21st Century Scholar

Recent days have been laden with all kinds of news items that challenge our notion of what college is. Take the news from the California legislature’s introduction of a bill that would require state-sponsored colleges and universities to accept credits from MOOCs and other alternative low-priced avenues of education. Burke Smith, the founder of Straighterline.com [...]

I wrote the Foreword to Damon William’s Examining Strategic Diversity Leadership: Activating Change and Transformation in Higher Education (Stylus, 2013). Here’s what I said: In his epic The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois commented that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Damon Williams [...]

How the higher ed world changes in such a short time. K–12 education has been in “crisis” much of my adult life, but usually higher education has been spared the Hollywood-like metaphors. “A nation at risk” paralleled other 20th century reports that forecast calamity because particular goals had not been reached in K–12 education. The [...]

As faculty members and co-directors of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California, we lead action research using CUE’s Equity Scorecard. The mission of our center is to create the “tools” needed for colleges and universities to bring about racial/ethnic equity in students’ collegiate experiences and outcomes. In the action [...]

AERA’s 2013 theme is centered on the issue of “poverty.” It is spurred by President Bill Tierney’s provocation that despite education’s ability to lift students out of poverty, schooling is often mired in economic relations surrounded by the debilitating effects of poverty. There are at least two senses of “poverty” invoked here, to which I [...]

Great relief swept over me when I saw the theme for this year’s AERA—finally, we are led by a team of scholars who recognize the intimate connections between our educational institutions and broader societal structures, and encourage us to talk about those connections without fear that we are downplaying the urgency that schooling requires. I [...]

I confess some ambivalence about a definition of poverty which encompasses the moral, intellectual, and material domains. Not because each of these domains is unimportant; rather, my concern is that defining poverty this broadly runs the risk of obscuring the ways in which they are intertwined. Impoverished material circumstances may heighten the risk of an impoverished moral or [...]

Addressing questions of justice and inequality in educational research requires a deep understanding of the social, economic, and historical forces that connect us to one another and of the difficulties of intervening in complex and dynamic systems. For example, if people saw children drowning in the rapids of a river, their first impulse would probably [...]

Bill’s assignment was like coming face to face with a task that I had been putting off. Constantly having to put up with political and social rhetoric that wants to take the US back to the days of rugged individualism and “I got mine, you get yours” that has been a central component of this [...]

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a student I’m mentoring from my hometown of Detroit. This young man was an average high school student and bombed in his first attempt at community college. After dropping out he returned home to work at a nearby Burger King. He indirectly complained to me about the nature [...]