THANKS for posting this. When you get time more such history or links to good stuff on the web would be quite interesting. I may not respond right away but am definitely interested.
DC
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 3:48 PM, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> ---------
>
> 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
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