news flash: poor parents value education, too.

I'm taking a summer class about diversity in higher education, and I really like it. The professor is great, the material is interesting, and it's going to help me write my all-important candidacy paper. Trifecta of win... until my classmates speak.

Well, not all of them. There is actually a really diverse mix of people and I'm sure/I hope that as the session goes on (only 4 more weeks!) the conversations will get better. But right now, the only people who feel comfortable speaking a lot are me (duh) and the ones who only know privilege and are therefore ignorant about the populations who benefit from efforts to improve access and retention policies... Which is kind of the point of the class. Instead of coming in with an openness to learn, they say stuff that makes me want to punch them...

So here is what happened in the last session.

We were discussing the flawed pipeline from high school to college that shows how about 20 out of 100 ninth graders will end up graduating with a two or four year degree. (That's national data, folks. Disaggregated by race and gender, it's even more depressing.) Professor posed the question 'Why do you think this is?' and my classmate replied: 'Middle class, well-educated people don't have kids, but poor people do. So it's not a surprise that, since more poor kids are in school, that they don't want to go to college, or won't be successful when they get there. Poor parents don't push college because it's not as important.' (I'm paraphrasing, but sadly, not much.)

Having worked with low-income families in the past, I know that this is patently false. The majority of my students were free lunchers whose parents were either unemployed or minimally employed, and I never met one who didn't value education... especially higher education. I never had a problem 'selling' more education to these families, and often they sought me out for advice. The hardest part was knowing that they were so far behind in the process that their dreams, while attainable, would take a lot more work. The admissions timetable can't start in junior year for kids who don't have a college-going tradition in their families. It is not that these parents don't care, they just don't know how to navigate the system. (I didn't touch the whole 'poor people have more kids than educated ones' comment, because that's just not correct.)

I said this in class, and there was an awkward silence. Nobody disagreed, but the topic died. This definitely wasn't the first time I'd heard this sort of comment, but it still bothered me just as much. I don't know how people (especially education people) can believe such nonsense, and it makes me sad for the people that my classmate is supposed to serve. There are plenty of gaps in American education - achievement, opportunity, gender, disciplinary - but desire to have their children succeed in life is not one of them. Poor parents value education. They care just as much and want their kids to be just as successful as middle and upper class parents wish their children to be. It's such a shame that some educators don't share this mindset, or at the very least, acknowledge it.

How can the system be fixed if the folks responsible for bringing about change think so negatively about the people they are supposed to help?