Report on historically black colleges....

The Economist has a report on how the 105 US historically black colleges and universities are doing and their problems:
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3503700

Some 25% of all black Americans earn their degrees from them - including the step-daugter of a buddy of mine (Tuskeegee - but now at UCLA med school) - and her mother teaches at one.

-Orson

 

It was a very informative article.

It's a very bad idea to "dumb down" the grading standards at African American colleges. By doing so, they are doing a great disservice. Conversely, one could say that many European American colleges might be doing the same thing i.e. UoP, et al.

 

Do you have some reason to cite UoP as a school that engages in the "dumb down" process? My experience (one year of full-time academic activity as a College Chair) has shown me otherwise. Or did you choose UoP because it is the largest?

 

This Is Just Wrong!

Article Quote"

WHEN first-year students at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, receive their grades, they may see As or Bs, even if their academic performance doesn't merit it. Under Success Equals Effort (SEE), a controversial new grading policy, freshman grades at the historically black university are calculated on a 60-40 formula: effort counts for 60%, academic performance for only 40%. In their second year, the formula is 40-60. Only in their third junior year will students be judged strictly on academic performance.
The SEE programme, which is being scrutinised by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges, was introduced a year ago by Benedict's president, David Swinton, who went to Harvard himself, but insists that incoming students lack the study habits and other skills necessary to succeed. It has caused an uproar among faculty members, and alumni too have wondered whether the quality of their own degrees will be questioned.

End Quote


As an African-American who did not go to a historically black college I find the "SEE" model appalling. In actuality I find the need for colleges to distinguish themselves by race appalling also. Times have changed in a few days it will be 2005, America needs to change also. In order to compete fairly in the world market today an individual must know that he or she is on par with his colleagues.

While I do agree that brick-and-mortar institutes can create bonds and friendships, not to mention lifelong contacts, Benedict College in Columbia does not meet these qualities in my opinion. Graduates will be reluctant to mention the school they've graduated from if it is embroiled in academic turmoil over its substandard grading policy. I find it even more disturbing that the inventor of this model is a Harvard graduate himself. He knows this model would not fly at Harvard or any other state school, this is an experiment in the dumbing of future Americans, whether African-American or any race. I know that there is still some doubt in online schools but no regionally accredited school to my knowledge uses a model based on"SEE", and admits to it. I personally find it atrocious and would be tempted to call this a degree mill philosophy.

I sincerely hope that parents of these students can recognize that their child will be inheriting a substandard education. I would immediately withdraw my son or daughter and place them in a respected school whether it's a community college or Harvard.

On a personal note I feel it's not successful just to go to college, success is completing it. Later on in the article there is a quote the majority of students at historically black colleges do not graduate on time, only 25%. I would deftly press African-Americans and all Americans to do better or watch their jobs be outsourced to a Third World country that has better math and reading skills than we do.


Only My Opinion

 

What did I miss?

I agree with the article to some extent because I believe that although the Historically Black School is trying to help students who need it, it is denigrating the standard of academic performance as a metric for the grades that students earn. I think that they could have come up with something a little better than the 60/40 or 40/60 system. I just think that it will haunt the school, the graduates, and the faculty because "America's Standard" is based upon selecting "the best...from the best." But, on the other hand...I have reaped the benefit from working hard before; I graduated with my AA by working so hard in a Trigonometry Class that DR. "K" must have slipped me some points in there. In fact, I needed about 2 points. Did he give me some points for effort? Heck yes! What I am trying to say is that although the method is wrong, I feel that it does help students at these schools when they can get into a program, work hard, and be guaranteed some attainable success...as long as they work hard! This leaves the question of when does a student need to be able to perform at the college level...as a junior? Needs Work!

Conversely, where the heck did you see in a UOP Class, Curriculum, Website, Advertisement, or any other media where they dumb down or award for effort any part of a student's grade? Let me know; please! You may not feel in your opinion that its as tough as it should be...if so, your opinion is as valuable to you as mine is to me! I don't think every student is looking for the hardest thing to do with their brain in regard to applying it towards a degree. So, if one school is a little less rigorous, it may be a good choice for a working person, with a career, family, a person serving in the military, a person who is incarcerated, or in a situation where they don't have the luxury to sit in a top-notched program. As long as its RA. I think that the UOP is a niche that is needed. Everyone can't go to Harvard.

 

Re: This Is Just Wrong!

You know Vonnell...I hate it when people refer to themselves as "African American." There have been over 300 black soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines killed in Iraq...serving as American Soldiers. There should not be a link to Africa based on the color of a person's skin. We don't do it for Italian Americans, Anglo Americans, German Americans, etc. Every family came to American on some type of vessel...our ethnic status kep us apart on the voyage and through much of American settlement & civilization, but we have gone through wars, depressions, deaths of presidents and princesses...and September 11. We are all one family! Ohana, as my wife; who is Hawaiian, would say!

Now saying that, I politely and respectfully disagree with your statement. I think that until there are no distinctions drawn between Blacks, Whites, Asians, Hispanics, etc. there must be some things that remain in place. Status quo? Hell no! But they need to remain.

I have a colleague that graduated from a Historically Black College. I won't paint a picture of his entire life, however, if he wouldn't have gotten into that "Black School," his brilliant mind may have gone un-nourished...and I may have been deprived of his excellent service to his country. He could not get into a "so-called regular school" so he went where he was accepted. Imagine, fighting through the harshest streets to get to and from school, working to take care of your family, noone else in your house is educated so they denigrate your hunger to be educated, therefore your grades suffer. Harvard is out of the question at that point...and maybe every other school on your watch list. People still need that option available to them...but that option (Historically Black Schools) have to remain Viable! Stop the B/S of effort for grades and the 60/40 systems. Hire world reknowned scholarly minds (Cornell West, for example), and get with the times...stop trying to "not" raise the bar! Remember, some Black Colleges were "world class" and trendsetting in their hayday! There have been some wonderful scholars and trendsetting innovations that have come from Black Schools.

Now, that I have finished my rant...I think that my point was that an option is an option. We can't be limiting the choices for black students. But those choices can be more competitive.

 

University far above Cayuga's waters,awful smell, etc: 2 L's
Pompous wealthy Marxist prof who dresses like a banker: 1 L

P.S. Thanks, Vonnell, for calling crap crap. When I think of HBCU's, I prefer not to think of bad jokes like Benedict. Thanks for the post.

 

Re: This Is Just Wrong!

But Vonnell, it is going on at Harvard. 50% of Harvard undergraduates are currently getting either "A" or "A-". This link was posted in another thread, but in case you didn't see it:

http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i30/30b02401.htm

At best it's tough to believe that so many Harvard students are doing that much better than in the past. This is especially true since high school, SAT and college entrance exam grades have been falling rather than rising, and it isn't because the classes or exams have gotten more difficult. More students than ever are enrolled in remedial classes, including remedial reading, upon entrance to college.

I'm not implying that what Benedict is doing is right, only that it's also going on at other colleges including Harvard. As it has been going on for some years now it's not likely to change anytime soon. It's tough to unring a bell. Trying to drastically change grade inflation policies, whether spoken or unspoken, would be likely to leave the colleges open to more complaints and/or lawsuits from students and parents. Lawsuits along the lines of...."Yabbut graduates for the last 5/10 yrs are enjoying the benefits of the previous policy!! This change will make ME unable to compete with them and makes them look better than me. Unfair, unfair!!"

Kit

 

Re: This Is Just Wrong!

"As an African-American who did not go to a historically black college I find the "SEE" model appalling. In actuality I find the need for colleges to distinguish themselves by race appalling also. Times have changed in a few days it will be 2005, America needs to change also. In order to compete fairly in the world market today an individual must know that he or she is on par with his colleagues."

Hooray for you Sir/Madam. It's almost 2005. There is simply no excuse for segregated colleges in this day and age in
America. Brickbats also to the women who are demanding that traditionally all-female colleges remain, while they simultaneously insist that formally all-male colleges like VMI accept women. Everytime I read about the need for these black colleges, I am reminded of David Robinson, star NBA player. Besides being a fantastic black athelete, Robinson graduated from the US Naval Academy with honors in mathematics and engineering. He's also very politically conservative. I can imagine how he feels about the "need" for black colleges. I salute the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools which refuses to be intimidated by political correctness. In recent reviews of seven traditionally black colleges and universities, one was re-accredited, two were placed on probation, and four had their accreditations revoked entirely. Predictably, liberals squealed like scalded pigs, yet the commission held fast. While the Left decries SACS action as racist, others recognize it for what it really is -- tough love.

 

Standards are standards. On another thread I have called this policy 'dumbing up'. Grade inflation is a pernicious destruction of standards. The whole concept of normal passes in the high 90s is so ridiculous that it undermines international respect for US education and its faculties.

The worthy attempt to motivate otherwise disadvantaged people does them no favours by the '60-40' policy. It undermines their self respect. That they should be motivated to work at their classes is fine - good teachers can do that (find them and hire them) - but everything in higher educated is predicated on the right to discriminate on standards (and nothing else!). The Republic of Letters - the one true republic we belong to - is about discrimination among people who have the ability to succeed at their classes.

I am all for getting people off their knees and being stretched to their limits to show how good they are at the intellectual challenges put in front of them. It had been shown that scholarly leadership and inspirational learning environments work, from 'sink' schools to failing universities.

We have all been inspired by great teachers - if you haven't, then either you learned despite your tutors or you missed the most important experience of learning, namely, seeing for yourself what great teaching can do for you when you are struggling and what you can do likewise for others when you become a teacher.

I have never forgotten a maths teacher who taught me the differential calculus using a mind experiment of water running into a bath and water escaping down the plug hole, and one who made the Spanish and Portuguese importation of gold and silver in the 16th century so interesting I took half a dozen extra history classes while doing my economics bachelor degree.

Those without formal education do not need favours - they need challenges. Find new ways to challenge them would do more for them than kidology that measures their progress by lowering the accepted standards using non-relevant measures of aptitude.

Do juries want to be attended by medical practitioners who have been 'helped' through their courses, or defended by lawyers who were passed through their 'exams' simply for turning up, or served meals by people who do not practice hygienne because it was not on the syllabus because it was too difficult?

 

UOP does not participate in the SEE rule

In no way shape or form does UOP grade on the 40/60 rule, your grade is totally dependant on your papers, presentations, and tests (in courses like statistics, and finance, exams are weighed heavier than the papers as well). Some teachers do require more participation than others, and some do not, but you still have to complete the 6-8 papers per class, plus the group-work, presentations, exams and online activities (NET G/simulations, assessments) to receive a decent grade. People who don't turn in their work and don't show up usually do not pass, grades are not based on effort, they are based on the student's ability to demonstrate they have effectively grasped the course materials.

 

Re: UOP does not participate in the SEE rule

We all know that UoP is extremely rigorious and demanding, espicially those of us that have been there. LOL

 

Rich,

You should know better… me again’s expert opinion is based on his/her student experience with ONE course. How can you dare to compare your one-year, full-time academic experience as a College Chair against that?

 

Funny thing about historically black law schools, anyway. They are still much "blacker" than even state supported law schools where black students are underrepresented in proportion to the black population.

These schools still exist because they are still necessary. Law being by far the "whitest" of the professions, we have a long way to go even now. Much progress HAS been made, to be sure, even in my lifetime, but the profession is still overwhelmingly white.

I am not so sure that a different approach to learning or even a different approach to grading is necessarily "dumbing down". Heck, many medical schools are pass/fail throughout, or so I've heard.

I am also not convinced that the WAY a person learns is not influenced by cultural and economic background. I am not an educator, but I AM heavily educated and I've done a good bit of lower division teaching. I never had much faith in testing and grading as a means to measure educational effectiveness.

One of my daughters completed a B.A. at Evergreen State College. They have NO grades; every student receives a written evaluation from every professor. I'm here to tell you, she got a very good education under this system, better, really, than I received at St. Martin's College.

Fact is, I think the rest of us could maybe learn something from the SEE experiment.

 

Heaping a compliment on me....

Thank you kindly for the generous compliment. LOL

 

BUT WHY IS...?

But why is making one profession less white considered progress? Why is "representation"
THE sine qua non of legitimacy?

If so, then pro B ball is backward.

Both personal destinies and free markets resist your quaint notion of justice.

It was one better achieved by Nazi governments (Law was far too non-Aryan to be fair) than American. That was necessary too - by your lights.

"These schools still exist because they are still necessary." Not according to this article.

Programs like SEE would be unnecessary in the first place if secondary schools did their jobs.

-Orson

 

Orsen,

Believe me, I don't swallow "representation" as the be all and end all. However, the profession and the legal education establishment has a LONG history of explicit discrimination against black lawyers and law students. Even in MY lifetime, the University of Texas Austin admitted NO blacks.

Now, UT Austin is and was a taxpayer supported institution. Although there were public law schools that accepted black students, none had the national reputation of UT Austin and none could confer the benefits of a UT Austin degree beyond mere bar membership.

In short, the ENTIRE state, blacks and whites (and Indians and Hispanics) PAID for the education UT Austin students received but many wers hut out merely because of thier race.

It is not enough to pass a law requiring facially race-neutral admissions policies. Texas did that; UT Austin literally roped off a few seats in its lecture halls and labelled them "colored" for the ONE black student they were forced to admit. In MY lifetime this happened!

Don't you see that laws and policies like this flow from deep seated attitudes? That bigots will find new ways to exclude those they don't like when you pass laws outlawing the old ways?

So how DO you take effective action? You have to measure SOMETHING that can't be rejiggered; racial representation is about the ONLY objective measure I can think of that has a prayer of validity.

 

You - dear nosborn - have hit upon the intractable impulse that's killing contemporary liberalism: round meritocratic holes resist the square pegs offered up as "solutions," papering over widely recognized grass-roots realities, but only gratifying ideologues. Continually, the civil rights lobby (the Democratic plantation decried by Larry Elder, Star Parker, and other outspoken antiestablishment blacks) denies what blacks experience - and blacks, whether out of despair or frustration, want "out" according to suveys, desiring school choice more than any other demographic group!

The juridicial problem is that a liberal political order requires the legal fiction of equality of all people in order for law to be administered fairly. Thus, as according to the civil war amendments, the state should treat people equally. But in fact, as the framers recognized, people are not equal - something ignored by today's left in its quest to achieve a chimerical greater "good."

Now, this isn't so much of a problem where proceedural justice is concerned, but it enormously contradicts cause and effect where the welfare state's egalitarian agendas are at stake.

In our democracy, people support middle class entitlements (whether corporate subsidies or elite law school subsidies like UT-Austin) because of popular sovereignty, one-man one-vote rules, and the middle class composition of society. But most Americans reject special privileges for "victims" who were never enslaved to begin with; they want merit to distribute these rewards, not perpetual discrimination - no matter how well intended.

(Meanwhile, as the left like you obsess over historical guilt and the littlest racial injustice, blacks have made their largest gains toward parity in incomes in recorded history. But admitting and welcoming this progress instead of denying it would deprive Dems of one of their oldest victim groups to exploit for political gains.)

Leftist elites desperately want some way to ensure differential outcomes that advance egalitarian ideals. This either requires force (outright racial discrimination) or the subtrefuge of force (racial quotas - indirect discrimination).

There is no way out of this dilemma in a democratic way without giving up force, contitutional coherence, or honest meritocracy.

Thus, GMU Law professor David Bernstein writes that "while racial preferences for 'diversity' purposes are legal under Grutter v. Bollinger [2003], racial preferences for remedial purposes are not."

"t would be hard to argue that, say, the fifth African American student from Harlem adds more 'diversity' to a class than the first recent Gambian immigrant. Any college (are you listening, president of Amherst?) that preferred 'American' black students over black immigrants would likely be violating the law. This is just one more example of the perverse consequences of the 'diversity' argument for racial preferences."
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_21.shtml [June 24, 2003]

The egalitarian quest breaks down under its sheer incoherence.

And again, this was recognized several years ago; see this piece from the Austin Review below
http://www.austinreview.com/articles/69.html
- - - - - - -
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1999
College Board Study Suggests Lino Graglia Was Right
By MARC LEVIN AND EDWARD BLUM

Remember Lino Graglia?

He was the University of Texas Law School professor who speculated in a widely condemned speech that the large gap in academic achievement between blacks and Hispanics, and whites and Asians, might be attributable to cultural differences in attitudes toward education." Blacks and Mexican- Americans are not academically competitive with whites in selective institutions," Graglia mused at a 1997 press conference in Austin. "It is the result primarily of cultural effects," he concluded.

In response to those sobering remarks, Jesse Jackson led sixties-style protest against Graglia that nearly shut down the UT campus. Even President Clinton's press secretary said that remarks like Graglia's "don't go down well with the President, period."

Talk about shooting the messenger.

Now comes a report from the College Board, the organization responsible for the Scholastic Achievement Tests the bane of every college-bound high school senior since they were introduced after World War II. One of the factors cited as contributing to the persistent gaps in standardized tests and academic achievement is "cultural attributes of the home, community and school."

It seems that Lino Graglia was right after all.

Even more distressing is the report's finding that the minority achievement gaps persists across all economic groups: middle-class and upper income blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans lag behind their white and Asians counterparts....
- - - - - - - -

You ask "Don't you see that laws and policies like this flow from deep seated attitudes? That bigots will find new ways to exclude those they don't like when you pass laws outlawing the old ways?" As if the people in funny hats (Rotarians, Shriners) are tantamount to Klansmen!

NO - I'm neither so much in denial of the enormous change in white American's conduct since the 60s (eg, I have an Indian nephew, a black half-nephew, and my best friend's wife is black - oh, and my last roommate too), nor so conspiratorially driven (or gullible). And even if there were good reason to accept your point, there are strong laws against it.

The way "forward" for black people isn't through more or "better" state discrimination - but indirectly, by improving the cultural capital of blacks: through better primary and secondary education, and more stable family units that can perpetuate such social gains.

-Orson

 

Re: BUT WHY IS...?

I disagree. The problem starts not in the secondary schools but in the primary schools, and stems from problems in the home.

A few years back it was reported that the majority of 3rd graders in inner-city Washington D.C. public schools were unable to read at all. These children were all 8 or 9 years old and many had no diagnosable learning disabilities. A hue and cry began about the primary schools, teachers, school administrators, and public officials "not doing their jobs". The usual solution proposed was that more money was needed. Absent from all the hyperbole was any questioning about the parents or other primary caregivers and what kind of job they were doing, or not doing in this case. Schools, public or private, teachers, school administrators, politicians, and government cannot raise anyone's child for them. That responsibility belongs to parents. How is it that someone's child can get to 8 or 9 years old and the parent doesn't know their own child can't read at all?

Kit

 

I am not talking about special privileges, I am talking about a history of culturally based, blatant, and at one time LAWFUL discrimination on basis of race. Correcting THAT bias is my concern. If you don't see that, we can't ever agree.