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These days, as commentators aplenty bemoan the achievement gap between the United States and other developed countries (not to mention the gaps between groups within the United States), it has become popular to suggest all students should go to college. In some circles, it has become almost heretical to suggest otherwise.

Yet if the United States is truly to “win the future,” as President Obama encourages, it will be necessary to do with skilled craftspeople as well as resident scholars. In other words, at a certain point a 4-year college is not for everyone, and in this era of budget cuts to education it is critical to maintain community colleges as well as vocational and non-academic post-secondary programming options.

As the director of a college prep program that works within a public high school, I’m certainly a cheerleader for the benefits of college. Our program works with students from the ninth grade on to familiarize their families and them with the college process and to make well-informed, high-quality decisions on where to apply and matriculate.

Even so, a few months ago I decided to create an option for a dozen seniors who are uninterested in or unsure about attending college in the fall. Instead of participating in a 90-minute weekly class led by our college counselor that readies students to transition into college, these students, about 20 percent of their class, choose to attend a workshop with our career counselor to learn about a variety of post-secondary options.

Don’t get me wrong — college is still on the table for these students, whether for right after graduation or sometime thereafter. But so is a career as an auto mechanic, or nurse, or computer technician, or carpenter. (more…)

The scores are in.

After our college prep program and partner high school collaborated on a relatively robust effort to prepare our juniors for the January SAT, we recently received our students’ results.

Let me put it this way — our students are to the SAT what Congress is to fiscal responsibility.

After months of regular preparation, multiple, full-length practice tests and a coordinated campaign to ensure attendance, our students averaged 351 on critical reading and 371 on math, which earns them an average overall score of 722. In other words, despite all of our efforts, which represented a ramped-up approach as compared to previous years, our scores were as dismal as ever.

There is a consolation prize — the get-out-the-student effort resulted in a 28-percent increase in attendance, to 95 percent — but we were expecting much more of a bump in the scores.

This year’s crop of juniors is a promising bunch, overall, with higher rates of academic and civic engagement and greater college-going interest than peers from recent years (one of their teachers refers to them as the “golden class”). While their skills are still several years behind grade level, they are, on average, the highest-performing grade in the school. And yet — 722. (more…)

“When I found out I wasn’t crazy.”

Such was famed feminist Gloria Steinem’s response to a question posed by writer Malcolm Gladwell during a panel session this weekend at Teach For America’s 20th-Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C. Steinem was responding to a Gladwell query about when she knew she had been successful in her campaign for equal rights for women.

The sentiment she was describing — a sense of calm and comfort upon realizing the presence of like-minded people who supported and were engaged with her struggle, who shared similar beliefs and the conviction to act on those beliefs — rang true for me this weekend.

Of the roughly 11,000 current and former Teach For America corps members gathered in Washington, the overwhelming majority had taught and/or were teaching in a school with another corps member. I didn’t, and I missed the camaraderie that came with working alongside someone who was recruited because of shared experiences and trained on the same principles. Working upwards of 60-, 70-, 80-hour weeks over the last few years has gotten tiring without the reinforcement of like-minded colleagues acting in concert.

Thus I feel rejuvenated after 36 hours of immersion in the wacky world of Teach For America. A Friday night dinner with founder and CEO Wendy Kopp was followed by an evening reception, where I was delighted to find myself around a hotel bar sometime past 11:30 p.m. in deep conversation about educational inequity in post-Katrina New Orleans. (more…)

Do you know that feeling of excitement-turned-nervousness, that rumbling in your gut before you take your driver’s license test, that fluttering before your blind date shows up or the results of your pregnancy test appear?

As the novice director of a college prep program in a high school with paralyzingly low SAT scores historically — between 660-720 on math and critical reading combined — and as someone who threw the sink at trying to move those numbers skyward, that’s how I am feeling today, when we find out the results of our students’ Jan. 22 SAT exam.

The decision to go all-out on SAT prep was not easy — on average, our 11th-graders read two to three years below grade level, and I considered whether their time (and our program’s money) would be better spent focusing on remedial skills than learning test-taking strategies and far-flung vocabulary words.

Yet the series of events that unfolded once I committed to sustained SAT prep and the challenges we subsequently encountered encompass larger themes present in the current state of urban, public schools that serve low-income students. Issues of differentiation, competency, fairness, accountability and ownership all came up in our preparation, and they will be issues I return to in future months in “The College Conundrum,” a biweekly survey of the landscape from my perch as a college prep program director at a small, traditional public high school in the South Bronx. (more…)

As a former high school history teacher in the South Bronx, I rallied my students with the necessarily optimistic classroom motto of “Anything is possible.”

Just before Christmas, the U.S. Senate effectively told some of my former students, “No, it’s not.”

By voting 55-41 to block advancement of the DREAM Act, the Senate slammed the door shut on thousands of students’ futures and threw away the key for at least another two years.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act would have provided a way for children who were illegally brought to this country by relatives to gain citizenship. The reward — citizenship — was to be dangled as a carrot for children who have been in this country for five years, graduate from high school, pursue college or the military and have no criminal record.

As a teacher and in my current capacity as a college preparation program director, I have worked with several such upstanding students who would have qualified for relief under the act, and it’s crushing to hear them talk about what their futures look like without this legislation. (more…)