OE? WOP War on Poverty? I think there is interesting history in your narrative but I am having to make up a little too much to get the gist. Details? Dorene Cornwell
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Below is a bit long. I want to write about this general subject of education, standards, and assesments. So here it goes. It will illustrate what I think is wrong headed about NCLB by way of constrast to past experience with one War on Poverty program. I'll go over the programatic structure first, because it's important to see how federal level political power can be used to change local education. (Sorry for the teacher tone. I always wanted to be teacher, but never got there.)
Okay OE, US Department of Education, also known as the Office of Education, hence OE. OE was formerly embedded in HEW, US Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Each of these departments were their own entity. The War on Poverty programs where administered through the various executive branch agencies under the cabinet level. We were under HEW, with the subdivision of Department of Education. Our program was part of a set of education programs called TRIO, these included the most famous, Head Start, then Upward Bound, and us at Special Services. We were the top of the education ladder working in higher education. The purpose of Special Service projects for poor, minority, and otherwise disadvanged students was to admit, retain, and graduate these students. (Imagine that? They let anybody go to Berkeley, back then. Damn right!)
When a college or university accepted federal money under Special Services, the administration had to open the admission, registration, and enrollment processes, and manage those systems jointly with our project. This was before affirmative action. The admissions office notified us of any student who noted a disability on their admission. Another project like ours was devoted to non-disabled poor and minority students, and they were doing the same thing we were. All our students were on welfare. Economic assistance for non-disabled poor students came from the National Defense Education Act. Back then NDEA grants were modest but livable. Loans were at 1%. Dorm fees could be waived, reduced or paid by other programs. What this joint management system with the university administration meant was that we got to go over the applications for admission. We could wave the grade average, high school subject requirements, and test score requirements for `our' students. And we certainly needed to do a lot of that. These were called Special Admissions. (Also before Affirmative Action)
There was also a high school level program call Upward Bound (UP). It specialized in improving academic achievement in high schools. It worked with parents, students, teachers, and consellors. (The few people I knew at UP did plenty of community work and organizing too, but all that was off the books.)
So, then it was our program's responsibility to make sure special admission students got any and all the help they needed. Non-SA students were certainly welcomed to use our services. Many did, others did not. When I get down to detail, this was some pretty damn radical stuff here.
Below is an fictional and ideal narrative of how these programs were suppose to work. I am going to use a non-disabled example because I think it is more relevant to what's going on today and more people are familiar with minority education problems.
Let's take a black high school kid with average grades, from a low income family in Oakland. His HS consellor has already put him through UB. She has him take the SAT, has the scores, filled out the admission forms, collected the transcripts, and helped him write an essay. Dot, dot, dot. She has called to notify us to watch for the name in admissions. I call him JD. We call the admission office and get the packet. We open the packet and review it. Mostly average stuff. Okay essay, average test scores with the usual weak points in english and math. Got a B in history. That's a good sign. We go over his high school grades a couple Ds here and there. Took some of the lighter science track biology, geography, etc. Not enough of those units to meet the standard requirements, test scores and grades to low. Special admission route.
Our only real question is can he make it? Probably, if we can cherry pick his classes, reduced the course load, and hand steer him through a year or two toward a degree program.
There will come the day, when the first paper is due and he is in panic. Everybody is. Do we have somebody, or know another student who can do hands-on tutoring in most of the subjects this guy might need help with? If he stays in the humanities or social sciences, yes.
What's going here is a system of mutual assessment, assessing JD, and assessing our ability to serve him. He is an average student, which is doing pretty damned good in a collapsing school district.
We call the high school consellor for an interview. We're looking for a couple of things. We want to see if JD looks like he can handle himself in a new and high pressure environment. We also want to see if he shows a difficult thing to judge: ernestness, enthusiasm, something that shows motivation. JD needs to get through, even with all the assistance we can provide. Certainly getting average grades in a poor school system shows promise.
Getting back to process. We waive admission requirements, assemble more forms for NDEA grants, and have a dorm room set aside. JD lives nearby and he may not want to live in the dorms for a lot of different reason. JD acts more grown-up than most of the students in the dorms. He might like a lot more freedom, might not like the overbaring white kid stuff, etc. It will be his choice. We want to encourage use of the dorms. It will mean free room and board for JD. It will lighten the economic load on the family. It will elimenate transportation needs. It will provide a way to get away from home.
JD comes to Berkeley. He moves into the dorms. He wants to get away from home. We go over the course loads and requirements, and help him hand pick which courses to take, and cut his load down to three or four classes. We discuss his interests. We mention intro courses in, Cultural Anthro, Sociology, Education, Psychology, History, various Ethnic Studies classes etc. (These were my favorites to start somebody with.) We don't enroll him in any first year requirements. We know the university uses first year requirements to weed out students. We want to retain them. The reasons for these choices is partly about JD's interests. The other reason is we know particular professors and particular classes that have lead to successful academic outcomes. Some of these professors (also associate, assistant and visiting) are interesting, a little bit of fun, and we can work with them. We can ask them to throw out an occasionial a bad paper or low test score. We can also ask for extention deadline for withdrawl and several other administrative details. We've been over the textbooks. Some of us have taken the class.
Remember this was before home computers where every class had a web page. We had to actually walk over to the book store, walk up to the professor's office, and talk with other students about this or that class. There was also Slate. Slate was good back then, because some Free Speech Movement people were running it. Slate was a student pamphlet that covered most of the first two year required courses in most of the majors with a description of the class and a grading system for the named prof. It also covered some of the upper division entrance to the major courses)
A few weeks into the semester, JD tells us, he's got a paper due and is worried about it. We assign a tutor to help him write it, in advance. One of us who knows the subject or can write, goes over the paper, then JD submits it, gets a C. Great! Think about it, straight out of a damned rundown high school, and he scores a C on his first paper at Cal.
After a couple of successful years we lose track of JD. He sometimes comes by for lunch. He got into the Education department on his own and is a few units away from a degree. We tell him about the Job Placement Center and one of our hand picked people who works there. We tell JD he needs to make an appointment with her about a semester before graduation. He says will but he's thinking about grad school. We tell him about Teacher Corp as another possibility.
(Side note. Our program director, as an administrator, just below Dean level, had a vote on some new university hires of non-academic staff in other departments. The woman in Placement was a civil rights radical from Chicago. We became friends.)
I did this kind of work between 1969-79. At first I did it ad hoc, then paid. I was first hired as a student counsellor, and later changed over to wheelchair repair and transportation. The change of duties was to fill a programmatic need. I liked both kinds of work. I continued the counselling off the cuff with course information, who to see, etc.
This system worked to put several hundred people through UCB and graduate them. That's progress. That's the fight that got won, if only for a few years.
Since old threads seem to die fast unless a flame session is in progress, I am going post it under a different thread and maybe to be continued.
CG