On Thursday, May 26, I read an essay by former state Rep. Jonathan Pelto that appeared in the online publication, ctmirror. It dealt with the emerging approach of the Malloy administration to community-college education during a time of budget crisis. Here’s my response, which I submitted to ctmirror.
As a community-college teacher, I had multiple reactions after reading Jonathan Pelto’s excellent and depressing column, “A Giant Step in Connecticut’s Race to the Bottom.”
The first was simply that those of us who work in the community-college system know, perhaps even better than Gov. Malloy and Commissioner Michael Meotti, the dimensions of the problem that they presume to address. We see it at the start of every academic year—students who come to college unprepared to do college work. And we’ve come, reluctantly in my case, to accept that community colleges can’t quickly solve the problems that accumulated during the first 13 years (kindergarten through Grade 12) of our students’ education.
The second reaction was that someone has to try, that “someone” historically has been us, and that no effort in higher education is more important.
After reading Commissioner Meotti’s comment that the state should “reconsider” offering a college education to those who are “likely to fail,” though, I came up with a few other ideas that could deal with the problem that he perceives and save a ton of money to boot.
We know, for instance, that 75 percent of our students are going to come here unable to do college-level work in math, English, or both. Since the deficiency rates are higher in the state’s cities than in the suburbs, why not post a sign over the entrance to every urban high school in the state—a sign that says, “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.” I’m assuming that, since Dante Alighieri has been dead for more than six centuries now, his inscription over the Gates to Hell is part of the public domain. And it captures perfectly the spirit of Commissioner Meotti’s analysis. After all, most of these students will graduate from high school “likely to fail” anyway. Why permit them to build up hope for four years, receive a high-school diploma, and then have the doors shut in their faces? ‘Tis kinder, surely, to discourage them from wasting time on an effort that was doomed from the start. Plus, we would drive down high-school enrollment, which would save money on teacher salaries and building maintenance.
There is a way to save even more money: Simply close the state’s urban high schools. No schools would mean no teachers, no maintenance, and even more savings. Why, especially in a time of mandatory austerity, spend anything at all on those who probably will fail anyway?
Because, of course, one of the foundational beliefs of this country is that few among us are destined to fail.
We who work at the community colleges have seen students who should have failed by every available measure, and yet who have succeeded—whether the measure of success is graduation, a transfer to a four-year institution, a promotion made possible by success in a specific course or attainment of an academic credential, or simply the satisfaction that comes with learning something new. We have seen, by the hundreds, students have succeeded in ways that crude budget analysis can’t capture. I refer specifically to the students who needed six or seven years to get their associate’s degrees because they had to complete multiple levels of developmental English and math in order to get to college-level work, because they also had to work full-time, and because they therefore had neither the time nor the money to take more than six credits in a semester.
Like every unit in public education, the community colleges face tough choices. “Ability to benefit” is no longer an abstract and obscure phrase that we can kick around in our idle time. Enrollment at my college must remain substantially flat until we can afford to hire more full-time faculty, which seems unlikely at least into the mid-range future. So we need to craft plans that allow us to achieve our mission within available resources. As we make the decisions, however, we must interpret our mission as generously and broadly as possible.
We do have a lot of thinking to do. As we deliberate, however, we need to focus on maintaining a success rate that, if properly defined, is quite admirable.
Let’s leave the talk of destiny and failure to the politicians.
If we handle ourselves well enough, we might even get them to stop talking about failure altogether. Then we can all turn our attention to keeping hope alive, which is an effort that enriches everyone who undertakes it.
