On the State of Education, Part 1: The Price of Admission

On some level, I always knew I wanted an advanced degree. I’m lucky, or blessed, or privileged, or well-trained by my college-educated parents; I like classroom-style learning, reading books, doing research, writing papers, having discussions, solving intellectual puzzles and problems. There’s a lot about school that works for me, and I always imagined advanced degree programs as these sparkling islands of intellectual growth and guaranteed fulfillment. Getting accepted to Boston University felt like a one-way ticket to intellectual paradise; in retrospect, it’s almost cute how little I understood. And while I did indeed achieve unbelievable personal growth, drank in a medium-sized lake of knowledge, and discovered a lot about myself and the world and people and history and humanity in general, it was anything but the paradise I had envisioned. It would be kind to say that I was underprepared to face some very hard truths.

It turns out that master’s-level education – just like pretty much all education – is a mixed bag. You may find yourself with a professor who is brilliant, experienced, personable, and skilled (and I did), or you might have a second-year doctoral student who might be all of those things but has their own class load, assignments, reading, and research to deal with before they even get to the syllabus and content for the course they’re teaching (I also had these; incidentally, you might also have a professor who is more interested in their own research than helping you discover the focus of yours, or a doc student who is an absolute rockstar…mixed bag, like I said). In a lot of ways, some of the issues that pervade public school education continue on into higher education: Misapplication and mismanagement of resources, including teachers and money; egocentric and presumptuous – or even well-meaning, but misguided – adults (though definitely not all of them) making decisions without consulting the students that are their main stakeholders; and lack of communication among and between departments when it comes to scheduling, balance, and priorities, just to name a few. And, while the government is constantly slashing the budget for education and educational initiatives, students are being buried under increasingly onerous and crushing piles of debt (Masters programs are a university’s cash cow. This is a discussion for another day). 

I was really fortunate in that I received a scholarship that covered nearly half of my tuition; I made the decision to give up almost all my free time to add a job on top of that, taking care of another 1/3 of my $53,000 per year tuition bill (not including books, rent, food, gym membership, transit pass, parking…) with a tuition waiver and a small stipend. My debt is very manageable – still a burden, I’ll admit - but I have some classmates who weren’t nearly so lucky. Several of them paid full tuition, not to mention the exorbitant cost of living in Boston. Was it worth it? I haven’t spoken to those classmates to ask whether they think it is or will someday prove to be so; I suspect that the answer will be some version of “yes, but it’s not that simple.” For many students, the price of an education goes beyond the already formidable barrier of dollars and cents. The draconian structure of mainstream education also exacts a price on the body, the mind, and the soul.

Despite this, some students - though not nearly enough - still find ways to thrive. I can say that the farther from academia that I get, and the more I lean on the knowledge and perspective that the grad school crucible helped me find, the less I focus on the stress, incredulity, and frustration that were constant companions on my journey through graduate education. What I can also say is that overall, I felt consistently underwhelmed by the quality of about half of the instruction, especially in some of the fundamental classes in my program; I know from conversations with other students that I am far from alone in this. It’s like the more qualified, longer-tenured (not necessarily to be confused with Tenured) professors were assigned – or often chose – the interesting electives and left the foundational classes to their already-overwhelmed and overloaded doctoral students. We, the lowly master’s students, suffered because of this.

The bad classes were really bad, though I still managed to learn some things on my own in almost all of them (learning to deal with – and also construct – B.S. is a highly valuable skill). They demanded every ounce of self-manipulation and willpower just to get me to show up. I also had some classes that were incredible, inspirational, life-direction-altering exercises in self-exploration and learning; what made them that way was that every one of those professors created a safe, compassionate, and discourse-oriented educational space. The time was balanced between lecture and discussion and everyone was accepted for who they were and who they aimed to be. The assignments were challenging, relevant, and demanded critical thinking and self-examination. These professors listened to what their students had to say and tailored the classes to give us what we asked for within the context of the curriculum. It was almost enough to get us to forget the deep dysfunction…almost. Since Boston University is a private institution, you may be wondering what this has to do with public education. Let me explain.

The Measurement Problem

Elementary and secondary public and private education, like public and private higher education, are in trouble. In our schools, despite the mandate of desegregation that flowed out of the Civil Rights movement, the schools with resources (both financial and intellectual) are almost always overwhelmingly White schools. Even with that desegregation mandate, racist redistricting and busing policies have continued to keep schools divided along color lines and, in combination with very cleverly-worded and sweetly-scented policies of “merit-based” funding, ensure that the resources keep flowing to the “good” schools and that the “bad” schools fall further into material, social, and intellectual disrepair.

In Boston, where I first saw this glaring disparity with my own (at the time, painfully naïve) eyes, many of the differences between a place like English High and somewhere like Brookline High are stark (as a side note, I know that Brookline isn’t technically part of Boston. I think the fact that they literally bought their way out of the city actually serves to prove my point). One of the most obvious differences was the demographic and socioeconomic makeup of their student populations. And, despite these differences, they along with many institutions of education at all levels suffer from the same problem: There is a fundamental disconnect between what the students know they need in order to be successful, and the priorities of the environments that the purse string holders, policymakers, and adults in positions of power are creating and sustaining for them. 

What adults have done is impose adult sensibilities onto what should be child-centered spaces. One way we do this is through standardized and merit-based (meaning “worthy” or “deserving”) methods of evaluating students, which give schools and school districts convenient and necessary benchmarks that allow them to seek and obtain critical funding. The problem is that these same standardized measures are by necessity so narrow that all but a select group of students who either learn in a particular way or test in a particular way, or have the resources and time to learn to fit the mold, get entirely left (or more often, pushed) out. What we then do with these students, rather than asking what they need in order to be successful, is that we label them as misfits, or as lazy, or as unintelligent. We do it both to their face and through more subtle means – though policy, through social messaging, and through a lack of emotional and financial investment in their future as they envision it. This intellectual handcuffing isn’t limited to “poor” schools; there are students from all demographics whose particular intelligences and skillsets don’t fit into the definition of “potential” and “success” that we relentlessly espouse in our collective quest for “greatness.” We sometimes call these students “disadvantaged” but really, it’s much more insidious than that.

What we in the academic elite call “disadvantages” often refer to non-White, non-Western cultural norms and skin colors that dictate certain priorities in the home and in life that don’t mesh well with our capitalistic and individualistic, Eurocentric, climb-the-mountain-no-matter-who-we-hurt-along-the-way definitions of personal success. Our narrow and prejudiced educational system uses policy to overwhelmingly hinder students of color and immigrants, who in the United States predominantly come from socioeconomically underprivileged communities and countries. For example, the concept of truancy – legal consequences for kids under 18 who skip or don’t go to school – does not even begin to account for extenuating social, community, cultural, and family circumstances. Policies like truancy and standardized testing make it easy for schools to abandon students that come from cultural paradigms that ask them to be responsible for helping take care of younger siblings, or students who are at risk for violence or trauma in their homes or communities; students whose first priority might be survival (imagine the range of skills required to do this!). Students who, overwhelmingly, are people of color.

I hope that you can see that I’m not saying that education is all bad; there are countless inspiring, dedicated, creative teachers out there, and there are kids who thrive in classrooms. There are schools who are attempting to do things differently, giving students choices and bringing in community members to expand curricula and offer new ideas. What I want to point out is that where this type of innovation is almost always found is in schools with the resources to be creative and progressive, and those resources almost always exist in schools located in affluent (read: White) neighborhoods. This needs to change.

Originally published on May 12, 2020