budding scholar

One thing checked off the list in my countdown to not living in a bubble for a few months! Turned in my sociology paper this afternoon. Calculated that I spent about 50 hours on it in the last week. I wasn’t thrilled with the last section of the paper, but felt good about the majority. The effort to bring in segmented assimilation literature at the end of a paper that summarizes the research on Latinos in higher education didn’t quite work, but it is something I continue thinking about, so am happy to have attempted it. Grappling with questions is the point in grad school, right?

Am getting more and more excited about planning the trip to China. Turns out one of my closest friends is going to visit her brother there, so we’ll get to travel together! Wild that it’s worked out, and really gives me something to look forward to. Motivation to get through the next set of work, starting with working on my statistics lab projects tonight. Luckily I had a great break with Juanjo this evening after turning in my paper, including a walk and a delicious dinner outside on a rare warm San Francisco evening. Kiwi margaritas tasted especially good! Another glimpse of normal life beyond the crunch…

Writing my sociology paper synthesizing the research on Latinos in higher education is pushing my thinking about the quality of research. I’ve learned that it can be quite easy to do a so-so study and package it with reputable research and get it published in any of the multitude of journals out there. As I write my class paper, I keep wanting to systematically review the methods of the studies I’m reading, since it doesn’t feel right to just toss in citations from studies of such varying quality. Yet the purpose of the paper is not to assess the quality of the research, but rather to find out what people are saying about the topic.

I realize how easy it is to make whichever argument you want, and why it’s hard to definitively “prove” anything. It takes high levels of knowledge about statistics and research methods to have even an inckling of whether a study is well-done and trust-worthy, and few lay people have this. I’m barely getting it myself and I’m finishing my first year of a doctoral program!

Today I spent the entire day working on my paper. Yesterday as well. Thank god for coffee and coffee shops, as they fueled the writing in the flagging hot Sunday afternoon hours. It was over 85 degrees in San Francisco today! Juanjo and I just took a walk up around Dolores Park, and it was still warm out. Couples were everywhere, the park still full of people enjoying the warm weather. Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter.

Back to the paper for now. Looking forward to wearing a skirt and sandles tomorrow, and enjoying the warm summer weather, despite knowing I’m going to be exhausted!

 The time of the semester has come when final papers loom large, and I know that to manage I need to be writing more. An important part of academics is writing papers, and academics are famously bad writers.  I’d like to take a class or two to hone my writing skills (have wanted to for years). But I know how I write, I know when I’ve done my best writing, and I know that I don’t need a class to do that (though it can only help). The key is to write regularly. And for some reason, my classes have required little writing this semester, and the page looms bigger and bigger in front of me as I think about tackling my two big final papers.

Tonight writing two small papers for tomorrow, I realized again the truth of my writing process. Put some words to the page from the beginning. Allow the thinking that happens only as I write to begin flowing. Don’t seek perfection in the first paragraph. Such basic writing advice. But crucial to remember as I try and get over these blocks and put ideas to the page little by little in preparation for writing these big papers.

I spent most of my flight to Spain and the past day here catching up on the reading for my Sociology class “Power and Inequality in Higher Education”. The readings focused on educational opportunity by income quartile, and argued that since the 1970s the opportunity for students in the lowest quartile of family income to continue on and complete a bachelor’s degree has fallen. Thomas Mortenson looked at Census data as well as data from the High School and Beyond dataset and concluded that the distribution of who goes on to college and finishes their bachelor’s degree by age 24 has shifted from the lowest to the highest income quartile. What does this mean? That the rich are now taking spots that the poor were taking in higher education in the 1970s.

Why has this happened? Student aid from the federal government has fallen since the 1970s, with caps on how much lower-income students could get each year during the early 1980s. At the state level, the amount of money we give to the public universities has fallen, and the cost has been passed on to students. This has the effect of squeezing out the lower income students, whose families cannot as easily pay the fees.

Why does this matter? In part because all of our taxes are paying for public universities, so it is only just that all of us (all income levels, all races and genders) should be represented in our public universities. If the population of California is 32% Hispanic, which it is according to the Census, then the universities that are supported by tax dollars (the UC and CSU systems) should have a student body that is about 32% Hispanic. If 10% of Californians live below the poverty level, then about 10% of California students in the public university system should come from below the poverty level. We’re all paying taxes after all!

I think a lot about this in my own family. While we have the privilege of being white, and owning a house, we’re also a lower income family. Certainly several of my siblings qualify in this regard. But they’re slodging through the Junior College system, intent on getting a nursing degree. How did I myself “make it” to where I am today, given my family background? I ask myself this when I read about college opportunity, and see the slim chances I had. I was lucky in so many ways, but also had to break through a lot of barriers since I was from a family where no one had a college education. How was I able to do this? How can I make a difference in the work I do to help equalize college opportunity so that who makes it to and through college better approximates the face of the larger population?

First, we drank grapefruit mimosas, called “lilosas”, standing around the bar at my house while I finished making the salad. It was hot yesterday, unseasonably hot, and everyone was parched and worn out from the week when they arrived. Six women in grad school, aged 26 to 31, coming together on a Friday evening to study for orals exams. There was a moment of heady, champagne-induced giddiness when, laughing, we considered not studying at all, just spending the evening like this. But then we settled in to take on the task, feeling the weight of responsibility hang heavier than the need to have fun together.

We talked through topics we’ve studied this year, discussing how the theories and articles we read fit together, what they tell us about the larger themes and historical tapestry of American education. What distinguishes the Common School Movement of the 1800s from the Progressive movement that came after it in the late 1800s and early 1900s? How do the theories we’ve learned this year vary, and how are they similar? Going forward, what do we need to know about class conflict theory, Durkheim, and rational utilitarian theory? What vision of the world does each of these theories represent, how do they explain society and education’s place in society?

My assignment is to look at the history of the Common School Movement and compare and contrast it with the Progressives. Much of the foundation of what our education system looks like today was laid back during these two major periods. Stay tuned, as I’ll work through the ideas here!

Every Sunday is the same: an avalanche of reading for the next day. My three big reading classes are all on Mondays: History of Education from 9-12, Advance Policy Analalysis focusing on Policy and Pluralism from 12-3, and a Sociology class on Power and Inequality in Higher Education from 4-6. It’s now 11:28, and I’ve got a good chunk of it done, but as is often the case, not as much as I ‘d like to. Maybe sometime next year when I’m almost done with coursework I’ll reach a point where I can watch television or bury my head in a novel on Sunday nights.

The truth is, the reading is endless in graduate school. If it’s not the reading for class this week, it’s reading for upcoming papers or reading to study up on areas of the field. Or going back to readings from earlier classes. The stacks of books on my school bookshelves are growing. I’ve started buying books on Amazon that come up again and again in my work, and seem like works I should have, and as a result the books I’d like to read and haven’t yet keep staring at me daily. Like Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods”, which is a rich ethnographic portrait of class and its impact on how families interact with the institution of schools. Or Guadalupe Valdes’ “Con Respeto”, which is another ethnography of 10 Mexican families living near the U.S.-Mexican borders, and their experiences with schools. Or David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s “Tinkering Toward Utopia”, which is all about the past century of school reform and the lack of progress we’ve made.

Can’t get to these tonight. Instead, back to Historical Perspectives reading for tomorrow morning. Learning about how the modern debates we have about curriculum go back to the late 1890s. The question for my short history paper for tomorrow is “What legacy, if any, did the nineteenth century bequeath to contemporary American schools?”. Much of the structure of our modern schools in fact seems to go back to the 1800s. Dividing into grades with segmented curriculum at each level. Linking college to high school. Fighting over work-preparation goals and knowledge for knowledge’s sake goals for the curriculum.

Reading this history brings up an important question for me. To what extent was the schooling experience of kids around the country (immigrant, rural vs. urban, non-English speakers…) uniform? Was there a lot of variation in the kind of schooling experience kids had? Did school look different? At what point in our history did school start looking so much the same?