Leveling the playing field for low-income students
In 2006, Joshua Steckel left his job as a college counselor at an elite private school on the Upper E Side of Manhattan to take a similar job at the Secondary School for Research, a public schoolhouse in Brooklyn that primarily serves low-income, inner-metropolis students. (The Secondary School for Research has since changed its name to Park Slope Collegiate.)
In the book Hold Fast to Dreams (The New Printing, 2014), Steckel and his wife Beth Zasloff write about his experiences helping students—many of whom never thought they'd get to college—at the Secondary Schoolhouse for Research pursue a college teaching.
I recently talked to Steckel—who left the Secondary Schoolhouse for Enquiry in 2009 for a college counseling position at the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies—about his transition to the public-school system, and the lessons he'south learned about the state of college opportunity in this country. Here is an abridged version of that chat, edited for clarity.
Question: Why did you make up one's mind to get out a ritzy private school to piece of work at an inner-metropolis public high school? Did your sometime colleagues at Birch Wathen Lenox think y'all were nuts?
Respond: I estimate they did recollect I was a little basics. At private schools, the higher counselor is a very important person. For families who are paying tens of thousands [of dollars] in tuition each year, the outcome of the college admissions procedure tin can feel like the final word on the value of their investment. People wondered why I would leave for a public school nobody had ever heard of.
"…I felt like I was playing for the wrong team. It wasn't that the students and families I was serving didn't need help, but that the system was set in such an unjust way: those who already had the most advantages in life were getting a leg up, and those whose life circumstances made them the almost vulnerable and the virtually in need of support were getting the least."
I left because I grew increasingly uneasy with my part in a system that was so clearly structured to favor the privileged. The longer I spent in the job, the more clear it became to me what a tremendous affect quality counseling and advocacy had on where students applied and where they got in. The idea that our college admissions system functioned every bit a meritocracy—or fifty-fifty resembled ane—seemed more and more empty. The playing field was anything but level. And I felt like I was playing for the wrong squad. It wasn't that the students and families I was serving didn't need assistance, but that the arrangement was set up in such an unjust fashion: those who already had the most advantages in life were getting a leg upward, and those whose life circumstances fabricated them the almost vulnerable and the most in demand of support were getting the least.
Q: What were your expectations when you arrived at the Secondary School for Research? What surprised yous the well-nigh when you got there?
A: When I arrived, I was surprised by how little the students knew virtually college. I was surprised by how few students thought college was actually a possibility.
I was surprised by how low students' Saturday scores were. I was surprised by how all over the place the grades on many students' transcripts were. And in light of these things, I was surprised to be meeting then many incredibly talented, smart, insightful and resilient kids every day.
I was surprised to larn of the indignities that kids endured in their twenty-four hours-to twenty-four hour period feel: having to unbuckle and remove their belts as they shuffled through the metal detector each morning; the pizza place across the street that refused to serve students from the school at dejeuner; the cops who shooed them out of the neighborhood at the end of the twenty-four hours. I was surprised to learn of the outrageous inequities that defined students' lives. I surprised to learn from students how ofttimes their academic records were a clearer reflection of a history of trauma or of ongoing instability in their lives than of their ability or achievement.
Q: How were the attitudes of students and families about college different than at Birch Wathen Lenox?
A: For students and families from Birch Wathen Lenox, college was an entitlement. The question was never whether they would go to college, but which higher would they go to. Or, more specifically, how they would get into the "best" college. Affordability was almost never role of the conversation.
Students and families from the Secondary Schoolhouse for Research generally understood college—and its promise of social and economical mobility—to be something that was non for them. To work against this, they felt, required boggling effort, exceptional ability and luck.
Q: In your book, you lot talk well-nigh how important information technology is for a college counselor not only to counsel students but to advocate for them. Did yous feel that this was a much harder job at the Secondary School for Research than information technology had been at Birch Wathen Lenox? Did the admissions officers you had worked with in your previous job care for you any differently one time you moved to the Secondary School for Research?
"I can't tell y'all how many times I've heard a higher say they don't want to 'set students up for failure' every bit a justification for rejecting my students' applications. Colleges should be asking instead how they tin help low-income students succeed."
A: Colleges were less responsive to my advocacy when I moved to the public schools. The event wasn't so much that I was treated differently equally information technology was that my students and my school were just off the radar.
Related: A 'promising' way to help depression-income students to and through higher
And then it was definitely harder. Some admissions officers thought I was crazy for the number of emails I'd write near particular students. Even when I had their ear, I felt like I had to fight harder to become colleges to really hear students' stories, to understand their strengths and graphic symbol and recognize the value they would bring to campus. I had to push admissions staff to read applications in ways that felt unconventional for them. This meant existence able to connect the dots when a dip in grades was the event of (all-too-common) catastrophic changes in life circumstances, and not assume it to be a reflection of ability or piece of work ethic; or learning to look abroad from SAT scores and rigor of transcript (usually measured by the number of AP courses) to detect indicators of potential and hope.
Q: I think some readers will be surprised to learn that the students you lot worked with at the Secondary School for Research were academically prepared to get to elite private colleges. Did you worry at all that yous were setting students upwards for failure by pushing many of them to go to those schools?
A: I felt a lot of anxiety about this when I began working in the public schools. So many of my almost promising and impressive students also had deficits in writing or math, and all had express exposure to highly rigorous coursework.
What has been striking to me, equally I've followed students over the last 10 years, is the incredible rate at which students can abound academically and intellectually, given the right college environment. Nkese Rankine, one of the first students I met at the Secondary School for Research, was a sophisticated, skillful analytical thinker and an constructive youth leader whose essays were simplistic and total of grammatical errors. By the fourth dimension she graduated from Bates College in 2011, she had submitted a 120-folio thesis, drawn from her experiences studying abroad, that explored concepts of whiteness in Afro-German identity. She attributes her success to writing tutors and other academic supports within a rich and challenging bookish environment; well-adult mentoring and peer-support structures; and an institutional delivery to cultivating community understanding of economic and racial difference.
"The conventional wisdom communicated by private colleges well-nigh financial assist is not to let the high 'sticker' price go along you lot from applying: the sticker toll is never the 'real' price, so just apply and see what kind of aid you get, considering you never know. This is bogus. Simply a tiny per centum of private colleges are able to come across families' total need, and we know exactly which ones those are."
I can't tell yous how many times I've heard a college say they don't desire to "set students upwards for failure" equally a justification for rejecting my students' applications. Colleges should be request instead how they can aid low-income students succeed. Students often fail for reasons that have piddling to practise with their ability or academic preparedness. In general, colleges don't exercise nearly enough to accost this. It is hard to do well on a test when you are hungry. It is hard to discover the hours of concentration to write a good paper when y'all are worried about problems at home—violence, threat of eviction—that yous know no 1 else on campus can really understand or relate to. It is difficult to contribute to classroom conversation when yous are having to absorb daily micro-aggressions that undercut your sense of self and identity.
Q: Practice you think that some colleges are more apt to enroll a less qualified wealthy educatee than a highly qualified lower-income pupil? In other words, do dumb rich kids have a leg up over smart lower-income kids?
A: Yes, definitely.
I remember how steamed I was when I learned, at the cease of my start year in the public schools, where the Birch Wathen Lenox seniors were going to college. I knew those kids well, because I'd worked so closely with them the yr before. My least successful students at Birch Wathen Lenox had been accustomed to and were planning to attend colleges where many of my highest-achieving, nearly compelling students at the Secondary School for Research had been rejected.
Related: Are public universities becoming bastions of privilege?
The reality at about admissions offices is that educatee fiscal demand matters, a lot. Financial aid resource are limited, and admissions directors are oft responsible for tracking the status of the financial-aid budget every bit the admissions staff moves through decisions in committee. It is not unusual for admissions staff to come into commission on a given twenty-four hour period with guidelines nearly the number of "full-need" students they can put in the have pile, or the number of "total-pay" students they'd accept to admit to make these offers possible. And while it is not necessarily the case that an admissions committee volition dip—i.east., lower their standards—simply because a kid is full-pay, it is absolutely the example that there is a college bar for kids with loftier need, because scarcity of resources means more students competing for fewer spots.
Q: When it comes to fiscal aid, you talk most how surprised you were about the extent to which colleges "gap" students (leaving students with a large gap between the amount of money the authorities says they need to go to higher and what they actually receive). Is this a problem you encounter a lot?
A: All the time. It is standard practice amidst individual colleges.
The conventional wisdom communicated by individual colleges about financial aid is not to let the high "sticker" price keep you from applying: the sticker price is never the "real" price, so just apply and see what kind of assist you go, considering y'all never know. This is artificial. Only a tiny percentage of private colleges are able to meet families' total need, and we know exactly which ones those are. Those few colleges become a lot of play in major media outlets, and have an outsized touch on on the general public's agreement of the higher pedagogy landscape. Ironically, media coverage of their policies effectually aid, many of which are admirable, often functions to perpetuate the terrible fallacy that low-income kids somehow have it easier and that college costs are not really a problem
Related: Which college will replace Wash U. equally the least socioeconomically diverse in the country?
At this point, I don't even permit my kids to use to those places where we know they will be gapped, unless it is under the auspices of a programme or partnership through which there is a commitment to meeting students' full need.
It was heartbreaking, that first year, when I hadn't nonetheless gotten it. The students had made information technology through a grueling marathon of a process, motivated in part by the religion they had invested in me and in what I told them was possible. Students came into my makeshift office ready to finally celebrate their acceptances, and I had to say: "No, that'due south not a real choice. You can't beget to become in that location."
Q: What do you think is the biggest obstacle that low-income students face in terms of going to college? Academic preparation? Lack of finances? Lack of guidance? Familial obligations?
A: Whatever large-scale solution to increasing college enrollment and attainment must address the deep structural inequalities that shape the lives of low-income students.
There are too critical systemic bug which must be addressed inside the field of college education. Funding and price structures, for example, are very poorly conceived, if we really practice believe their purpose is to make higher education possible for all students and families, and allow it to function as an engine of mobility.
But if we're talking about meeting students where they're at correct now and intervening in a way that can brand a big divergence, I think there's nothing more important than quality higher counseling.
One of my sometime students, Mike, said it this fashion: "It's non something that a student tin can practice alone. Kids need someone to really work with them, to permit them know that even though things haven't been so great in their life and so far, they can go on to do cracking things."
Students need counselors to stand beside them and look into the hereafter with them, and they demand counselors who can offering the intensive support and advocacy required to navigate the process. Counseling for strong college "friction match"—to help students connect with institutions where they will take access to adequate funding and robust support structures, designed to meet the detail needs and challenges faced by beginning-generation and low-income college students—is disquisitional to increasing college enrollment and attainment. "College-readiness" ways little in the absence of a quality college lucifer.
A ridiculously small percentage of the students in our country'southward public schools currently take access to quality counseling of this kind. Virtually school advisor pedagogy programs exercise not offer grooming that is specific to counseling for college access and success. One in five schools in the country does not even take a school advisor. An boilerplate caseload for a school counselor nationally is over 400 students, and in some states, like California, it's 1 advisor for every 1,000 students.
Q: Your book does a fantastic task of showing simply how complicated the lives of low-income students are. Do you call back that policymakers, higher-education researchers and the news media capeesh this?
A: I think at that place is so much amazing work happening correct now in policy, research and journalism effectually inequality and higher education. I experience very hopeful.
I exercise call back that a cracking deal of this work is happening at a very high altitude—at 35,000 feet, as they say. It is critical that we're using big data to better understand students' choices and outcomes; that we're trying to imagine ways to bring policies to scale and to use technology to impact the largest number of students.
Related: Hillary Clinton should acknowledge that tuition tax breaks don't work
But we miss some really important stuff from all the fashion up in that location. This is why we wrote Hold Fast to Dreams. This piece of work, if it is really going to exist nigh equity, must be rooted in empathy, on the ground with students where we can hear their voices, value their stories and run across their experiences in granular, close-upwardly detail. Otherwise it can be too easy for our own assumptions and paradigms to frame our way of thinking well-nigh things. And so nosotros miss the smallest, nigh important things.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, contained news website focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about higher educational activity .
Source: https://hechingerreport.org/leveling-the-playing-field-for-low-income-students/
0 Response to "Leveling the playing field for low-income students"
Post a Comment