Only six of Sci’s first graduates finished college within six years, the federal standard for on-time graduation. Three others earned degrees this year. Though eight, including Pierre, are still working toward a degree, 32 of the 49 who enrolled in college have dropped out.Only two finished within the normal four years.
Parks tries to make this about race and class.
In recent years, charter high schools with Sci’s college-for-all mission have celebrated as 100 percent of their graduating classes enrolled in college. Few have publicized how their alumni fared after enrolling, but in 2011, the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, the nation’s largest nonprofit charter school network, released a report criticizing its own outcomes. Yes, KIPP officials wrote, their first students in Houston and the Bronx went on to college at more than double the average rate of their peers. But KIPP found that only a third of its alumni earned a bachelor’s degree—above average for low-income students but a long way from KIPP’s goal of 75 percent.Williams, the student they are following as earlier described:
Still, as Williams and her classmates moved away in the summer of 2012, Marcovitz said, he believed they’d all have “a happy ending with college.” Then, “pretty much immediately,” he realized he had underestimated just how tough college would be for them.
Williams wasn’t sure what to do after her mother and uncle dropped her off in Birmingham. She looked around her dorm. She hadn’t brought any decorations, so the walls were bare. The wood desk was empty, too, but her mother had made the bed with a brand-new sheet set and comforter, so Williams sat on the twin bed, opened the laptop that her godbrother sent, and downloaded Skype and ooVoo so she could chat with her friends long distance. She looked around again. The sun was still shining, but she pulled back the covers, climbed in, and fell asleep.
She forced herself to go to orientation that weekend, but as her classmates went around in a circle introducing themselves, she grew nervous. Every school that she attended in New Orleans was nearly 100 percent black; only a tenth of the students at Birmingham-Southern were. She worried that her New Orleans accent might make her unusual. “You don’t want to seem uneducated with these people,” she said she told herself, “so just stay real quiet.”
Williams said she was relieved when classes started the next morning. In high school, classwork had always come easily. At Birmingham-Southern, she strolled smiling toward Introduction to Film, but when the instructor asked the class to write two pages explaining what they hoped to do in film, she froze. She had chosen to major in music business because she wanted to help people make art. She believed that movies, like music, could be therapy for people who might never go to a counselor. But she couldn’t find the words to explain her goals, so when she tried to write the paper that week, she sat motionless in front of her laptop. Finally, a few hours before class, she scrambled a few dozen sentences together. The professor gave the paper a C–.
Williams tried harder in her courses, but no matter how well she did on the essays or tests, she said, she still felt uncomfortable. She didn’t talk in class, and she never went to the cafeteria. Instead, she survived on packs of ramen. She grew close to the only other black woman in her dorm, a first-generation student named Ashley. They went to the gym together every day for a month before Ashley decided to drop out. She had a kid, but the college wouldn’t let her keep the child in her dorm, and she couldn’t afford a babysitter.
After Ashley left, Williams spent most of her time alone. She wrote letters to her 11- and 9-year-old sisters, then taped their replies to the wall above her bed. When her roommate asked to be moved midsemester, she didn’t blame her. “I’m very awkward,” Williams said.
She spent four years at Sci learning how to improve her writing and study habits, but no one in high school had talked about what college would feel like if your only friend dropped out and your roommate couldn’t bear to live with you. She had never learned to navigate being the sole black woman in a residence hall full of white people who didn’t understand her.
At the end of 2012, Williams packed her clothes and letters for Christmas break. She hadn’t told anyone, but she had decided she couldn’t go back to Birmingham in January. As her mother drove her home, Williams daydreamed about transferring to the University of New Orleans. UNO wasn’t as prestigious as the private school that Sci’s counselors had steered her toward, and she would have to repay Birmingham the tens of thousands of scholarship dollars it gave her.
Williams was “extraordinary,” Marcovitz said, someone deeply curious and capable of the kind of complex thinking not common in most high school freshmen. She trawled the dictionary for new words and spent school bus rides proofreading her friends’ papers. She tutored other kids from public housing. Her initial test scores were below grade level, but nearly every student arrived at Sci academically behind. Most still read at an elementary school level. Some couldn’t read at all.Perhaps. But it is clear she was academically unprepared. Her failure at Birmingham-Southern is followed by a series of further academic setbacks, each time her desire for an education leading her back to a further effort but at institutions of ever decreasing reputation.
Marcovitz and Sci Academy clearly are trying hard. They take on WIlliams student loans and forgive them.
Parks follows some other students who similarly struggled, as apparently did all of them. Sci Academy is trying to help in many different ways. Some are productive. Others seem self-defeating such as focusing on race, culture, and social integration rather real academic achievement.
“We underestimated the importance of social integration. We underestimated the cultural gaps between the communities our students come from and the more elite, highly selective institutions that a lot of people got placed into,” Beabout continued. “Even if I can hang in my college algebra classroom, can I make a happy life for myself in a dorm with very few people who have had very similar life experiences?”That is not to say that culture and class are not real issues. But everything in the article screams that they are focusing on the wrong issue. Culture and class can be addressed if the underlying knowledge and academic skills are there. When they are not, preparation around culture and class won't accomplish much.
I appreciate the issues of being an outsider and not initially fitting in. I attended seven different schools on four different continents in six different countries with five different languages (though instruction was always in English except for the language classes). Such challenges are real. There is a whole field of study about third-culture kids.
But for all that, and for all the good intentions, and for all the effort - this article still seems to be communicating that we are a long ways away from providing the real and realistic education children from challenging backgrounds require.
About the only redeeming grace of the article is not made explicit. From a number of hints, it does appear that the all-charter school approach New Orleans took after Katrina is producing better results than the old public system. Better but still not good.
And it is hard not to look coldly at this initiative and ask whether the children of Sci Academy haven't been exploited. They were promised an education which would allow them to achieve a college education and it is apparent that for all the efforts, that was not achieved. The great majority wasted time and took out loans only to achieve nothing and possibly postpone some of the more achievable successes attained by some of their non-college peers.
That said, there are few obvious villains, just heartbreaking under-achievement.
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