Peace Corps Blurb (my application is turned in no plagiarism)

I was walking through the streets of South Korea in the summer of 2012 when I was approached by a young Korean woman who asked me a simple question. That question was, “What is peace to you?” She had a piece of paper on a clip board with one word and that word was “peace.” As I looked at the paper, I thought to myself, what is peace to me? And the only thought that came to my recollection was that peace loves one another. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated in one of his many speeches that, “We are caught in an escapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” I truly believe and live by this quote. We are caught in this human experience that connects us to a deeper sense of self and what it means to be human. To truly have peace we must love each other. In order to have this love for one another, we must understand each other. It is through the shared experience of culture, language, and community that one can understand and love another. Throughout my life I have had different and varied experiences that have given me a greater appreciation of other cultures. This understanding has formed my life goals to become an advocate of breaking cultural barriers through education. As a Peace Corps volunteer, my goals in life will be reached as I aspire to become a University President. Having this experience will allow me to see the world with a different perspective. I desire to join the Peace Corps to serve the global community beyond my own culture so that I can connect to this “garment of mutual destiny” and positively affect another community through education. Also, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I have a broad understanding that there will be several challenges that I must face. I believe that I can meet the Peace Corps 10 Core Expectations. The most challenging aspect of the Peace Corps 10 Core Expectations is the first one – preparing my personal and professional life to make a commitment to serve abroad. In May 2013, I will be graduating with my Master's of Arts in Higher Education Administration. First, I have made a commitment and a dedication to the Peace Corps to ensure that I can give it my all by not committing to any other job or degree program in the next year. Secondly, I have let my family and friends know that I will be joining the Peace Corps. Finally, I am at peace with the understanding that I have to let everything go in order to pursue my dream. In order to bring peace and friendship to the world Mahatmas Ghandi stated, “Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.” My life in the United States cannot affect the work that I wish to accomplish in the near future.

Young Thurgood... Helping an old law professor

I received an email from a good friend and mentor, law professor Larry S. Gibson. He and I worked on several committees together at Morgan State University as we tackled issues on Morgan's right to be acknowledge for beginning sit-ins at lunch counters long before the students in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is an accomplished man and is one of my academic idols as he approaches history and law with fervor and scholarship. This December he will be publishing a book entitled - Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice. This volume is quite arguably the most extensive historical account of the life of Thurgood Marshall before his work in 1936 with the NAACP. It should be an interesting read and I am excited to pre-order it myself. Once I have a copy I will do a review with my thoughts on the book. Below you can read the email I received this morning.

"My new book, Young Thurgood:The Making of a Supreme Court Justice, will be released by Prometheus Books this fall. Many historians regard Thurgood Marshall as the most important American lawyer of the 20th century. The book is the first depth examination of Marshall's formative years and shows how his personality, priorities, and work habits were shaped by people and events in Maryland before he joined the NAACP staff in 1936.

The book contains much information about Baltimore and Maryland in the 1920s and 1930s. The website about the book is http://www.youngthurgood.com

Please do an old law professor a favor. Pre-order the book now at Amazon.com :
http://www.amazon.com/Young-Thurgood-Making-Supreme-Justice/dp/1616145714 .
The pre-order price is $21.

Pre-orders are very important, because they affect how much effort the publisher will spend promoting the book nationally and how much media attention the book will receive. Your pre-order could help this book become a bestseller.

Although Young Thurgood will later be released as an e-book, you will want the hardback. That way I can sign it for you. Furthermore, the 188 photographs, maps, and images throughout the 400 pages will make it an attractive tabletop book and an excellent holiday gift."

College Readiness - A Review

College readiness is being examined in Texas. They are reviewing students ability to perform on the college level from their level of preparedness in high school. Please see the previous post to gain fuller understanding of the decisions being made by policymakers, educators, and the business community. From the article I want to examine a few key points that I noted when I read it myself.

"Because colleges are not good at gauging what remedial courses students need, some experts say, students fall through the cracks or give up because they are not progressing toward a degree. They cite the numbers who are “underplaced” in remediation because they did not take the placement exam seriously when they got to campus, or they have spent time out of school — and quit out of frustration or boredom.

Others point out that deficiencies in students’ secondary education are often the reason they are in remedial courses."

To fully understand the study that was conducted in Texas I would need to acquire the study itself. Then I can fully analyze the study instead of using a secondary source. However, I have gathered a few questions of my own in regards to the research that was conducted.

I will go through a brief synopsis of the questions I have without going too in depth due to the fact that this is not a paper but a blog. My first question is were all institutions of higher education examined if there were deficiencies towards secondary education in Texas. If so, how were the Historically Black Universities and Colleges (HBCUs) examined? Were they included in the examination of the higher education system in Texas or outside of the system? Within the state of Texas there are nine HBCUs some of which are Paul Quinn College, Prairie View A&M University, and Wiley College to name a few. A constant debate within higher education is in regards to the relevancy of HBCUs? Well, how relevant are the institutions of higher education in Texas if most students are placed in remedial courses and are under placed?

As you can tell, my main focus to this study would be towards the HBCUs within the state and how this study of college readiness impacts state funding towards these institutions. I will add more to this blog as I continue to study the report.

ehs - 8/06/12

College Readiness... Article to be discussed...

Policymakers, educators grapple with getting students ready for college

The short answer to whether most Texas students leave public schools prepared for college? No.

Fewer than one in two students met the state’s “college readiness” standards in math and verbal skills on ACT, SAT and TAKS scores in 2010. Though average SAT scores in both verbal and math dropped between 2007 and 2010 — a trend that state education officials have attributed to an increase in students taking the test — more students in the same period of time have met the state’s standards for college ready graduates, largely because of improvements on their state standardized tests and the ACT.

But that increase is only a slim silver lining in what appears to be a large storm cloud.

“It’s still pathetic,” Dominic Chavez, a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board spokesman, said of the ACT scores. “It’s still a very low number, and nobody is satisfied with it.”

Getting to a number that is satisfying is a task that policymakers, educators and the business community have grappled with for years. And although the current data shows that something is not going right, pinpointing why is difficult. Part of the trouble is that while it is easy to define what skills students need to be successful in college, so far the measures used to assess how they lack those skills have returned an incomplete picture.

Debates over lagging performance at community colleges and four-year institutions can devolve into finger-pointing between the higher education and K-12 camps, each blaming the other for students’ poor performance at the post-secondary level.

Because colleges are not good at gauging what remedial courses students need, some experts say, students fall through the cracks or give up because they are not progressing toward a degree. They cite the numbers who are “underplaced” in remediation because they did not take the placement exam seriously when they got to campus, or they have spent time out of school — and quit out of frustration or boredom.

Others point out that deficiencies in students’ secondary education are often the reason they are in remedial courses.

In an effort to provide better data for the discussion, the state in June approved a contract with the College Board to develop a statewide placement assessment, which all institutions would be required to administer to incoming students who do not meet the benchmark scores on state standardized exams or college admissions tests. The new assessment is intended to provide a uniform view — different colleges offer exams from different vendors — and detailed diagnostics to give a better idea of what post-secondary students are missing. That in turn would allow colleges, if needed, to offer a three-week review of trigonometry instead of a yearlong review of introductory math. And for high schools, the diagnostics could offer a closer analysis of where they are coming up short.

“I don’t think we have a good identified gauge over the past because we’ve been using a test that has no diagnostics,” Richard Rhodes, the president of Austin Community College, said of measuring college readiness. “We also haven’t across the board done a good job in preparation to take the test.”

A growing body of research questions whether the measures that students must pass to avoid taking the placement test — the state standardized and college admissions exams — can accurately predict how well a student is prepared for college. Studies support that high school grades, not placement or admissions exams, give a better picture of whether students are ready for college, said Pamela Burdman, an education policy analyst who recently wrote a report on the role of placement exams in assessing college readiness for Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based nonprofit. And the best measures, she said, use some combination of high school grade point averages and standardized test scores.

The move toward the single statewide placement assessments puts Texas at the forefront of states that are tackling how best to evaluate students as they enter college, Burdman said. Although it should be considered an advance, she said, the state was still several years away from determining if the method does a better job in predicting students’ ability to succeed.

If the state can do a better job of assessing what students need once they get to college, it also has implications for the help they receive in high school. Some community colleges across the country, including El Paso Community College, have provided students the option to take a college placement exam their junior year of high school. Once they receive their score, they can use that to guide their coursework in their remaining year. Burdman said it could serve as an early intervention to increase students’ chances at success before they get to the point where they need remedial work.

A few school districts across the state have collaborated with local community colleges in another way to increase their graduates’ likelihood of success in higher education. At early-college high schools, students can take a higher number of dual-credit courses earlier than their peers at traditional high schools, allowing them at times to leave school with an associate’s degree.

Such programs can also give the school officials who institute them a window into the challenges of increasing the number of students prepared for college.

West of Abilene, the Roscoe school district has invested money earned from area wind energy development into becoming a state-of-the-art early-college school, with a goal that 90 percent of its students graduate with an associate’s degree by 2015 — at a time when Superintendent Kim Alexander projects that about the same percentage will be from low-income and English-language-learning backgrounds.

Roscoe’s example helps illustrate the difficulties of measuring students’ “college readiness.” In 2010 the district still lagged behind the state average with just more than one in three students graduating ready for college in both English and math. But 55 percent of its students were already taking college courses through the dual credit program, compared with the state average of about 25 percent.

Alexander said that although he believed they were on their way to meeting the 2015 objective, the disconnect between the skills students need for college coursework and those that the standardized tests measure made it more difficult.

“Everybody is starting to see the issue, and everybody is trying to raise their standards, whether it is higher ed or public ed,” said Alexander, whose district has just under 400 students. “It’s just not in sync at this point in time.”

That may improve with the continuing transition to the STAAR exams, the state’s new standardized assessments, which are supposed to be better aligned to coursework. But Alexander said some of the issues in the current system would probably remain. For instance, he said that if students are taking a dual credit course, they must take both a standardized exam and a college final — something that he said was a deterrent for both schools and students who want to take that step.

“You’ve got that ever-present pressure on the high-stakes testing that really hogties your creativity to do some things,” he said. “There’s just some really tough issues that if you are wanting to be innovative and you are wanting produce a student who is really college and workforce ready, these students are almost being penalized for choosing that path.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/NUaeOX.

Student Motivation Part 1

Student Motivation in a Higher Education System
​Recently, there has been more research that looks at learning, performance, and motivation among students of all levels. Researchers have looked at three components that interact with student’s learning and motivation: self-regulation, perceived competence, and self-efficacy. According to Rimm-Kaufman et, al. (2009) self-regulation is the ability for students to manage their emotions, focus their attention, and inhibit some behaviors while activating others. A student who is able to self-regulate their behavior will have to focus their attention on school work, lessen the chance of becoming off task, and control their ability to learn on their own. Perceived competence refers to one’s ability to feel knowledgeable and proficient in areas that there are being asked to perform in (Garcia & Pintrich, 1995). For example, a student who has a test on a particular day needs to believe that they are able to perform well on this test. This belief (perception) is needed to make it possible for a student to perform without anxiety. In addition to a perceived competence in students, self-efficacy is also needed for students. Self-efficacy involves a student being able to effectively accomplish a task to their fullest potential (Bembenutty, 2007).
​The literature examines all three of these components in their relation to student’s self-regulation of learning and motivation. Strategies to obtain all components of self-regulation of learning are coordinated by motivational, behavioral, and cognitive regulations. These regulations examine specific characteristics of the student. Cognitive regulations ask how students voluntarily control their cognition in learning; behavioral regulations look at how one controls and regulates their learning tendencies; motivational regulations inquire about how a student regulate their own learning motivation (Yang, 2005). The literature of each regulation has several sub-topics. In motivational regulations topics are goal-orientation, achievement value, and self-efficacy. Behavioral topics consist of control of action, support and help from others (especially the teacher), and environmental enhancers for self-regulation. In addition, cognitive topics are cognitive strategies and academics skills.
​This literature review will examine the implications of motivational, cognitive, and behavioral regulations among students. This paper will look at the three factors that interact with student’s ability to learn and their subtopics. Learning and motivation is dependent on self-regulation, perceived competence, and self-efficacy. What are the implications of motivational, cognitive, and behavioral regulations on learning and motivation?

The University President

​In order to understand the university president, one must understand the fundamental ambiguities that consist of being the university president. There are four faces of the president. The first is the ambiguity of purpose. The second is the ambiguity of power. The third is the ambiguity of experience. The fourth is the ambiguity of success. What is the president’s purpose in the institution? How does the president use the power of the office? What is learned from being the president? As well as, what experiences are needed to be president? When is a president successful? And what determines their success? These things need to be understood to understand the role of the president.
​At the same time, the university president must understand the symbols they use throughout their time in office. The university president use of symbols creates the culture of the university by several symbols. The role of the president is symbolic and open to interpretation. Board members, faculty, staff, and students attach certain significance to the role of the president and they all have different interpretations of the president. The president must then understand the symbolic acts of the office to communicate effectively the vision of the institution. Symbols, then, define leadership and is defined by the organization and used by the president in a way that best communicates the policies and procedures of the institution.
​The president can use metaphorical symbols which are figures of speech of the organization, the vision, and the activities of the campus. By focusing on specific metaphors the president makes it easier to understand the direction of the university by saying that “everyone needs to pull their own weight.” The physical symbols are those objects that are used to define how the vision is made physical by buildings, structures, and facilities on campus. The president can also use communication symbols that give verbal and written communication that is consistent with the vision that helps individuals understand the vision. The president can use him or herself to personify certain traits that they would like to implement on the campus. Also, the president can change the structural educational process that would allow the campus community to see the rigid focus or flexible perspective to learning. If the president understands the symbols of the president, they can then overcome the ambiguities of the office.

Niggers No More

Niggers No More: A Critical Race Counternarrative on Black Male Student Achievement at Predominantly White Colleges and Universities

Shaun Harper, a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, focuses on black male student achievement primarily at predominantly white institutions. In this article Niggers no more: A critical race counternarrative on Black male student achievement at predominantly white colleges and universities, Harper used a popularized methodological approach used by critical race theorists. Critical race theorists oppose dominant discourses in main stream society about the social and educational status of black men (Harper, 2009). Harper described that some of the topics that are often covered in the media about black men are high rates in drug activity, gang violence, the product of dysfunctional families or the result of them, and the common suspect for rapes of white women (2009). The American society has done an injustice to black males and black male students over the last century.

Within this article, Harper used the word “nigger” or “niggering” to elicit the emotions that have been historically associated with this word. Also, he used this word in the article to show how school systems in America have “niggered” the black male student population. The word nigger has multiple meanings but in America it suggests second or third rate citizenship for African Americans (Harper, 2009). The result of 40 years of the word being used has allowed for K-12 teachers and higher education professors to devalue the worth of the black male student population. Black male students in higher education may have been ‘niggered’ by being told that they are unlikely to accomplish much in life even though they are in college (Harper, 2009). It is suggested that higher education institutions have claimed policies and programs that show they care about the black males but the institutional and structural barriers to black male achievement demonstrate otherwise. Harper suggests that what higher education institutions have done constitutes a form of niggering (2009).

Harper employs a method of research in this article that looks at black male students who are achieving in academics and student leadership. He uses the voice of the black male students to counter the media misperception that all black men are the same and without the ability to achieve (Harper, 2009). The article examines three main questions: 1) Is there an overlooked population of black males who are engaged and academically performing, 2) if so, what are their realities in navigating the higher education system, and 3) were they able to resist the niggering forms on their campus (Harper, 2009). The critical race theory used in this approach to education research is storytelling or telling stories of people who are overlooked in research to counter the master narrative about them. Within the stories, Harper uses composite characters to represent the sample used who reject the assumptions held of them in regards to academic achievement and student leadership (2009). The participants of the study gave their input through a panel discussion at a conference they attended in 2008. The overall themes that were generated were: 1) there is an overlooked population who are student leaders that are academically thriving, 2) these students naviagate higher education by experience racism and success causing them to develop strategies to counter the hostile environments, and 3) they resist being niggered on campuses by being the positive role model on and off campus (Harper, 2009).

The implications of this study are vast and can be applied to any predominantly white college. However, it would be interesting to apply to a historically black college or university. If this study were to be replicated on a H.B.C.U. would it have the same effect? Can H.B.C.U’s claim that they have enough programs and policies for black males? Are their institutional and structural barriers to achievement for black males? Is the black consciousness really awoken in black males at predominantly black colleges? Here are just a few questions that could be posed if the study were to be replicated at an HBCU. 

Reference:  Harper, S. R. (2009). Niggers no more: A critical race counternarrative on Black male student achievement at predominantly white colleges and universities. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22(6), 697-712.