budding scholar

A digression into the personal stress of Ph.D. study. I should expect that this would happen, but it doesn’t stop being difficult to manage. The end of the year. The fact that I’ve felt behind on too many things for months. Having it all come to a head in the next three weeks. I don’t know how much I’m doing it to myself by being such a perfectionist, and how much is just the nature of what I’m up against. But it sure feels insurmountable right now…staring ahead to the next few weeks. Of course, it will all get done. It always does. But the stress is pretty high right now.

Tonight Sarah and I did our first orals rehearsal. First–we went to dinner at Ti Couz and had yummy crepes and fresh lemonade. It was delicious! I hadn’t been there in a long time.

Then we came home to my house and did one practice question each. It was very nerve-racking for both of us, and made us both realize that far beyond the summarizing and reviewing of this year’s reading that we’ve been doing–we need to practice practice practice the public speaking piece. Figure out how to TALK about what we know, what we’ve learned this year, and how it all connects to the history and practice of education.

A few other strategies came to mind as we practiced: 1) it’s important to define the key terms in the question, and talk about how the people we’ve read have talked about and defined them–thus, if the question asks about reforms that are intended to address equity, as mine did, it’s important to start my answer with a discussion of what reform is, how it happens generally, and what we mean when we talk about equity in schooling–then get into details of the specific reform (bilingual education, in my case); 2) starting with a historical context can be a helpful way of framing what we’re going to talk about–where did the reform come from, what did we have before, what reoccuring problems of education is it related to; and 3) give a context for the readings we bring in–our examiners may not have read them recently, or ever, so talk about the kind of perspective the reading provides.

Whew! Oral exams are difficult–and these are just a practice-run really for the big orals that come in Year 3 or 4. In search of Ph.D. humor after Sarah left, I then went to the most reliable source I know, and cracked up at this comic:

 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.

In about 5 weeks on May 10th we have our first-year oral exam! I’ve been emailing with a student from last year to get sample questions to supplement those sent to us by our professor, and here are a few:

1. What are the prospects of one of the following reforms for improving, reconceptualizing, and/or reforming how school is practiced and its outcomes in the United States?
a. Charter schools
b. Small schools
c. Accountability policy

2. There is a tension in national accountability legislation like NCLB between centralizing control of education and yet leaving elements of implementation and articulation of standards and appropriate tests to the state and local level decision makers. How do you explain this tension and how it came to be?

3. How do you explain the policy to practice divide (aka the “Great Divide”)? Why don’t policies turn out according to plan? Choose a reform with which you are familiar and discuss.

4. Choose a particular era of school reform from American educational history and discuss what kind of lasting legacy this reform has had on how education is practiced today?

5. Given multiple purposes of education, what are mechanisms for handling/accommodating/reconciling conflicts over these purposes? Which of these methods do you believe holds the most promise and why?

6. What types of policies – federal, state, and local – attempt to influence approaches to teaching within the classroom? Under what conditions would you expect each of them to have any effect on what teachers do?

Later, a post sketching out an answer to one of these questions! It is sure to reveal how much studying I still need to do to link themes from my different reading this year.

This year the American Educational Research Association has it’s annual meeting in Chicago in 2 weeks. I went for the first time last year when it was in San Francisco, and found it very valuable to meet and hear people speak who I’d only read in classes or at work.

Next year I hope to go to New York for the conference, and perhaps even present research. It’s earlier than usual, March 24-28. The following year, in 2008, it will be in San Diego, later than usual, from April 13-17th. By then I’ll be in the third year of my program, and can perhaps present part of the early research for my dissertation.

New York

San Diego

I suspect I’ll read it in my advisor’s class on organizational theory in the fall, but regardless, I’m reminded that I need to (re) read the Meyer and Rowan (1977) article on new institutionalism. This article is the most often cited from this theory about how organizations work. I read it in my class with Chiqui Ramirez at Stanford, but need to rescue it from my files and reread it!

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?

If you haven’t already visited www.phdcomics.com, it might be a good time. A great way of getting a laugh at ourselves over the kinds of things we routinely agonize over during our Ph.D. study!

Remember to take yourself lightly, no matter how serious it all feels most of the time!

Today I drove home with a friend from the program who also lives in San Francisco, and as is wont to happen, we talked about school. But rather than discussing the minutia of day-to-day life in classes and the GSE as we often do, we talked about our program, what we want to get out of it, how we want to shape our studies and coursework to be meaningful in the real world.

Clear blue sky, late-evening sun hanging low over the horizon as we drove across the Bay Bridge back into the city, we talked about what matters to us in this program. Where we’d like to go with it. What we want to have had by the time we finish. She thinks about working for a district. I think about being employable in Spain. We both want our Ph.D.s to be more than theoretical, to be applied to the real world, and relevant to the real-world problems surfacing in education each day. We want our Ph.D.s to be applied, and readily accessible in some ways to people beyond academics.

“I don’t want to be one of those people who comes out of the Ph.D. with a dissertation that doesn’t apply to anything in real life”, she said. “There are skills and expertise that I want to develop, to have mastered, that can be applied”. I soundly agreed. Statistics and research design. Sociological theory. The realities of policy-making and policy implementation. Teachers and real-world schools. These are pieces of the Ph.D. that are important to keep alive.

This is why we are in a school of education policy program–because we care about looking at the real world of education, how things are working or not working, and what action can be taken to improve what we do there. It can be so easy in the academic environment to get mired in interesting ideas and theories that have little practical application in the real world of schools and education policy. Who we choose as our advisers, the classes we decide to take, and the paper topics we choose to write will all steer us in one way or another toward a more theoretical or applied endzone. I’d like to keep aiming for the applied.

I came straight to the computer when I got home to post about the conversation, to keep its energy and bits of inspiration alive a few moments longer. I need to focus on the goal, what I want to get out of this program, what I want to do in the real world with what I’m learning in school.

…and while I did get some schoolwork done, not nearly enough. As if this were news! I just arrived home to the sound of the cricket that’s taken up residence in our apartment and am sitting down to dig into work. What comes first? Reading “The Failed Century of the Child” by Judith Sealander for History of Education? Or working on my statistics project, which is due Thursday but that I’ll turn in Tuesday since I’m headed to Spain Thursday. Or one of the other 15 things on the endless list….

The truth is, graduate school seems to be a constant game of prioritizing things like this. Reading, reading, and more reading. Writing, and more writing. And way beyond that which has been assigned. What should take precedence? How do you prioritize your work? How do you cull what’s important and let the rest go until tomorrow?