Working with Working-Class Students

This week I’d like to shift gears from issues of education policy and school reform and offer something on teaching. I was asked by the editor of “Diversity and Democracy,” a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, to write a short piece on teaching working-class college students. Now I don’t believe that one social group needs to be taught one way and a different social group taught another – that would be much too reductive. Also, one must always be careful about painting any social group with a broad brush, denying the wide variation within the working class, or Latinos, or Gays and Lesbians or, well, you name it.

But there are some things that teachers can do that might smooth the transition to college for some students from working-class families … and, for that fact, from students from other backgrounds as well. Most of what I recommend is pretty simple, hardly pedagogical rocket science – but it can make a difference in some students’ lives.

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I've been spending a lot of time lately conducting research in an urban community college, and I'm struck by how readily memories and feelings from my own freshman year come to mind. Like many of the students I'm observing, I was the first in my family to attend college. And as is the case for the students I meet, my first year was a mixture of hope and anxiety, moments of success and moments of being at a loss.

All new college students experience a range of emotions in this unfamiliar place, but chances are that children of working-class families are less familiar than their middle- and upper-class peers with a college's instructional practices and modes of interaction. They are often more prone to wondering if they belong.
I certainly don't want to claim that all students from working-class families experience higher education in the same way. As much variability exists within social class as in any other social category. And though socioeconomic status and educational inequality are closely related, some working-class undergraduate students attended well-resourced K-12 schools. Through school, possibly through enrichment programs, and perhaps through the social capital of extended family and friends, they were well prepared, cognitively and socially, for college. In this article, I focus on those who are having a harder time with the transition.


Sources of Conflict
If a working-class student does feel out of place, the sense of discomfort might well involve more than social and interactional factors. Because of gaps in previous education, there might be fairly basic material that students don't know and skills they don't have. That was certainly the case for me. My knowledge of mathematics or formal analytics was so spare that I had to drop introductory economics after a few weeks of fearful incomprehension.

Less dramatic but equally difficult to surmount are the mismatches between strategies students used to good effect in high school and the demands facing them in college. When I was running the Equal Opportunity Program's Tutorial Center at UCLA, I would regularly encounter students from courses like general chemistry who would labor night after night, highlighter in hand, memorizing facts and formulas--and would then fail a test. The test required students to think through a problem and apply what they had learned to solving it. Demonstrating what they had memorized was suddenly not working.

Related to this mismatch issue is the issue of "doing school"--that is, appropriating the routines and practices of schoolwork but not using them to their most effective end. I saw an example of this the other day at the community college I was visiting. A student in the fashion program pointed to her notebook with pride and surprise and told me that she recently realized that her notes were a resource, that she could return to them and consult them as she struggled with an assignment. Before this insight, notes were something she took in school and used to study for a test, and that was that. They were not a tool or a resource to aid thinking and problem solving.

Some working-class students can be reluctant to ask questions, fearful of calling attention to themselves and appearing stupid. Again, these worries are not held exclusively by less-affluent students, but they can be more acute for those who already feel out of place. We teachers are fond of saying things like "there is no such thing as a stupid question." But let's face it: there are ways to phrase a question that sound smart and mask how little one knows. This is a powerful defensive skill that calls for rhetorical savvy and a sense of academic assurance, the kinds of things that come with a privileged education.

A related issue is a reluctance to seek help. This reluctance can be rooted in pride and notions of self-reliance. It can stem from shyness or embarrassment. But something else can be at play: an unfamiliarity or lack of comfort with help-seeking behavior within institutions. Many middle-class kids are socialized from day one in seeking out resources and engaging members of institutions to help them attain their goals. This seems so much like second nature to most academics that we forget that it is a culturally influenced, learned behavior.

All of the above--the out-of-place feelings, the cognitive-behavioral disjointedness--are complicated by a larger conflict, one central to American cultural history: the tension between book learning and schooling versus practical experience and working in the world. "It took a guy with a college degree to screw this up," a cousin of mine is fond of saying, "and a guy with a high school degree to fix it." Some working-class students struggle with this tension or feel it at home. It's a complex issue. Many working-class families see education as a pathway to economic opportunity, and they bust their backs to send their kids to college. Yet they might also wonder exactly what their kids are learning and worry that advanced education will make their children grow distant, and, at worst, regard their parents' lives with disdain. All these dynamics affect a young person's experience in school, and might well emerge in class or during office hours.


Interactions of Consequence
The good news is that these tensions and reluctances are open to intervention. The teacher in the fashion program I mentioned above intersperses her lectures and demonstrations with specific tips on everything from how to keep track of appointments to how to use the textbook. Instructors can schedule students into office hours, make referrals to tutoring centers, and call or e-mail the centers ahead of time to smooth out the process. On several occasions, I've walked a student in distress to the counseling center. Some problems require substantial interventions (it would have taken a lot of tutoring to get me through that economics course). But some are more easily remedied, like the fashion teacher making tricks of the scholastic trade explicit.

What I and many others find so fulfilling about teaching working-class students is that by making the hidden visible, by putting in a few extra minutes to strengthen a referral, by just talking straight, you can make a difference in someone's life. There were about a half-dozen people who made my journey out of high school and through college possible. I'm not exaggerating when I say I couldn't have done it without them.

And there's something else, something that doesn't get articulated nearly enough. Teaching people whose backgrounds don't fit the mold can be a deeply rewarding intellectual experience. I was tutoring a student who was reading excerpts from Plato's Republic for a political science class. The student was mystified by the passage on the cave. I talked through the passage paragraph by paragraph, situating Plato historically and offering my prepackaged definition of idealism. It didn't work. Frustrated, the young man blurted out two or three questions: How can anyone believe we're like shadows? Why did Plato use fire and a cave to try to convince us of this?

These basic questions made Plato strange to me in a way I hadn't experienced since I was an undergraduate. Frankly, I felt uncomfortable. And then, probably because I didn't know what else to do, I repeated the student's questions, asking them of both of us. That questioning set us off on a more thoughtful consideration of this central Western text.

Moments like these get us to return to basics, first principles, and long-held perspectives. The intellectual unsettling that happens, the fresh take on things, is what brought us to this work in the first place.

The Threats to School Reform …are within its own program

This commentary of mine appeared in Valerie Strauss's blog The Answer Sheet, a part of washingtonpost.com.

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Here’s an all-too-familiar storyline about reform, from education to agricultural development: The reform has run its course, has not achieved its goals, and the reformers and other analysts speculate in policy briefs or opinion pages about what went wrong. The interesting thing is that the reform’s flaws were usually evident from the beginning. As someone who has lived through several periods of educational reform and has studied schools and taught for a long time, I see characteristics of the current reform movement, as powerful as it is, that could lead to unintended and undesirable consequences. But when reform is going strong it can become a closed ideological system, deaf to the cautionary tale.
I have six areas of concern.

Tone Down the Rhetoric. In the manifesto “How to Fix Our Schools” published on October 10 in this newspaper, New York City’s chancellor, Joel Klein and 15 colleagues wrote: “It’s time for all the adults – superintendants, educators, elected officials, labor unions, and parents alike – to start acting like we are responsible for the future of our children.” The collective “we” is used here, but it’s pretty clear rhetorically that the signatories believe that they are already on the side of the angels. Anyone who is not on board with their reforms is acting out of self interest.

This is not the way to foster the unified effort called for in the sentence.
Reformers have been masterful at characterizing anyone who differs from their approach as “traditionalists” who want to maintain the status quo, putting their own retrograde professional interests ahead of the good of children. Teachers unions are the arch-villain in this Manichean tale of good and evil, and schools of education are right behind. I’m reminded of the toxic rhetoric of patriotism that characterized the 2008 presidential campaign. So, if I may, in the interest of the children, I suggest a less adversarial language. Many of the people on the receiving end of it have spent a lifetime working for the same goals voiced by the reformers, and the reformers need their expertise.

There is another language issue, and that’s the unrelenting characterization of public schools as failures. To be sure, this crisis rhetoric predates the current reformers, going back to the 1983 document “A Nation at Risk.” Since then, the language of crisis and failure has intensified. Crisis talk can give rise to action, but heard consistently enough and long enough, such rhetoric can also lead to despair and paralysis.

There is a crisis in American education, and it involves mostly poor children, and thus it is a moral as well as educational outrage. But it is just not accurate to characterize public education itself as being in a thirty-year crisis.

I can’t tell you how many professional people I meet who, upon finding out what I do, erupt with damning statements about public schools: they are a catastrophe, we are doomed, the situation is hopeless. What is telling is that they are not speaking from experience; they don’t have kids, or their kids are in private school, or are grown. They are voicing the new common sense. Unless you’re in the free market camp of the reform movement, this reaction is not good news, for it suggests hopelessness and withdrawal from support for public education.

The Problem with “Cleaning House.” Some districts are so dysfunctional that clearing them out seems the best option. But the history of reform in education – and other domains as well – reveals the shortsightedness of such action. In even the most beleaguered school district there are good teachers and administrators, and their skills and local wisdom are tossed out in the clean sweep. And in most communities there are grass roots movements to improve the schools, and they are typically ignored. Finally, this approach predictably is going to piss people off, not only those who are part of the problem, but many others in the community as well. No one likes to be pushed around – as the voters in Washington D.C. just demonstrated. Clean sweep reform shakes things up and attracts the media, which might be useful. But these tactics can generate more heat than light. Though it is tedious and calls for great skill, a more targeted and discriminating approach that builds on what is good has a better chance of long-term success.

Careful of the Big Idea. Reformers are often driven by a big idea, a grand process or structure that will transform the status quo. Not too long ago, the big idea in education reform was turning large schools into small ones. For NCLB it was a system of high-stakes tests that would drive achievement. One appealing big idea today is charter schools. The problem with the big idea approach to school reform is that large-scale educational problems have more than one cause and thus require more than one solution.

The mother of big ideas in contemporary school reform is the belief that we can capture dynamic phenomena like learning or teaching with a few numerical measures. This is the logical fallacy of reification, and the last century of psychological science is filled with unfortunate examples, as Stephen J. Gould trenchantly observed in The Mismeasure of Man.

Though most reformers acknowledge the problems with NCLB, they continue to try to build a better technocratic mousetrap, not questioning the assumptions behind their use of testing and accountability systems. We’re seeing all this play out with currently popular “value-added” methods of evaluating teachers as reformers ignore the concerns raised by statisticians and measurement experts.

One more manifestation of this way of thinking is the attempt to develop quantitative models of teacher effectiveness. In a nutshell, the approach attempts to pinpoint specific teaching behaviors and qualities and correlate them with a numerical measure of student achievement. There’s another logical problem here, the reductive fallacy –the attempt to explain a complex phenomenon by reducing it to its basic components. Even if researchers are able to specify a wide range of behaviors and qualities, the further problem is that it’s likely, given the history of such attempts, that the result will be a small number of significant correlations with the measure of achievement – which itself might be flawed. We’ll end up with a thin composite of good teaching. We just witnessed with NCLB the way high-stakes testing can narrow what gets taught; a reductive model of teacher effectiveness could lead to a corresponding narrowing of teaching itself.

Focus on Instruction. It is characteristic of contemporary school reform to focus on organizational structure and broad testing and accountability systems, but change at that level is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reform. As Debbie Meier, the maven of the original small schools movement, once said: You can have crappy small schools too. What goes on in the classroom makes all the difference.

It could be argued that standardized tests give us a window onto learning, but it is a pretty narrow window, distant from the cognitive give and take of instruction. And it could also be said that aforementioned measures of teacher effectiveness will bring characteristics of good teachers to the fore. Even if they work, these methods won’t help us think about curriculum, the organization of the classroom, what we want students to do intellectually, how we address academic underpreperation, and so on. Instruction is the gigantic missing element in reform, and without it, all the structural changes in the world won’t get us very far.

Privileging Youth Over Experience. Reformers have a tendency to downplay the value of experience and to celebrate the new. You will rarely see a career public school teacher featured in reform media, but will see young teachers in KIPP schools or Teach for America volunteers.

Furthermore, ask yourself, when in a reform document have you found reference to the rich Western tradition of educational thought, from Plato through Horace Mann and W.E.B. DuBois to the twentieth century treasure trove of research on learning. It seems that the reform movement’s managerial-technocratic orientation has an anti-intellectual streak to it.

I greatly admire the young people who sign up for Teach for America or work diligently in schools like KIPP. I began my career in education via an earlier alternative program, Teacher Corps, so I know the exhilaration and challenge. But I also know how green I was, and how the wisdom of veteran teachers saved me from big blunders.

What I’m concerned about is the way young teachers are used in reform publicity, what they symbolize. The message is not simply the accurate one that we need to attract bright and committed young people to teaching, but that the new and the alternative will save our schools.

In what other profession would such an appeal be made? Can you imagine proposals to staff hospitals with biology majors or the courts with pre-law graduates?

Merit pay could be related to experience, though many merit pay schemes link pay to test scores. The original Race to the Top proposal did mention professional development and career trajectories, though I haven’t read much more since. This cult of the new is interwoven with the reformers’ attempts to remove seniority and to not consider teachers’ academic credentials. However these issues play out in management-union negotiations, reformers are going to have to develop ways to draw on experience and expertise, not with add-on rewards but as central to the reform enterprise.

Don’t Downplay Poverty. Low socioeconomic status does not condemn a child to low achievement. This fact has led some reformers to downplay – and in some cases dismiss – the harmful effect poverty can have on the lives of children in school. To raise the issue of poverty is to risk being accused of making excuses or of harboring “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I grew up poor and have worked a fair amount of my life with low-income students. To be poor affects everything from health to housing – which weighs mightily on children. There is also the extraordinary gap in educational resources. While a poor kid is trying to work through an outdated textbook at the kitchen table, his affluent peer across town is being tutored in algebra in her own room. Only someone who hasn’t been poor could say that all this can be overcome by school. It is telling that The Harlem Children’s Zone, a rightfully celebrated crown jewel of reform, incorporates health and social services with schooling.

Reformers slip into either/or thinking here. They are right to insist that schools provide poor kids with a top-flight education, but to insist on excellence does not require negating the brutal realities of being poor in America.

If education involves children’s psychological and social as well as cognitive well-being, then we have to address poverty, and the reformers have an unprecedented bully pulpit from which to do it. Wealth and income gaps are widening in the U.S., and no less a figure than Warren Buffet observed that we’re in the middle of class warfare, and the rich are winning.

Which is all the more reason to get school reform right this time.