"College for All" dissected (part 2)

This is the third in a series of posts critiquing the "college for all" rhetoric of the contemporary reform movement. If you're just tuning in, I recommend reading from the first post in the trilogy. If you're in a hurry, I encourage you at least to read last week's post.

Original artwork by Paris Mancini,
created for Dewey to Delpit

Uniform Expectations

The avoidance of the realities of student achievement constitutes a peculiar reworking of the concept of high expectations. Any real teacher who has genuinely high expectations for his students knows that what is exceptional and praise-worthy in one student is run of the mill for another; and what is exceptional and praise-worthy for the other will be unobtainable for the first. Thus, real teachers would never hold all students to identical standards. Yet, policymakers’ simultaneous adherence to the rhetoric of egalitarianism and that of high expectations has led to precisely these sorts of identical standards.

“College for all” is the ultimate manifestation of this uniformity of expectations, but the effects trickle down into the lower grades, in the form of state—and soon, national—standards, for each grade and each subject. Let me be clear: there’s a strong argument to be made for a consistent national curriculum, but the requirement that all students, homeless and affluent alike, be proficient in precisely the same skills in each grade constitutes a dangerous obliviousness to individual variation; the result is that teachers in schools serving disadvantaged students are forced to race through large swaths of material, relying heavily on memorization and sacrificing both comprehension and retention (see my post on rote instruction and memorization in impoverished neighborhoods).

Unrealistic Expectations: the Uncertain Promise of College

Dana Goldstein has an excellent article on vocational education appearing in next week’s issue of The Nation. (You can read it online currently, and I recommend it). Before delving into some interesting modern incarnations of vocational ed, Ms. Goldstein discusses a recent study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which found that only about 30% of new jobs in America, over the next seven years, would require a four-year college degree. The study serves as a jumping off point for a critical reexamining of the contemporary reformist rhetoric that every student in America can and should attend a four-year liberal arts college. Not surprisingly, challenging that rhetoric generated some vitriol in the online comments on The Nation’s website, but Ms. Goldstein is right to take on these questions; thorny though they may be, they are pressing ones.

"Long Odds"
Original artwork created for Dewey to Delpit.
Line Drawing: Paris Mancini. Color & Texture: Tavet Rubel

I’ve been concerned about the implications of “college for all” since my first experience working at an inner-city No-Excuses charter school. The school had a motto, which the students were made to memorize and chant often: “Work hard, go to college, change the world.” The first two items in that list formed the driving axiom of the school. What do you need to do? Work hard. Why? So you can go to college. College was presented as the ultimate motivation and reason behind everything we did at the school.

The effort to inculcate in students the bourgeois value of college-attendance was everywhere visible. Each classroom was named after and decorated with the colors and emblems of a different college, and the students in a given homeroom were addressed collectively by the name of the corresponding college. “Wisconsin, I need your eyes on me,” a teacher might say to a class of eighth graders. Teachers went out of their way to refer to their own college experience whenever possible in classroom discussions, and hallway bulletin-boards were often decorated with photographs of faculty alma-maters and accompanying testimonials. Whenever possible, school trips included a visit to a college campus. Students were never referred to as students; they were called “scholars.”