Horatio Alger lives! Blame and the culture of poverty

This post was originally published on January 21, 2011.

Horatio Alger, a 19th century author, wrote novels about poor, downtrodden boys who go from rags to riches. They succeed due to dogged toil. The story is ingrained in the fabric of mainstream America. Fathers tell their sons, “If you work hard, you can make it.” That’s the American dream.

The rags to riches story works in concert with the culture of poverty argument. It goes something like this: a group of people develop a set of beliefs, actions, and perhaps excuses that inhibit them from succeeding in life. Over 40 years ago, when Oscar Lewis introduced the concept and Patrick Moynihan’s report popularized it, some parts of academia reacted strongly. William Ryan, in his book Blaming the Victim, retells a comedic sketch where Zero Mostel acting as a senator from the South wonders about the origins of World War II. At the end of the skit, the senator booms out, “And what was Pearl Harbor doing in the Pacific?” Ryan uses this to illustrate his point: the culture of poverty blames individuals for being the victims of unfair and deleterious structural conditions.

The culture of poverty often evokes two responses. First, some believe the culture of poverty is absolutely wrong and become indignant. Second, others believe the culture of poverty is absolutely right and become indignant. I worry that both sides, being so emotionally charged, are hindering us from having meaningful conversations about how to improve the conditions of economically impoverished people. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your opinion, there is no right answer.

The culture of poverty is a flawed concept, not because it doesn’t exist but because it is too simple. As Sharon Hays, a sociologist at USC, points out in her book Flat Broke with Children, to assume that there is a culture of poverty is neither wrong nor the whole story. Why is it outrageous to think that a young African American male or Latino has developed a series of behaviors to cope with his bleak surroundings? The school experiences and reactions of Primo and Caesar in Philippe Bourgois’ In Search of Respect provide an excellent example of this. What is wrong is to assume that there is only one culture of poverty and that it applies to all. Culture is not abstract. It is everywhere but also mutable and embedded in context.

At the same time, there is a common refrain among academics: culture and poverty are back and open to research (see the May 2010 issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science). While that is true, scholars also know that the culture of poverty has remained a popular shibboleth among mainstream America. Moving forward, academics must not only create a more appropriate vocabulary to explore and describe multiple cultures of poverty but also to communicate the import of understanding the myriad cultural and structural conditions that lead to the generational reproduction of poverty.

Dr. King, Civil Rights, and Education

This blog was originally published on January 18, 2011.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that education is the civil rights issue of our time. While provocative and well-intentioned, the Secretary’s sentiment isn’t entirely true. That is not to say I disagree–education is part of the issue–but to target education as the last stand for civil rights is short-sighted. Poor education outcomes are a symptom of insidious, far-reaching, and unequal conditions and government policies.

We now live during a time when the distribution of wealth is astoundingly unequal. Not only do the top one percent control the majority of wealth in the United States, but the top decile of the top one percent, according to scholar David Harvey, are accumulating capital at unprecedented rates. Relatedly, spatial segregation occurs in cities across the United States, a result of changing labor markets as well as government sanctioned initiatives and policies such as freeways and redlining that have caused unfair conditions for specific groups based on race, class, and gender. Couple grotesque class inequality with segregation and government retrenchment regarding key civil rights issues such as education, housing, healthcare, and job opportunities and a more complex picture of the conditions causing poor education outcomes arises.

Since Dr. King’s famous speech, we have progressed. We have laws that ban segregation and discrimination. More people believe in equality and justice for all, so much so that an African American won the popular vote in a presidential election. And yet, as Dr. King noted, progress is not linear: “All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.” Just this year, anti-gay bullying led to the suicides of multiple teens; Arizona enacted stringent immigration laws that have endangered the basic human rights of both documented and undocumented immigrants; a proposed inter-faith mosque and community center to be built in Manhattan caused a groundswell of opposition and anti-Muslim animosity; and, despite comprising a minority of the population, African Americans and Hispanics occupied the majority of prison cells across the country. Indeed, our generation faces new challenges to overcome in order to achieve civil rights and social justice for all. Racism, classism, and sexism have transformed, becoming sometimes overt, sometimes covert, but just as pernicious.

Let’s celebrate the accomplishments of Dr. King and fellow civil rights activists, but also acknowledge that the dream is unfulfilled and we have work to do.

The problem with education jargon

This blog was originally published on October 19, 2010.

Language is a contradiction. It both liberates and constrains. Consider a toddler learning English. Her understanding of and command over the world expands as she learns words like food, mom, and dog. Similarly, an art student’s perception of space changes as he learns about concepts such as line and plane. But, language also restricts. As much as a toddler’s notions of the world expand as she learns new words, she also limits herself. When she observes a dog, she tries to categorize it. Is it an Australian shepherd or a collie or, maybe, a mutt? Likewise, when she grows up and tells their partner “I love you,” is she adequately conveying the emotion she feels? Just as important, does the parter understand love the same way she does?

In education, reformers face a similar conundrum. In our attempts to identify social groups and create conditions for equity and diversity, we often wrongfully categorize students and perpetuate our own biases. The use of ostensibly aseptic terms to describe historically marginalized students is at an all-time high, and a greater awareness of and skepticism towards the words we use is necessary by all.

Words like “at-risk” and “underprivileged” are seemingly innocuous; yet, they carry with them the imprint of hegemony, a term defined by Antonio Gramsci as meaning the process during which subordinated classes consent to their own domination from the ruling class. At-risk, for instance, victimizes students, whereas a term like underprivileged may ignore the cultural assets of a students family, favoring instead the lack of resources they ought to have in comparison to students from a dominant class. Think about a ninth-grade student who recently arrived from El Salvador with her mother, who makes $15,000. It is easy to see how such conditions may contribute to labeling the student as at-risk. Yet, such a stance ascribes poor educational outcomes to the student and her family and ignores the strengths of her family and culture.

As I said earlier, language is a contradiction. Words like underprivileged acknowledge inequities and argue for the redistribution of resources; but they also serve to reproduce institutional prejudices. These terms are the result of the political correctness movement. We successfully removed race and ethnicity from our vocabularies, and I am afraid we have created an even more malicious, insidious system for domination and oppression.

The social construction of change: Why deliberation matters

I originally published this blog on July 17, 2010.

Collaboration and stakeholder involvement are catchphrases frequently bandied about during policy design. The words connote democracy and shared decision-making. True deliberation, unfortunately, rarely occurs. Instead, we are entrenched in an age of symbolic rhetoric, not authentic participation, when talk about participation far exceeds actual involvement.

Never more has the inclusion of varied participants been more important: Communities are increasingly diverse, but also segregated. Educational outcomes are abhorrent for students belonging to non-dominant groups.  And amidst a 100-year blitzkrieg of ineffectual education trends and reforms, the likelihood for educational change is dubious. True deliberation, however, provides the opportunity for innovative and meaningful reform, reform that influences numerous target populations.

The core of public policy design is problem identification, which introduces several issues. First, how do we identify problems? And second, once identified, how do we obtain and allocate limited resources in order to mollify the problem?

The identification of social problems is complex and political. Problems do not exist a priori; they are not independent of individuals. In general, three factors impact problem identification: Indicators, focusing events, and feedback (Kingdon, 2003). First, indicators are most often concrete evidence of a problem; consider, for instance, graduation rates, unemployment rates, or the percent of working poor in a city. All are indicators of some social problem. Second, focusing events can occur in numerous forms and at unexpected times. September 11th, for example, spurred a focus on terrorism. California’s Prop 8, which bans gay marriage, caused a widespread polemic about civil and constitutional rights. Third and last, feedback can occur in formal modes, such as program evaluations, or informal, such as citizen feedback. Of the three factors, feedback is the most useful for citizen involvement; it is also the least influential in the education policy process.

In a policy context, problem identification alone is insufficient. Action is necessary. The War on Poverty was a response to the nation’s high poverty rate. After 9/11, with a changed national tenor, the Bush administration created the Department for Homeland Security and enforced strict border control policies. In each case, politicians leveraged the national mood as well as their own political cache to instantiate change.

How do social construction and deliberation relate to policy design? Through a discursive process, social construction influences the ways in which individuals perceive and interpret social problems. Politics and power are critical factors to the identification of and reaction to social problems. However, power is not equally distributed and decisions do not always represent all. Up until now, policy design has mostly included dominant groups, which has resulted in mis-representative and poorly conceived policy.

Social construction occurs differently at various levels and is dependent on social hierarchies and positions. The way I understood welfare when I began teaching at a school in an impoverished community was not the same way many of my students’ parents understood welfare. Similarly, the way a policy-maker understands the needs of a community may differ from the way a community understands their needs. To assume one viewpoint is right and the other is wrong is mistaken. Like looking at a hologram from different perspectives, no two angles provide the same view; no one angle, however, is right. Similarly, no two individuals view problems or create solutions in exactly the same way. Through the inclusion of multiple parties involved in recursive dialogue, we may be able to approximate more accurately truth and, in doing so, socially construct change that benefits all.

Found reform: (Re)imagining possibilities

I originally posted this blog on September 14, 2010.

Bricolage (bree-kuh-lahzh), n. 1. a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things. 2. (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources. 3. (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork. 4. the use of multiple, diverse research methods.

When I was an undergrad, some of my favorite moments included sitting in my art history class with the lights dimmed on those early crisp fall mornings, looking at projected images of 20th century art. In one class about found art, my professor displayed images of Dadaism, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. I remember feeling a little uneasy, but also excited. After all, Duchamp repurposed a toilet for art. But that class also sparked my imagination. How could I re-imagine the world using ordinary objects? Since then, I’ve read and crafted a bit of found poetry, but have just recently linked that inventive spirit to the world of education reform.

A clear connection exists between art and education. Just like there is no shortage of detritus to rework into art, there is no scarcity of failed reforms to re-purpose into something meaningful. Principals and teachers bemoan the incalculable amount of reforms at a school. Lawmakers target previous failed projects to attack their opponents. And taking a long view of education history, reforms occur cyclically. But, what if, rather than replacing reform with reform and furthering the problem, we took a look at previous initiatives and re-imagined those?

The means by which this new method may be accomplished is bricoler—the cobbling together of extant resources (regardless of their original objective) to achieve a purpose. That is, innovators locate and mobilize available reforms, resources, and stakeholders to achieve sustainable reform.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” is an oft quoted expression, and yet, it is exactly what education reformers frequently do. Bricolage is not revolutionary and is, no doubt, familiar to qualitative researchers. What I want to emphasize is the spirit of bricolage, the spirit of possibility. It’s time for policy-makers to renew the contracts with the communities they serve. If solutions didn’t work then, they aren’t going to work now. It’s time to re-imagine possibilities.

Katy Perry, you’re awesome; Tom Jefferson, you need a makeover.

I originally posted this blog on September 21, 2010.

High school students know who Katy Perry is. She’s a socialite. She has a song, “I Kissed a Girl.” She dated the tattooed guy from Gym Class Heroes and now is engaged to  the funny guy from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Teenagers could, I’m sure, also fill-in-the-blanks for numerous other pop culture figures: T-Pain, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, etc., etc…

And yet, in spite of a mandatory civics class, most students don’t know who Thomas Jefferson is. Sure, some could tell me he was a president or signed the Declaration, but they don’t know about his political beliefs; they don’t know about inalienable rights. The same goes for most other political thinkers, like Thomas Hobbes or Aristotle or John Locke or John Rawls.

The fact that they are all white old guys who belong to a traditional Western canon is important, but isn’t my purpose for today. I am certainly not a Great Books fan, but I do see value in most of these authors’ texts. After all, many African American writers and activists learned about concepts such as inalienable rights and social justice from the classics. My purpose for today is what we ask teachers and students to do or not to do in schools.

The government will announce this morning the winners of the Promise Neighborhood planning grant competition. I have been clear from the start about my hopes and reservations for the initiative, which is modeled after Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), as well as community-based reform. Such a “holistic” policy perspective, using acclaimed sociologist William Julius Wilson’s words, importantly targets both structural and cultural factors.

And yet, reforms in education seldom last. It seems short-sighted that policy-makers frequently place so much stress on structural changes with little discussion of cultural factors. HCZ is largely successful because of the parent academy, which provides parenting skills and knowledge to the fathers and mothers of the students in the schools. Such reform, hopefully, creates sustainable change.

The next logical step is raising a generation of learners as well as politically engaged citizens. Some readers may argue that perhaps we should first focus on getting a student to read a book or pass a test. I agree, but also think raising good human beings isn’t a zero-sum game; we can encourage multiple purposes of education. Others may worry that I am advocating for jingoism or inculcation. That is absolutely not the case. I am arguing for students who will question, problemetize, and contest.

In some classroom in Los Angeles, a teacher is creating a dialogue with her students about Thomas Jefferson, civil rights, and social movements like the Justice for Janitors campaign or the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. That teacher is empowering her students by asking them to envision a better society. Hopefully, the Promise Neighborhood winners will dare to create the necessary conditions for lasting change too.

Toward a public scholarship

I originally posted this blog on April 29, 2010.

“The issue now is not simply to promote ourselves better,” writes Craig Calhoun, an acclaimed sociologist and president of the Social Science Research Council, “but to ask better social science questions about what encourages scientific innovation, what makes knowledge useful, and how to pursue both these agendas, with attention to both immediate needs and long term capacities.” Calhoun’s incitement to social scientists to make research more useful and more public is critical and timely.

The education landscape is changing. Whether the change is a fad or true reform, the fact remains that in three years school districts and universities will have undergone drastic alterations. Now is the time for academics to become more involved, to communicate and collaborate with various audiences. Yes, a spirit of intellectual curiosity and discovery is critical to scholarship. I’m not arguing for that to end. Instead, I am arguing for education research to become more public and better designed to answer pressing social questions and inform public policy. There is no reason why research design cannot serve multiple ends.

Social science scholarship has not always been this way. It used to be progressive, just as concerned with social movements as scholarship. But I fear we’ve lost a bit of our edge in an effort to gain legitimacy from our big brothers and sisters in the hard sciences. After all, in two years when I go on job talks, faculty will want to see publications rather than outreach. That is a shame, but it is also something we can improve.

This week is an important week for educators. It is the American Education Research Association’s annual gathering, the largest assembly of education academics. During this week, I hope we can all find some time to reflect on the ways in which we may better create public scholarship.

The promise (and peril) of Promise Neighborhoods

I originally posted this blog on June 28, 2010.

Geoff Canada has quickly become a popular example of the charismatic, transformational leader necessary for positive educational change. His vision of the potential of one neighborhood is nonpareil and extraordinary. His non-profit organization, the Harlem’s Children Zone, which provides a comprehensive suite of services to children and families within a 100 city block radius in Harlem, is ending generational poverty. Over the past several years, Canada has been featured in multiple newspapers, in a book written by Paul Tough, on segments for 60 Minutes and CNN, and even in an American Express commercial.  In fact, Canada and HCZ have been so successful that President Obama, using non-profits and higher education institutions as local implementers, wants to replicate the model in communities across the United States.

The purpose of the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods Program is to improve the outcomes of children through a continuum of “cradle-through-college-to-career” services. Of note, applications for the first stage, the planning grant, which provides a year of funding in order to develop an implementation plan, were due yesterday.

Promise Neighborhoods provides an opportunity to catalyze sustainable place-based reform; however, tremendous obstacles exist. Canada, for instance, estimates a program similar to HCZ will cost approximately $35 million. Even with matched funding from philanthropic organizations, organizations are not likely to achieve that amount. Other challenges include the politics of policy design, implementation, and evaluation, as well as the involvement of community stakeholders. Yet, the trend to fund community-specific  initiatives, while not new (see the Community Action Agencies established with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 as part of President Johnson’s Great Society), is essential to improving the lives of historically marginalized populations. Even though limitations certainly exist, Promise Neighborhoods represents an acknowledgment of the multidimensional aspects of education and community building. It may also represent, I hope and believe, an important shift in policy design.

Remember the Coleman Report

I originally posted this blog on March 02, 2010.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated a study of educational opportunity among students. In 1966 James Coleman presented the Equality of Educational Opportunity Study. Known as the Coleman Report, the findings were and are striking. They led to a shift of focus from inputs to outputs, from money spent to scores attained.

I’ve heard some describe the findings of the report as more money does not equal higher achievement. That’s true, but incomplete. The findings illustrate that variables such as per pupil spending and teacher to student ratio have little effect in comparison to socio-economic status. 

Yesterday President Obama announced ‘turnaround’ grants for underperforming schools in order to improve the percentage of students who graduate. Schools in each qualified state will compete for funds based on proposals that demonstrate their willingness to change. Some options include removing the principal and a portion of the staff, restructuring governance, and changing instructional programs.

Within the past year, our administration has introduced two new competitive grant programs for considerable sums of money–$4.35 billion for Race to the Top and $900 million for the newest grant. Reform is important and necessary. A disproportionate number of African American and Hispanic students do not graduate, do not go to college, do not lead happy lives. Spending money to fund a new reading program, unfortunately, will not initiate systemic, sustainable change. Replacing leadership, teachers, or governance structures probably won’t help much either. We may see bumps in achievement, but they will fade.

Public education is not doomed. For widespread, lasting change, however, our administration must consider a broader array of social reform programs. Money is important, but we need to fund the right things. The Coleman Report reminds us of the influence of a spectrum of factors including access to healthcare, stable housing, and early and adult education. The Great Society, which led to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is the source of both praise and criticism. The intent was good and ambitious. The results were uneven and sometimes uninspiring. Perhaps it’s time we begin to speak of a new generation of progressive initiatives, a chorus of reforms to improve schools and communities together.

Life history as movie

I originally published this blog on September 24, 2009.

A few days ago I called my friend, a graduate student in screenwriting. He happened to be on location, shooting video for a movie. They were driving around Los Angeles, getting the best of the best, a pretty building here, a nice park there. Afterwards they cobbled all the shots into one scene.

This is not a revelation. Anybody who has watched a movie set in a familiar place knows filmmakers frequently take locations blocks or even miles apart and scrunch them together. I remember watching a movie set in Washington D.C.; the main character, escaping from some villains, ran from Northwest to Southeast in 30 seconds. It was quite a feat. Sometimes the city isn’t even the same. Why shoot in New York when Montreal is cheaper? 

An analog exists between what filmmakers and researchers do: we both present narratives. A director, however, can pick and choose and take shortcuts. He does not have to represent Los Angeles as it is; instead, he presents it as best befits the story. A qualitative researcher has an obligation to present the city as it is (or at least tell the reader why the city may not be a true representation).

A common misconception about qualitative research is that it is easy. Bad qualitative research is easy. Good research is not. Good research requires skill, time, and constant analysis and self-reflection.

I am currently collecting data for a life history about a first-year college student. I usually communicate with her via email or text three or four times a week, and on average I spend three hours a week with her. Sometimes I conduct formal taped interviews; sometimes she walks me around campus; sometimes we discuss classwork and homework; and sometimes we just talk about life. One time I even fixed the chain on her bike. But all the time I am collecting data, formally or informally.

I don’t have to commit so much time to this research project. I could meet with her once or twice a month during her freshman year and write an informative, provocative article about the challenges of a first-year student. But that article, like the filmmaker and his city, would be more a representation of me than her.

No, good qualitative research is not easy. But, it is rewarding.

Twitter is the new haiku

I originally published this blog on August 26, 2009.

Poetry has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I do not come from a family of avid readers. If my father has read one book, that is one more than I would have guessed. He says The Executioner’s Song is his favorite, but I inherited his copy and, judging from its pristine condition, I think he saw the movie. My mom reads during one week a year, when she is on vacation at Ocean City, Maryland. She has gone to the same bookstore and the same rack for as long as I’ve been alive. She reads those lewd pulp fiction novels with strapping, shirtless muscle-bound heroes on the covers. She voraciously charges through the books, so much so that any observer would guess she’s a pro. I asked her once why she only reads when on vacation, since she clearly enjoys the activity; she just shrugged her shoulders. But, like a lot of parents, they believed in the importance of reading and bought me mounds of books.

My childhood hero was Shel Silverstein. I wanted to be like him. I wrote my first book of poetry in the second grade; although the quality has been downhill since then, I fear, I have continued to write. Now my heroes are mostly Irish: W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

Novels are nice, but I am impatient and have trouble sitting still. I appreciate the brevity, precision, and thoughtfulness present in a great poem. Every word matters. Haiku is a perfect example.

At the turn of the 19th century, the Imagists–Ezra Pound, in particular–were influenced by haiku and the economy of words to convey an image. They thought, “Why write a poem with 30 lines if you can do it in three?” The same logic has resurfaced recently in the form of micro-blogging, twitter being the most known example. Now, instead of 17 syllables, we get 140 characters or less.

Bashō, I think, would be great at tweeting. With its abstractness, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” just seems like an amazing tweet: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”

The point I am trying to make–and I am trying to make a point–is that twitter is not simply the plaything of constantly plugged-in techies. Micro-blogging is not an untouchable, immutable concept. Twitter has value. Twitter has substance. Twitter can be relevant in learning settings. But we, educators and students, are the ones that have to imbue it with meaning.