May 21, 2019--Abortion

Some years ago I had responsibility for the Ford Foundation's work with rural schools.

In the Black Belt communities of Alabama, for example, we funded efforts at the K-12 level to prepare young people who wanted to remain in their hometowns to not just find work locally but to develop the entrepreneurial skills needed to create work opportunities for themselves and their neighbors. 

In one town high school students began a local newspaper that over a couple of years was full of news and local ads. Enough so that five decent-paying jobs were created and those who filled them were able to support themselves and remain in place.

At the community college level, through a multi-state program we called the Rural Community College Initiative (RCCI) we helped colleges and their community partners align courses of study with the needs of local employers while at the same time strengthening the institutions' academic offerings so that those who aspired to earn associate degrees before transferring to four-year colleges had the preparation they needed to complete bachelors degrees in increasing numbers.

Again in Alabama, in Monroeville, at Alabama Southern Community College, with Ford help, the college and its local affiliates saw many more students than in the past receive up-to-date training as well as transfer to four-year colleges.

(One sidebar--Monroeville was the home of Harper Lee and it was a great pleasure for me to have the chance to meet her and spend some time sitting with her on her back porch. Also exciting, she generously gave me a signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.)

In addition, while in Alabama, driving from town to town, it was apparent that something else was going on--a battle over abortion rights. 

A battle that culminated last week when the state legislature and governor passed the most draconian antichoice bill in the nation. If implemented it would effectively end the possibility of abortion in the state. 

Back in my day, driving around the Deep South in even stormy weather, at every clinic that offered abortions and women's health services, there was a demonstration underway. All by antiabortion activists.

Women seeking reproductive assistance who were assumed to be arriving for abortions had to run the gauntlet of protesters who shrieked at them, accusing them of being "baby killers."

This went on relentlessly for decades.

One thing I also noticed--little sign of prochoice activists. 

Recalling this, as reproductive rights are under serious attack--perhaps potentially by the newly reconstituted Supreme Court--where are all the passionate defenders of Roe v. Wade? Clearly not engaged in anything comparable. On the ground, all the action is with the so-called pro-life advocates.

I confess to being cynical, but are work and entertainments more important to liberals who support abortion rights but are not involved with marshaling resources to fight back?

Minimally, where are the monthly prochoice mass demonstrations? Again, are we too distracted to organize any?

I know if Roe v. Wade is modified or overturned in the federal courts, abortion supporters self-righteously will express outrage and seek on MSNBC or from the New York Times what to think and how, after it's too late, to respond. 

Distressing to say I do not expect to see many progressives actively engaged beyond a gesture at abortion or Planned Parenthood clinics to help make it easier for women seeking reproductive services.

Too many on the left are better at complaining than getting off their sofas and marching in the rain.

November 1, 2018--Ivan ("Flash") Kronenfeld

We were an unlikely couple who met on Staten Island. 

Flash, a street person who had worked since childhood as a longshoreman on the fruit and vegetable piers on the Hudson River where high-rent Tribeca is now situated. Before dawn each day, with a hand truck, moving bushels of foodstuffs from freight cars to huge walk-in refrigerators and freezers. He was so good at this, he worked so hard and fast, that the other men dubbed him "Flash."

Me? Superficially, a smoother sort. Over-educated since high school in undergraduate and graduate programs at Ivy League Columbia, I was at the community college on Staten Island in large part to rebuild my resumé so that I could one day find my way back to the Ivy League, to get away from the stigma of being on the staff of a two-year college. Half a college of the type that someone once described as a high school with ashtrays. At the time, for me that about summed my situation.

In 1976, I wrote a book about this, Second Best. The title alone reveals in large part how initially I regarded my fallen circumstances. For a variety of reasons (among them that I didn't have the most developed academic chops) I found myself in collegiate purgatory.

But then I encountered Flash. 

We were initially unaware of each other. It was the tumultuous 1960s and we were working in separate orbits at Staten Island Community College (SICC). We had been hired and encouraged by the brilliant educator president, William (Bill) Birenbaum, to break the traditional molds that were hindering our largely first-generation students from either moving on to solid careers or transferring to four-year colleges where they could complete their undergraduate educations. The drop-out rate hovered near 50 percent.

Bill hired Flash to draw upon his street smarts in order to relate directly to the submerged, not fully embraced hopes and aspirations of the college's predominantly working-class students, to invent institutional ways to help them discover and make the most of their capacities.

Bill teamed me with Flash, thinking I could add my collegiate experiences to the mix so that together, for the students, from working with Flash, there would be a visceral and familiar connection while from me there would flow the possibility of their receiving help in making strategic academic choices.

Street and campus, our version of town and gown. As I said, we were an unlikely couple.

Birenbaum got to know the brilliant and accomplished Flash when he was chancellor of Long Island Universitiy's downtown Brooklyn campus. Bill was seeking ways to relate to the local Bed-Stuyvesant community and when he learned of and visited a remarkable day care center Flash had established in the neighborhood he lured him into joining his LIU team that was working to forge programmatic connections between the college and the Bed-Sty community. This also involved working with Bobby Kennedy's Bed-Sty Restoration Corporation, which was working to improve the local housing stock and attract businesses to locate plants there in the middle of then forgotten Brooklyn.

What happened next is a long story. 

In brief, Birenbaum was fired because the LIU board of trustees saw the college's future in building academic strength so it could compete for students with Brooklyn College, NYU, and Columbia and not get its hands dirty working directly with "the people." 

Students, largely led by Flash (Bill made him enroll in addition to having a job at the college), went on strike and shut the place down for weeks while Birenbaum ran the college from exile at the bar of Juniors Restaurant across Flatbush Avenue. The situation made all the papers and Birenbaum became such an attractive celebrity educational leader (it was the 1960s and charismatic Bill gave great quotes) that the City University hired him to serve as president of an unlikely place, Staten Island Community College. 

He accepted only if Flash agreed to move with him so that together they could seek ways to connect SICC to the local community. Bill said, including to me when he recruited me--"Community colleges are where the action is."

His charge to me (I was not given tenure at Queens College and thus was happy to get a phone call from Birenbaum) was to work with Flash and a few other "radical" educators he was hiring "to break all the windows and let the fresh air in."

We proceeded to do so. Not literally of course.

At SICC I became an educator with a lifelong devotion to working with so-called non-traditional students. This largely because of my association with Flash. Acknowledging him in Second Best, I wrote--

We've been through so much together it would take a chapter to sort out where his ideas begin and mine end. Suffice it to say I've learned more about learning from him than anyone else.

In endless conversations and long days and evenings of working together that lasted almost 10 years, we spoke about how most of the college's students arrived "cooled-out" by their families and previous schooling, effectively encouraged to lower their aspirations--"Don't overreach; be realistic; since you're not that smart, forget medical school; think about becoming a medical technician; forget law school; maybe think about becoming a paralegal, or (for the girls) working in a law office."

Flash said, "We need to be in the 'heating-up' business. In fact, part of the heating-up process is to talk with students about how they have been cooled-out. That the circumstances they find themselves in are not all their own fault." 

He called this a "political education" as it was about power--how one can come to lose it, yield it, and how gaining it--primarily over oneself--is necessary in order to come to be realistic in new ways--empowered, strategic, ambitious, mobilized. Anything then becomes possible.

To talk with students this way, to see them raise expectations for themselves, it was essential that Flash and I come to realize we needed to raise our own expectations--for ourselves as people and educators. He would always say personal change must proceed social change. We have to model that for our students if we are to be of transformative assistance to them.

As one example, since our heating-up students began to allow themselves to think about medical and law school as well as ambitious plans for themselves post SICC, almost all came to think about transferring to four-year colleges and universities.

To meet this increasing demand and to demonstrate what can be possible once mobilized, Flash and I travelled the country to strike transfer arrangements with more than two dozen highly selective institutions, including Amherst, Yale, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, UC Berkeley, Antioch, Oberlin, and my old Columbia as well as Brooklyn and Queens Colleges.

We told the receiving colleges that we would prepare our students for success--we would work on strengthening their academics as well help them deal with the inevitable cultural issues involved with leaving Staten Island to complete studies in otherwise alienating places such as New Haven or northern California.

The colleges would agree to hold up to 10 places for the students we would recommend and offer them full scholarships. As a consequence they would become more socio-economically diverse.

It worked! 

Over the years hundreds of our students transferred successfully and at most only half a dozen left the program. Everyone else graduated and we did in fact have a number who went on to law school. (None to medical school, but some did become psychotherapists!) 

Who I am, who I became is in large measure the blessed, magical result of encountering Flash (to know him is to have encountered him). His voice and ideas will forever be in my head. I know he has more to teach me.

Happy trails Flash, Ivan. Wherever you now are it is by definition a much more interesting place. 

March 28, 2014--Optical Systems Technology

Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY offers the certificate programs listed below. 



These are typical of those offered by nearly 1,000 community college nationwide. The only significant differences one finds when comparing Monroe's offerings with, say, West Los Angeles Community College's is that a few of the programs reflect their local economies and potential employment prospects.



Pretty much everywhere there is at least some need for dental assistants, restaurant workers, and security guards. But considering that Xerox and Corning are located near Monroe, custom-designed for these companies, the college offers courses in Optical Fabrication and Optical Systems Technology while at WLACC they offer a program in Aviation (the college is located near LAX airport) and Real Estate (we know about LA real estate!).

Monroe Community College Certificate Programs

Addictions Counseling

Automotive Training Apprentice Program

Computer Aided Design and Drafting

Criminal Justice: Corrections Administration

Criminal Justice: Law Enforcement

Culinary Arts

Dental Assisting

Early Care

Electronics Technology

Emergency Medical Services

Food Management

Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning

Hotel Management

Human Services

Interior Design

Law Enforcement

Mathematics

Office Technology Specialist

Office Technology: Medical Office Assistant

Optical Systems Technology

Paralegal Studies

Paramedic Certificate

Precision Machining: Optical Fabrication

Precision Tooling

Small Business Management

Solar Thermal Technology

Sustainability

Teaching Assistant: Adolescent

Teaching Assistant: Early Childhood/Childhood

Teaching Assistant: Technology

Tooling and Machining

Travel and Tourism

All things being equal, considering the state of the economy, and as a reflection of the kinds of offerings and training that Guest-Blogger Sharon suggested yesterday should be available for the non-college-bound student (a position I in many ways share), this would make a lot of sense and should receive the resources needed to assure that these programs are of high quality.


Sadly, far from in every case are things equal. 



At Monroe and WLACC, which is unfortunately typical, very few of these programs have ever been rigorously evaluated. We do not know, for example, how up-to-date they are in regard to the latest technologies or methodologies; and, perhaps more important for programs that are designed to prepare students for the world of work, beyond anecdotes, we do not know if graduates get the jobs they have been trained for and how well these courses and programs prepare them for the work that actually exists.



At Monroe, for example, if you click on Optical Systems Technology and look to see how graduates fare when it comes to employment, there is an asterisks (*) that states in effect that the college is "not required" to offer this data and thus they do not. One suspects that if the employment data were positive, the college would be eager to trumpet them. And why they are not required to see how well public money is being spent on these programs is a whole other story.



This does not blunt Guest-Blogger's main argument. She is right to call for high-quality programs of the sort that exist in Germany. 

We know that people enroll in and pay for these career programs, but we do not know if they work. This in spite of the resources that have been directed toward our community colleges and high school career programs.

December 17, 2013--Quad Learning

More than half of all high school graduates who go to college go to community colleges. Most on entrance say they want to complete two years there and then transfer to four-year colleges to complete bachelors degrees.

But for the majority their aspirations are thwarted--more than half of community college students ever complete those first two years, of those who do only a portion transfer, and fewer still ultimately gain baccalaureate degrees.

Since low-income students disproportionately begin and sadly end college life at junior colleges, this is a significant social problem for America. Equity suffers and there is the great loss of human potential.

For many decades--at least since the 1960s--community college advocates, critics, faculty, and staff have known about this problem and many have attempted to do various things to help more students reach their potential and realize their dreams.

One little-know fact involves the transfer of community-college credits to senior colleges. For too many students who manage to complete two-years and earn associate degrees only a portion of their community college credits are accepted by the colleges to which they transfer. Thus, transferring students have to amass many more than the 120 credits traditionally required to graduate with a BA or BS degree. Efforts to fix this higher education shell game through "articulation agreements" between two- and four-year colleges have only marginally improved, not solved this problem.

Also, since so relatively few community college students progress far enough to be available for advanced courses, including honors courses, their colleges simply do not offer them.

For many community college students thinking about medical school it is impossible, for example, to take any chemistry courses beyond Chem 101 and 102. For history-major aspirants nothing much is available beyond the introductory courses. Again, though this problem has been known for many years, little has been done to ameliorate the situation.

Far back in 1976 I wrote Second Best, which was about the history of community colleges, their social roles, and the structural problems low-income students had to confront when they began their college careers at two-year colleges.

Little has changed since then.

But, trumpeted recently by the New York Times, there are new kinds of efforts to, among other things, offer honors courses at community colleges to enrich their academic programs and meet the needs of students with high potential and appropriately high aspirations.

Offered by a for-profit company, Quad Learning, through what they call American Honors, advanced courses are offered at participating community colleges. Thus far only five community colleges are involved and just 230 students are enrolled. With many tens of thousands of students able and eager to benefit by taking honors courses at two-year colleges why such a small-scale program gets so much coverage in the Times is another story.

Perhaps one reason so few colleges and students are participating is cost.

Since Quad Learning is doing this to make money (no crime) and the colleges where American Honors is available share in the profits (not a crime, but highly questionable) it costs students about $2,000 a year more in tuition to be eligible to take the courses. Real money at this time in our economy and for students from low-income backgrounds.

American Honors is yet another example of privatizing higher education--shifting more and more of the costs associated with college onto individuals and their families and away from public, tax-supported providers. This is why tuition has risen much faster than inflation, college loans have proliferated, and increasing numbers of students have been diverted to lower-cost community colleges. And now, for those diverted students, if they enroll in Quad-Learning colleges, it will cost them more to get what they by the fact of their hard work and achievement deserve.