, perhaps more important, a change in institutional vision.  

A deep knowledge of poor people’s lives would also lead to policy that connects institutions to each other, creating a network of assistance. Many students need help with food and shelter, or health care, or transportation. Their development is limited as well by the fraying of the social safety net. It is not uncommon that students have to take leave of their studies to support parents or siblings financially or help them during a health crisis.

But I think the fundamental thing that increased understanding of the inner lives of poor people could yield is a redefinition of certain public institutions themselves as places in an unequal social structure that address some of the injuries, both physical and psychic, wrought by that inequality. Again, I’ll use the community college as an example. 

It is instructive to look at the demands for change being made of the community college. It is an institution under scrutiny, and justifiably so, for its generally low rates of completion of certificates or degrees and for its poor record on transfer to four-year colleges and universities. There are calls to do something about the high percentage of students who are held for remediation in English or math by improving the quality of remedial instruction (a good thing) or by restricting enrollment of low-skilled students--a troubling alternative. There are also calls to amp up the academic side of the curriculum, emphasizing the transfer function, with a possible diminishment of occupational education. And some are questioning the modern mission of the community college itself as a comprehensive, open-door institution. The college is trying to be all things to all people, from providing enrichment classes to the general community to occupational courses for displaced workers to a lower-division education for those headed toward the baccalaureate. The community college cannot do all this well, the critics say, and therefore needs to trim and focus its efforts.

I agree with much of this criticism--we absolutely need to improve the quality of remediation and the rates of transfer--but I’m also reminded of something Michael Harrington said about discussions of poverty and inequality: “In America, we are always having the wrong debate.” In the community college policy debates, we pit the comprehensive, open-door college against a leaner, meaner institution, or the academic function versus the vocational, or conceive of remediation as de facto antithetical to substantial education. What we should be talking about instead is the need to define the community college as an uniquely American institution that, at its best, can provide a public, mainstream, widely distributed institutional space—there are about 1,150 of them in the United States—where people with limited resources and opportunities can begin to direct their lives and find expression for their hopes and abilities.

The importance of the community college and other second-chance institutions is certainly recognized. More than a few of Barack Obama’s speeches are delivered from community colleges, but the discussion of them is always in economic and functional terms. They are places where people will learn “twenty-first century job skills.” The courses mentioned, always and unerringly, are technical ones: science, math, engineering, and the occupational offspring of them. There is nothing wrong with an economic, practical focus. The people attending these courses—just like the people we’ve heard from in this essay—desperately want to better their economic prospects. The problem is that both policy deliberation and political rhetoric stop there. 

You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader through the "share" function located at the top left-hand corner of the blog.

Challenges Facing the Guided-Pathways Model for Restructuring Community Colleges

This commentary appeared in Inside Higher Ed on June 23, 2016. It offers some thoughts on a currently popular and valuable reform strategy that is being considered and in many cases implemented by a number of community colleges across the country.

 ***

A much-discussed, comprehensive reform plan for improving community colleges and their low rates of student persistence and completion is the “Guided Pathways” model put forth by Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins’ in their book: Redesigning America’s Community Colleges. Published last year, the book condenses and focuses years of research -- a fair amount of which comes out of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, which Bailey directs. 

I support of the reforms laid out in book. But I also have some concerns -- maybe cautions in a better word -- about the social and political dynamics of establishing the Guided Pathways model, and about the complex nature of the typical community college student population.

In the book, Bailey and his coauthors locate the fundamental problem with the community college in the structure of its curriculum and the institutional assumptions that undergird that structure. In its attempt to serve all members of its area, the typical community college has allowed to proliferate a wide range of academic, occupational, general interest, and service courses and programs. Though some type of orientation and counseling and advising are typically available, quality and effectiveness vary, and counselors’ caseloads -- 1,000 students per counselor is not uncommon -- work against any substantial contact. Many students don’t utilize these services at all.

The authors label this arrangement the Cafeteria- Style, Self-Service Model. Students, many of whom are the first in their families to go to college, might enroll without a clear goal, get inadequate or incomplete advising or take courses that don't lead to a specified outcome are out of sequence or that they’ve already taken.

As a remedy, the authors suggest a basic redesign,, arguing that community colleges “need to engage faculty and student services professionals in creating more clearly structured, educationally coherent program pathways that lead to students’ end goals, and in rethinking instruction and student support services in ways that facilitate students’ learning and success as they progress along these paths.”

The authors acknowledge the laudable reforms attempted recently, such as improving the curriculum for remedial courses and streamlining them or creating programs at the front end of college to better orient and guide new students. But these reforms have had limited impact on completion, the authors claim, because the large macro-structure of the Cafeteria Model remained in place.

To realize the Guided Pathways Model, faculty and staff would create sequences of courses that lead to clearly defined outcomes. And  this major restructuring of the curriculum would provide direction for other significant institutional reforms that will aid in retention and completion. Faculty members who work within a particular pathway will together define the skills, concepts and habits of mind they want students to develop through the pathway “and map out how students will build those learning outcomes across courses.” At the front end, increased effort will go to helping students clarify goals and choose a major or “meta-major,” which would reflect broad areas of interest.  Orientation to college will be beefed up, and students will be enrolled in courses that provide ongoing information and guidance about college life. Through the increased integration of technology into advising, students will receive timely feedback on their progress, and instructors and counselors will be alerted when something goes awry --when a student drops a course, for example.

In addition, the authors adopt various promising reforms to remedial education, such as sequences featuring fewer, more intensive courses, and the use of additional instruction and tutoring. Their assumption is that improved remedial courses will function more effectively as part of a Pathways model, resulting in greater numbers of students moving into a college-level course of study.

Enacting the Model 

The Pathways idea is a good one. I have known so many students who would have benefitted tremendously from it -- would have taken fewer courses that were extraneous to their goals, used up less financial aid money, moved more quickly toward completion of a certificate or degree or toward transfer to a four-year school. And the suggested reforms that follow, especially related to orientation and advising, are long overdue. I raise similar suggestions in my 2012 book, Back to School. As for rethinking remediation, I’ve been on that boat for more than thirty-five years.

To achieve this restructuring  will require collaborative engagement on the part of faculty and staff, both within departments and across them. The authors realize the challenges of effecting such engagement and devote a chapter to the topic. They wisely begin the chapter by noting some of the difficulties, including the possible lack of trust among administration and faculty and staff; the divide between faculty and student services; the disruptive role played by dissenters.

The book then suggests strategies to work through these problems. For example, its authors suggest including dissenters in program planning, creating planning teams that combine faculty with student services personnel, the use of data to question current practices, and so on. Though this is a legitimate way to structure such a chapter, the structure implies that the barriers to change listed at the beginning of the chapter can be overcome with the management and group facilitation techniques presented in the remainder of the chapter -- an impression reinforced by the lack of any examples or discussion of what to do when the techniques fail.

The authors have a wealth of experience studying two- and four-year colleges, so they surely know how messy and unpredictable the process of reform can be. Perhaps they (or their editor) decided that it was best to present their model and a process to achieve it, and not to overly complicate things with extended discussion of potential pitfalls and blunders. Fair enough. And perhaps the authors’ disciplinary backgrounds in economics, public policy and quantitative methodologies limit their treatment of politics, ideology and the tangled day-to-day dynamics of status, power and turf -- which, depending on the institution, can include everything from budgets to racial tensions to contentious personal histories.

To limit treatment of all this is a legitimate choice, but should be stated and underscored, for my worry is that individual colleges attempting the reforms suggested by Bailey, Jaggars, and Jenkins will encounter more of a mess than anticipated and possibly scrap or significantly weaken the implementation of ideas that have real merit.

The organizational compartmentalizing and the administrative hierarchies that exist in the community college are not only structural features; they are electric with power and status. The various methods suggested by the authors to bring people together to work through these dynamics toward the common goal of creating Guided Pathways are good ones, tried and true in the toolkit of management consultants. But they also can be foiled by genuine ideological differences about the purpose of a particular area of study or of education in general. They can also be foiled by turf protection, administrative power struggles and pure and simple personal animosity.

To be sure, change happens. I’ve witnessed several successful programs take shape over the past few years as a core of energetic and creative faculty are given the resources to run with their ideas. But during that same time I’ve also seen such groups -- inspired, seemingly tireless people -- be stonewalled or shut down by larger groups of faculty within their subject area, by their department heads or by middle managers.

Bailey and his coathors suggest arriving at shared values as a starting place for examining current practices and changing them. For example, the authors write, “In our experience, faculty and staff choose to work at community colleges because they believe in the open-access mission and are passionate about improving students’ lives.” This is generally true in my experience as well, but with two qualifications -- which illustrate how arriving at shared values can be more complicated than it seems.

First, regarding the embrace of the open-access mission of the community college, a percentage of faculty at most institutions believe some of the students they teach should not be in college, and certainly not in their classrooms. These faculty align themselves with the universities that educated them, want to teach students who have some affinity with their discipline, and are not at all trained to work with students who are academically underprepared. In some cases, they are younger and work at the community college because that was the only position available in a tight job market. In other cases, these are older faculty who have been at the college for decades and lived through a significant shift in student demographics. They look back at a golden age -- one that most likely did not exist as they remember it.

Furthermore, faculty can have quite different beliefs about concepts like “improving students’ lives.” And some of these differing beliefs can present resilient barriers to change. One faculty member believes that to change methods of instruction will compromise standards and lead to sub-par education. Another believes that students -- particularly those with poor academic backgrounds --need to have positive experiences in school, so avoids challenging them intellectually. And yet another operates with racial, class or gender biases that limit what he or she thinks is realistic for some students in school or career.

Another assumption in the book is that when faced with data about student, instructor or program performance, faculty and staff with guidance will engage in reflection and behavioral change. Some people will respond thus -- and thank goodness for them. But other responses are also possible. People don’t believe the data -- especially in institutions where there is a high level of distrust between faculty and administrators. People question the way the data were obtained. People blame the students. This last response is a big one where test data or pass/fail rates are concerned. When faced with data demonstrating the low pass rates in remedial English or math, some faculty respond by stating that those students don’t belong here. As one community college staff member said to me, “It’s hard to admit we’ve been doing something wrong.”

For all its merits, the book’s implementation plan is sometimes thin on the political and social dynamics of institutional change. To work amid a complex human landscape, the plan  might well need to be combined with savvy, perhaps even  Machiavellian leadership; with horse-trading; with both symbolic and financial incentives; with the strategic use of personal relationships; and, unfortunately, at times, with reassignment or marginalization of obstructionist personnel.

Pathways and Students' Lives

The structural fix Bailey and his coauthors offer makes sense given the evidence that the status quo creates a host of barriers to student success. Still, like all structural remedies, this one runs the risk of reducing nuanced and layered human dilemmas to a technical problem, and thus being unresponsive to or missing entirely the particular life circumstances of students. So, yes, make the college curriculum more coherent, but realize that other human and material resources also will be needed to meet the needs of many students, and, as well, build into your structural changes the flexibility needed to honor the range of life circumstances your students bring to college. Otherwise, the fix may create unintended negative consequences.

A significant number of people who go to community college are adults with family and other responsibilities. They can only go part-time. They can’t go every semester. They sometimes quit in mid-semester because of family emergencies or changes in employment. They go to two or three different institutions. A Guided Pathways model could help them in some ways -- at the least lend coherence to their course selection -- but not necessarily speed up their progress through college. For them, evening or weekend classes, good online courses, legitimate competency-based options and counseling and advising in off-hours, weekends or online would also be necessary.

A different kind of problem lies at the other end of the college age continuum. We don't have in our country many avenues to help young people develop after high school. We don’t, for example, have a robust system of occupational apprenticeships or of national service. Young people who are not on the academic fast track and do not have a clear college goal have few options: entry-level, low-skilled, low-paying work or the military. Or they can enroll in the local community college hoping that some career path will reveal itself. Many such students don’t stay long, but those who do typically change their areas of study several times, shift between full-time and part-time attendance, start classes they don’t complete, stop-out and return to school. Eventually some find their way. A Guided Pathways model could help these students by more clearly delineating curricular and career options at a critical stage of early adult development.

But there are some powerful developmental dynamics going on here that lie beyond a structural fix in the curriculum. In interviewing such students, I’m taken by the simple but powerful fact that this process of discovery takes time. A lot of growing up happens: cutting back on partying and frivolous entertainments, changing one’s understanding of the purpose of school, bringing one’s fantasies in line with one’s abilities, learning how to manage time and to study. In some cases, students arrive at the big questions: Who am I? What kind of work do I want to do? What is meaningful work for me? Why am I on this Earth? It certainly could be argued that the community college is not the place to work all this out, but if our society provides limited transitional institutions or spaces, young people are left with few other options.

Then there is the issue of the burdens students carry. I am continually struck by the hardship experienced by so many community college students. To be sure, middle-class students from stable and secure backgrounds attend community college, but, depending on the location of the college, many students come from low-income to destitute families; have to work 30 or more hours a week; live in cramped housing, some of which is substandard; are food-insecure; and have health problems that are inadequately treated. For some, there are worries about immigration. Some must contend with prior involvement in the criminal justice system while others struggle with addiction.

In the book After Admission, sociologist James Rosenbaum and his colleagues make the critical point that a structural analysis of the problem with community college student success takes us “beyond individual blame” and focuses our attention on institutional factors that create barriers to academic progress. Bailey and his coathorsoffer a corrective to these problematic structural features. I do not intend to refocus blame on students, but I think it would be a mistake to not attend to the details of their lives while conducting this structural analysis. Otherwise the structural remedy might promise more than it can deliver -- thus threatening its longevity -- and also inadvertently contribute to the barriers students face by diverting attention from other remedies they need.

I do not want the issues raised here to be used as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. But even with the most coherent and streamlined curricular pathways, there will still be a number of students who enroll in one course at a time, who stop out, who take years to find their academic or occupational path, whose past blunders and transgressions continue to exact a material and psychological price, whose personal history of neglect and even trauma can cripple their performance.  All this and more require institutional responses beyond Guided Pathways (though the model could enhance these responses) as well as extra-institutional social services. The needs of the community college population require a range of programs and accommodations to make “the people’s college” more fully the uniquely American institution it, at its best, can be.

You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader through the "share" function located at the top left-hand corner of the blog.

A Review of Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges: Inside and Outside of Classrooms, W. Norton Grubb with Robert Gabriner

I’ve known Norton Grubb for some time and have long admired his wide-ranging and keen intelligence on so many issues in American education: from vocationalism to finance to remedial education. He and I have been thinking about remedial education for decades and pretty much agree down the line – though, as he once pointed out to me, I tend to see things in more of a glass half-full kind of way. But this new book of his has that glass-half-full quality to it, for as critical as it is, it is also full of suggestions – for we are at a time when a lot of terrific people are doing innovative work in remedial education, and Grubb and his coauthor, Bob Gabriner, draw generously on it.

Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges is one of the rare studies of higher education that takes us inside the classroom, in this case, community college basic skills classrooms. (“The classroom is a complex place, with much more going on than the simple interaction of teacher and student—and even that interaction itself is far from simple.”) Grubb has written extensively on the community college, and Gabriner has a long career working in higher education. Together they provide in just over 200 pages a comprehensive overview of the problems with instruction in remedial writing, reading, English as a second language, and mathematics and a set of recommendations for improving remediation.

In the book, Grubb and Gabriner discuss the range of issues that land students in remedial classrooms (from poor previous education to erroneous placement testing) but explore as well the range of institutional problems that stand in the way of these students’ success: outdated instructional methods to ineffective use of resources. The book is rich in both policy analysis and snippets of interviews with students, faculty, and administrators. The reader gets a palpable sense of the complexity of what the authors call “the quandary of basic skills.”

But the book also offers a number of ways out of the quandary. Drawing on work that is currently being done in the community colleges across California (home to about one-tenth of all the community colleges in the United States), Grubb and Gabriner detail a wide range of innovations in curriculum and instruction, in assessment, in the use of student support services, and in budgeting. So Grubb and Gabriner’s book is not only a critique but is also a guide to improvement.

At its core, Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges a call to thoroughly reassess remediation in a way that will lead to more students receiving an education that befits a democratic society. The authors’ closing paragraph nicely sums up this vision:

In the end, the educational institutions we build as a nation reflect the priorities we have, particularly for publicly supported education. If we want schooling to serve simply as a filter, identifying the students whose prior preparation has been the strongest and whose family and community influences are the most consistent with academic success, then we can develop—indeed, we have developed—a system that acts as a series of gates or barriers to success for those who are least prepared. But if we want our institutions to be truly developmental at every stage and level, then we need a system that takes improvement in basic skills education as seriously as any other activity. Such a system would produce and support institutions worthy of being considered truly educational.

You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader through the "share" function located at the top left-hand corner of the blog.