On a dark, chilly evening in November 1839, a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, convened a party at her friend’s house. That might seem an unremarkable event, but this was not a high-society tea party or wine-tippling book club. It was a bold social experiment. The hostess was the 29-year-old journalist Margaret Fuller, and the guest list was composed of the most finely tuned minds she could collect—minds that nevertheless, by virtue of being women, were barred from attending university. Safely concealed from the prying outside world by the guise of innocent domesticity, they were taking their education into their own hands. They were about to have a “Conversation,” with Fuller leading the way in the informal role of instructor.

Maybe more of us should be having such conversations. With fall approaching, thousands of high-school seniors are in the throes of the fraught “college search,” an anxiety-ridden affair that, for many, culminates in years of astronomical debt. Between the rising cost of higher education, the “devaluation” of degrees, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s shakeup of education—not to mention the culture wars over critical race theory and free speech—there is rising interest in finding other ways to prepare oneself for a rewarding professional and intellectual life. The resourcefulness of Margaret Fuller and her acquaintances—and the accomplishments that followed their budget-friendly, self-engineered education—show us that the foundations of a fulfilling life and career can be built on curiosity and willpower rather than loans.

The premise of a Fuller “Conversation” was simple: anything that wasn’t stale tea party table talk was permitted. There would be no petty gossip, no complaints about children or servants, no exchanging of recipes or sewing tips. And unlike the salons of the time, there would be no men to impress. Instead, the curriculum was an in-depth discussion on fine art, literature, science, politics, or mythology—with corresponding homework in between these two-hour weekly meetings. At the sixth conversation, the women discussed wisdom and the mechanics of art; for the seventh, they wrote, shared, and critiqued their own essays on beauty.

By 1839, Fuller had already made a name for herself as a writer, with publications in distinguished journals such as the North American Review and the Western Messenger. She was trained in the classics, talented as a critic, translated German Romantic literature into English, and was so outstandingly bright that regardless of her gender, she was hailed as something of an authority on anything highbrow. Yet she understood that it wasn’t mere writing talent that had afforded her the rare privilege of a professional life. Fuller had benefited from an extensive education and access to the reading materials and intellectual social circles she needed to cultivate her mind for a productive life, and she wanted to share the additional elements of good connections and directed study with others. She’d worked as a teacher already, having served at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston in 1836 and at Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1837, and the role came as naturally to her as the instinct to combine it with that of an author.

Still, the Conversations had their adversaries: privileged, bookish men who felt threatened by this clever female innovation—which made their prestigious and expensive university educations suddenly not so special anymore. Historian Charles Capper writes that they tried to conceal their obvious sexism behind religious objection—they were “scandalized” by the women’s discussion of Transcendental critiques of Christianity.

The Conversations continued until April 1844. Though only a five-year enterprise, they left a lasting mark, including forming the base material for Fuller’s 1845 feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century. There, she laid out her stern commentaries on the inequalities between the sexes and what needed to be done to remedy them for society’s benefit. The intrepid  educational reformist Peabody, whose home was the site of the discussions, went on to find the first English-language kindergarten in the U.S., in 1860. Sophia Ripley, a fellow feminist and philosopher, went on to become a primary school teacher at a progressive academy, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan, an ambitious Transcendentalist artist, published poetry and children’s books.

The Conversations have also served as a source of inspiration for factions of frustrated women who came after Fuller. Lara D. Burnett of the University of California claims that Fuller’s Conversations serve as the early model for the current phenomenon of podcasts, a technological platform through which creatives in pairs or groups can explore and discuss their niche interests vocally (an especially useful means of expression for modern-day women who are still being barred and/or systematically discouraged from mounting traditional podiums). It’s an equal, open space, where all women are free to participate as either speakers or listeners and can hope to be taken seriously. “Conversations allowed Fuller to be a kind of professor, and allowed her subscribers to participate in a kind of university course, without vetting by those who were determined to marginalize female intellectual work,” Burnett astutely observes. “Similarly, podcasts can, without any gatekeeping, make available to their producers and their listeners the conversational practices of the seminar room.”

Today, women can and do attend university, but the bittersweet reality is that not everyone can afford to partake. In this modern context, underground education is once again prevailing.  One example is the Dark Academia movement, a clothing and lifestyle culture born on TikTok that embraces the aesthetic of a 19th-century academic with some worldly flair. But it doesn’t end at looks. Dark academia appeals most to teenagers who are dissatisfied with their current education, defeated by higher education’s price tag, and have discovered the joys and benefits of self-directed study.

Though a degree is still necessary for certain jobs, it’s not essential for developing an original, critical, and respectful mind. There are always opportunities for full, rewarding, and meaningful conversations. Getting together to debate Sartre or new developments in gender politics can be done in any time period, in any available setting—tuition-free. And whether you do it on Zoom or at a friend’s place, stop and listen for Fuller’s voice, broadcasting through from a long-gone era.

The post Who Needs Student Debt When You Can Get Together for a ‘Conversation’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Feeling decisive one morning during my sophomore year of college, I picked my major: Russian. I had been studying the language and was excited for the opportunity to read literature, learn about another part of the world, and become bilingual. I updated my student profile on the university’s website and marched triumphantly to the cafeteria for lunch.

There, I ran into an acquaintance and told him the news. He looked at me quizzically, then scornfully. “You realize it’s not the Cold War anymore, right?” he said.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago and with divisions over democracy, authoritarianism, and control of resources resurfacing, many have warned of a “new” Cold War. But ironically, as Russia once again dominates headlines as a geopolitical foe of the United States, Russian language enrollments have hit historic lows.

Americans are responding to conflict by closing themselves off from an adversary, rather than trying to learn about it. But by “canceling” Russian, the U.S. isolates itself from a world that extends far beyond Moscow—a vast geography that isn’t Russia, but where Russian remains the lingua franca. Learning to speak Russian isn’t just about negotiating with one large country ruled by a stubborn dictator. It’s about understanding that swath of the world where Russian is a common first or second language, about getting to know the diverse life experiences, desires, and philosophies of people who once lived under a socialist empire, and about better understanding both other cultures and our own in the process.

Foreign language study in the U.S. as we know it grew out of the Cold War. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957, leaders in Washington worried that the U.S. lagged in scientific advancement and that it lacked expertise about the rest of the world. To close the knowledge gap, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958.

Among other initiatives, the law created Title VI “Language Development” programs that provided grants for institutional study centers, and scholarships for individual students, recognizing that mastering a language requires resources beyond what traditional college courses can offer. Though the act’s wording prioritized national defense, in practice it has funneled resources to undergraduate and graduate students conducting all kinds of study, from literature to musicology.

Language study got a further boost after a 1979 presidential commission reported that foreign language education in U.S. schools was falling behind once again. In 1976, only 17% of 7th through 12th graders were studying a foreign language; Russian had suffered the most precipitous decline, dropping by 33% from 1968.

It makes sense—Russian’s alphabet is strange, its grammar intricate, and its vocabulary hard to memorize. The payoff is far slower than that of the Romance languages. In response, in 1983, Congress created another set of appropriations, known as Title VIII, to fund language training and research specifically in what is now the former Soviet Union.

Since 2002, the annual Survey of Enrollments in Russian Language Classes—which was created by Congress and is now administered by the private School of Russian and Area Studies—has tracked Russian enrollments. In general, they have fluctuated along with university enrollments, peaking in 2011 and declining during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in 2022, things took a turn. Enrollment numbers had never been so low and had never dropped by more than 20% in so many programs. The average university Russian program now counted 37 students. (In 2013, when I graduated, that number was 50.)

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to be the key factor in this decline. “Many students have reportedly sought to distance themselves from anything Russia related,” wrote the authors of the survey’s 2022 report. Instead of approaching conflict by learning as much as possible about Russia, this time around Americans wanted nothing to do with it.

The problem is symptomatic of an increasing narrowness in the U.S.’s approach to the world, visible in declining support for the humanities, social sciences, and education at large, and in blinkered “America First” politics. And while the most immediate consequences of this solipsism will show up in diplomacy between Washington and Moscow, its impact extends far beyond those cities—and beyond politics.

My experience speaks to this. Since graduating from college, I’ve almost exclusively used my Russian outside the metropole, communicating with people educated under the Soviet Union who are not ethnically Russian. In 2014, I spent a year in Kyrgyzstan on a Fulbright fellowship, and honed my skills drinking tea late into the night with my roommate. When I moved to Mexico in 2019, one of the first people I befriended was from Belarus; we, too, communicated in Russian. Later that year, a friend who works as an attorney called on me to translate for pro-bono clients of hers—Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik families seeking asylum in Mexico.

Today, I maintain my Russian in weekly Skype sessions with a tutor in Kyiv. When Putin first invaded Ukraine, we “canceled” Russian in our own private way, switching to a beginner Ukrainian textbook. I welcomed the opportunity to diversify my knowledge of Slavic languages. I thought often of Russian poet Polina Barskova, who has said she considers translating from Ukrainian into English—and thus sharing Ukrainian culture with a broader audience—her anti-colonial duty. But it was draining repeating basic dialogues without having the time to commit to thorough study of a new language. The spark fell out of our weekly sessions; we missed being able to chat with each other and read literature. We switched back to Russian, but with a commitment to read books that were geographically marginal, feminist, anti-war.

In my solitary time, it’s those writers at the geographic and political fringes of the former Soviet Union that keep me attached to Russian. Though my college classes favored Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, the writers that I pore over slowly in bed in the morning, battling to remember verb prefixes, turning to my phone’s Google translate app for help, are those who capture life in the provinces—Andrei Platonov, Chingiz Aitmatov—and women: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva. Some, like Svetlana Alexievich and Oksana Vasyakina, occupy the center of the Venn diagram. They’re important to me because, more than any Anglophone writers I know, they speak to the way that humans nourish their spiritual and interpersonal needs under repressive political regimes—a question I find myself considering more frequently as the U.S. increasingly undermines the democratic processes it once invested so much in creating.

In Voices from Chernobyl, Alexievich’s polyphonic novel about the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, one character narrates (in Keith Gessen’s translation):

Picture us, with a three-liter bottle of moonshine…having these endless conversations. There were teachers and engineers among us, and then the full international brigade: Russians, Belarussians, Kazakhs, Ukrainians…I remember discussions about the fate of Russian culture, its pull toward the tragic…only on the basis of Russian culture could you begin to make sense of the catastrophe. Only Russian culture was prepared for it.

When Alexievich’s narrator refers to Russian culture, he’s referring to something far more expansive than Putin and his supporters. Those who are making sense of the catastrophe are working people from all corners of a crumbling empire, using a shared tongue to philosophize together. Those perspectives enrich the world and help us understand it. We lose access to them when we can’t understand their language.

The post What We Lose When We ‘Cancel’ Russian appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But in parts of rural California, the pandemic also revealed silver linings. Some far-flung schools and districts in our state have made great strides bridging the digital divide, addressing teacher shortages, and supporting English learners.

Recent test scores from the 2022 National Educational Progress Assessment—the nation’s report card for K–12 schools—show just how much damage the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures wreaked on learning. Average test scores for 9-year-old students declined seven points in math and five points in reading, wiping out nearly two decades of progress. Among Black students, average math scores fell 13 points.

But scores don’t provide the full picture. As the 2021–22 school year began, a mental health crisis was taking hold among students, too. More than a third of high schoolers nationwide reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic, and nearly half felt persistently sad or hopeless. Students in rural areas had higher levels of anxiety and depression, partially due to limited access to care.

These declines in academic learning and social-emotional wellbeing underline the need to improve school conditions and accelerate student learning throughout the nation. We do not yet have test scores for California students, but we know student needs are acute, particularly in rural areas.

The state’s rural schools faced unique challenges during each phase of the pandemic.

In what we are calling the first phase of the pandemic, in spring 2020, they struggled on the wrong side of the digital divide. Multiple barriers hinder broadband access and deployment in rural areas. Many internet service providers do not find it profitable to serve rural areas, where low population density makes it costlier to build and maintain internet infrastructure. Making broadband affordable for rural households is also a formidable challenge. Studies show higher poverty rates in non-metro areas across the U.S.

For this reason, the abrupt shift to distance learning in spring 2020 left many rural schools in California scrambling for solutions. In 2017, 74 percent of California households had access to broadband, with access slightly lower—70 percent—among rural households. But this gap grew markedly over time. In 2019, 84 percent of California households had broadband, compared to 73 percent of rural households. More than one in four rural households still did not have high-speed internet when the pandemic hit late in the year. Without reliable internet, students cannot access curriculum, receive live instruction from teachers, complete assignments, or receive academic support.

During the second phase of COVID, in fall 2020, fluctuating enrollments destabilized rural schools. In California, K–12 enrollment statewide declined by nearly 3 percent between the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 school years. Some rural counties experienced an exaggerated version of this trend; enrollment fell 10 percent in Humboldt, Mono, and Inyo Counties. But other rural counties gained students, bucking the statewide trend and placing greater demands on district resources. Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Sierra, and Sutter counties experienced double digit growth, with enrollment increasing 17 percent, for example, in El Dorado.

Statewide enrollment dropped another 1.8 percent in 2021–2022 but counties like El Dorado, Calaveras, and Tuolumne continued to experience growth—1.7 percent, 4.5 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively. Because state funding is linked to student enrollment, declines pose significant challenges for districts—but increases create problems too. Rural districts, which have long struggled to recruit and retain quality teachers, had trouble keeping up with growing enrollment. About a quarter of rural schools nationwide were understaffed prior to the start of the pandemic, and 70 percent said there were too few candidates applying for open teaching positions for the 2022–2023 school year.

And in the third phase of COVID, as caseloads declined and California started to emerge from the pandemic in spring 2021, rural schools brought students back for in-person instruction earlier than schools in other parts of the state, in large part because providing online instruction had been so difficult. Nationwide, 63 percent of rural schools offered in-person instruction to all students in January 2021, compared to only 35 percent of urban schools; some rural schools reopened in Fall 2020. Rural districts in California reopened to all grades in early February 2021, while urban districts fully reopened in early May.

As we worked with rural schools during COVID, we also saw hints of progress.

Lindsay Unified, a small, low-income Central Valley district with 4,000 students, is successfully addressing teacher shortages through a “grow your own” approach. In 2016, the district launched a community Wi-Fi network and shifted some of its curriculum online to facilitate personalized learning. It also created a program to recruit teachers and staff, urging students to attend college on loans that would be forgiven if they returned and taught in Lindsay schools for five years. This past year, the district added a residency program to help teachers earn a master’s degree and teaching credential in one year.

In California’s southernmost reaches, the Imperial County Office of Education (ICOE) has worked with local organizations and agencies for more than 20 years to build and maintain a state-of-the-art fiber-optic communications network for its K–12 schools. In 2018, it launched BorderLink to bridge the homework gap by expanding affordable access to reliable internet at home. ICOE was relatively well-positioned when the pandemic hit to connect students to distance learning. Today the county is leveraging pandemic related stimulus money to upgrade equipment and expand capacity further.

Finally, during the pandemic, the Golden Plains district, which serves mostly English learners, used science content to enhance English language arts and English language development instruction. This integrated approach ensures that science learning and language development occur simultaneously. Before it was in place, English proficiency was a barrier for students to access science learning.

The pandemic has had a profound impact on all students’ academic and social-emotional wellbeing, and in response, school districts have enacted strategies to support their learning recovery and improve their social-emotional wellbeing. It makes sense to acknowledge the special hurdles far-flung districts face.

Fortunately, state and federal governments are investing in rural schools. In 2021, California allocated more than $6 billion to expand broadband infrastructure. Three rounds of federal funding provided more than $21 billion to California schools to support recovery and renewal, included funding for after-school programs at rural schools. Spent on equitable, evidence-based programs, these investments can help rural schools accelerate student learning, address mental health needs, and keep up with the demands of 21st-century education.

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Going to college in the city seems so normal now that it’s difficult to comprehend that it once represented a radical shift not only in the location of universities, but also in their ideals.

From the founding of Harvard in 1636 onward, college leaders held a negative view of cities in general, and a deep-seated belief that cities were ill-suited to educating young men and women. In 1883, Charles F. Thwing, a minister with strong interest in higher education, wrote that a significant number of city-bred students “are immoral on their entering college” because city environments have “for many of them been excellent preparatory schools for Sophomoric dissipation.” “Even home influences,” he wrote, “have failed to outweigh the evil attractions of the gambling table and its accessories.”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, higher education leaders believed that the purpose of a college education, first and foremost, was to build character in young people—and that one could not build character in a city. When Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University, he wrote that college must promote “liberal culture” in a “compact and homogenous” residential campus, explaining that “you cannot go to college on a streetcar and know what college means.” The danger of cities was so self-evident that even the president of the City College of New York, Frederick Robinson, lamented to a 1928 conference of urban university leaders that commuter students “do not enter into a student life dominated night and day by fellow students” and therefore “miss the advantages of spiritual transplanting.”

A 1950 photo of the downtown brewery that housed the University of Newark before and several years after it officially became part of Rutgers University in 1946. Image courtesy of Rutgers University—Newark Library.

Urban colleges struggled to overcome the handicap of their locations. Columbia University, for example, moved three times to escape the encroaching city. In 1897, the new campus at the then-largely-rural Morningside Heights area in northern Manhattan was bounded by walls, with many trees planted inside, to isolate students from the urban growth that would eventually surround the school. Campuses with large numbers of commuters initiated a range of programs to “Americanize” students and get them to move beyond the culture of their working-class and immigrant neighborhoods. However, universities in cities also took advantage of the opportunities the city offered for research, teaching, and collaborations with local museums and cultural institutions.

After World War II, federal and state governments increasingly saw college education as critical, a view reflected in the G.I. Bill and the massive expansion of state universities. College attendance in America grew dramatically, from 1.5 million in 1940 to 2.7 million in 1950, 3.6 million in 1960, and 7.9 million in 1970. By the 1960s, government officials and civil rights leaders also sought to expand access to higher education for low-income students in order to enable poor people to move into the middle class. Two-year community colleges opened across the country, largely in cities. City University of New York inaugurated “open enrollment,” guaranteeing that any high school graduate could attend a CUNY institution.

But even though the higher education landscape was changing dramatically, the term “urban university” still bore a stigma as low-status institutions that enrolled large numbers of local commuter students seen as socially unrefined and academically weak. As a result, “urban university” became a low-status label, which many universities in cities tried to avoid. In 1977, the Association of Urban Universities, which was founded in 1914, voted itself out of existence—reflecting the resistance of its members to its own name.

Then, in the last 25 years or so, higher education’s longstanding ambivalence about urban students and colleges evaporated. As many central cities have revitalized dramatically, growing numbers of upper-middle-class people have chosen to live there. In addition, cities appeal more and more to relatively affluent young people who grew up in homogeneous low-density suburbs. Cities are now “cool,” and the kind of worldly education they offer is in demand.

By 2012 an NYU admissions administrator told a Chronicle of Higher Education writer that, “whereas 20 years ago the city was our Achilles’ heel, it’s now our hallmark.” Freshmen applications to NYU grew from 10,862 in 1992 to 43,769 in 2012. Two years later, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled “Urban Hot Spots Are the Place to Be,” arguing that “a college’s location might be more important than ever to its long-term prosperity as a residential campus”—because college students seek “hands-on experiences” which are most available in the “vibrant economy of cities.”

As students and schools have changed, the once controversial innovations pioneered by colleges in cities have prevailed. City institutions pioneered the democratization of undergraduate education, and universities across the country now strive to enroll large numbers of the kinds of “urban students,” including immigrants and minorities, once viewed with deep skepticism by many in the academy. It was urban colleges, particularly municipal institutions like City College and Hunter College, that began the once-controversial practice of providing college to commuters who could not afford to live away from home while in school.

Today, the overwhelming majority of college students commute. Urban colleges also initiated programs, controversial at the time, for adults and part-time students, including evening classes. Today, adult, part-time, and evening courses are nearly universal in state universities and widespread in private institutions. The broad access to college that was initiated by innovative city institutions is now central to the overall mission of American higher education.

Urban colleges also changed curriculums and research agendas by developing a commitment to community-based research, taking advantage of the extensive resources of the city, and encouraging the study of local problems and policy issues. This kind of research is now widely practiced. The Engagement Scholarship Consortium, founded in 1999, encourages all universities to do research that is important to their communities. Its member institutions are located in cities, towns, and rural areas.

Relatedly, service learning and community engagement by college students has become a central focus of American higher education—vigorously championed by organizations like the National Society for Experiential Learning and federal government agencies like the Corporation for National and Community Service. This is another area pioneered by the so-called urban colleges.

Universities are also seen as key players in the economic development of their communities, a change that would not have occurred without the leadership of urban schools. In 1994, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter founded the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City to “spark new thinking about the business potential of inner cities.” In 2001, CEOs for Cities and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City released a study arguing that higher education institutions are well-positioned “to spur economic revitalization of our inner cities.”

The following year, Carnegie Mellon Professor Richard Florida published a book arguing that economic development depended on a “creative class” and that universities were “a key institution of the Creative Economy.” Florida re-envisioned the city as a fountain of economic growth and intellectual activity, placing the university—and its knowledge—at the center. Universities have become key entities for economic development in the post-industrial technology economy, not just in inner cities but also across the nation. Old prejudices about the urban university are effectively dead.

The purpose of colleges and universities—and undergraduate education itself—are still widely debated. Many people are deeply critical of American higher education. These conditions make it important to understand the history and value of college in the United States. Today, access to college makes it possible for millions of Americans to improve their socio-economic status and to live richer lives. Many do so while living at home, working, and attending part-time. Colleges teach traditional-aged students and adults of all ages, both full-time and part-time, including many minorities, immigrants, and people from low-income families, in degree and non-degree programs. Colleges play an ever greater role in our nation’s economy. And college students engage extensively in experiential learning, developing work skills and a commitment to civic responsibility.

All of these conditions began many years ago, in universities in cities. Whatever the deficiencies of American colleges, we must not forget how profoundly they serve society—and how those practices emerged initially in urban institutions.

The post How Universities Migrated into Cities and Democratized Higher Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After LAUSD made an enormous investment in iPads and Pearson educational products developed for those iPads, teachers quickly discovered the iPad program didn’t work as guaranteed and the Pearson applications were useless. Superintendent John Deasy resigned in disgrace, elections changed the school board, and the FBI began an investigation into allegations of bid-rigging.

I’m inclined to believe that those in charge saw the iPad as a magic talisman that could just about transplant knowledge into students’ brains directly, bypassing teachers. LAUSD technophiles saw teachers as low-tech and low-value conduits between students and cutting-edge software and hardware; teachers weren’t consulted on the purchase or given a chance to give the machines a trial. I suspect the LAUSD powers hoped to construct a system that would be efficient as technology can make other aspects of life, like Ubering up an education.

But teaching isn’t always efficient. Often it’s messy, and because it’s messy, the process can produce epiphanies, and sparks of creative thinking.

I taught English for five years at Locke High School in South Los Angeles. One of the highlights of my career was when a student, a kid who dressed like a Crip, asked where I had gotten a short story that I photocopied for the class, Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants.”
He said, “It ain’t a real story.”
“Why isn’t it a real story?” I asked.
“’Cause it’s interesting,“ he replied.

I was confused but flattered, and later, as I mulled over exchange, it became clear to me that a kid who was unaccustomed to reading had been engaged at a high level because I had found the appropriate material for him, something that wasn’t complex in language, but sophisticated in action, character, and meaning. I suspect my student had responded to Issues that are raised from the point of view of a woman desperately appealing for her lover not to compel her to have an abortion. This isn’t common in a world where teenagers often get their cues of sexual conduct from sources in hip-hop who don’t share the powers of empathy of a Kendrick Lamar that he demonstrates in “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.”

An iPad is an amazing device for transmitting information, but what makes a difference in a student’s life is the information, not its mode of transmission. Appropriate content, provided at the right time in the student’s life, and in the right pedagogical context, is everything. Technology doesn’t guarantee any part of that. An iPad loaded with inane apps is just another boring textbook.

The technology that made this connection with my student possible was the photocopy machine, technology that—when I taught—was rationed, only accessible to administrators, not to teachers, who were condemned to use that ancient but cheap technology of the mimeograph machine. So I paid out of pocket to make sure my students had the material that I thought would engage them. An iPad would have made this process only marginally better than what was available 20 years ago. Tech wasn’t going to magically transform this student, or students like him onto devoted readers.

My magic talisman, in conveying Hemingway to this student, was another teacher, Professor Alan Stephens at UC Santa Barbara. I was lucky enough to have taken a great Hemingway course that he taught that made it possible for me to understand how to teach Hemingway and stress what was valuable—the clarity, the powers of observation, the brilliant dialogue, and also the flaws of racism and anti-Semitism. I learned it well enough to develop curriculum for it, to sell it to these students who often treated their textbooks as if they were written in another language.

Tech isn’t a panacea. On an orderly campus with sufficient funding for workable restrooms and other niceties that enable students to be comfortable enough to flourish academically, it can be a useful tool for well-trained teachers. What tech can’t do is change the culture of campuses where academic achievement is rare.

Locke High School is in an area of Los Angeles suffering from high unemployment and high crime, just as it did 24 years ago when I was there, though. Some students did well and achieved academically, but the majority of these students graduated in the lower percentiles in reading and math. The majority of students did want to graduate and some wanted to go to college, but many of them were rudderless, hoping at best to blunder into a community college or the military. Their choices were informed by brutal reality and existential struggle, then as today. Doing well in school mattered but personal safety and money mattered more.

Yearbook photo of the author while teaching at Locke High School

Under these difficult circumstances, schools that create a sense of order but also respect these young men and women can accomplish miracles. It is not an easy thing to do, and when it is done these schools and programs deserve great praise. USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative headed by Kim Barrios is such a program. It’s a seven-year pre-college enrichment program designed for low-income neighborhood students. If they complete the program and meet USC’s admission requirements and decide to attend USC, they are rewarded with a full financial package.

It also supports the USC Family Schools, such as Foshay Learning Center. The students are lively but prepared, and instruction is the highest priority. Students understand that attending Foshay is a privilege that can be revoked. They are expected to buy into the code of conduct of the school and if they don’t consequences follow.

When I attended Foshay in the ’70s, it was one of my worst experiences of growing up. I feared for my life and saw riots, beatings, girls sexually assaulted, and teachers slugged. Now, it’s an entirely different world: kids and their families have bought into the culture of achievement to such a degree that many of their students attend the Saturday Academy at USC and are there by 7:50 a.m. Groggy, but ready to attend S.A.T. preparation classes. As a consequence of all this hard work and support, the black and Latino Students in the Neighborhood Academic Initiative all graduate from high school, and more than 98 percent attend four-year colleges and universities.

Verbum Dei in Los Angeles is another school that that overwhelmingly serves low-income black and Latino students in a community that suffers from high unemployment and high crime. Students at Verbum Dei all graduate and are admitted to multiple colleges and universities. Here, too, students buy into the demanding culture of the school, with tons of homework and school-required work (yes, they work, at law firms and other high-income businesses).

The commonalty of these very different success stories is not the emphasis on tech gadgetry but making the investment in creating a culture for achievement and getting the kids and their families to buy into it.

Seemingly, Deasy and the technophiles didn’t see what should have been obvious: an iPad is an amazing device but it isn’t so amazing without content or the right pedagogical context. School reform isn’t expensive tech and high-stakes testing; it’s the incredibly difficult task of creating highly functioning, transformative educational communities. Tech isn’t a shortcut. We are asking teachers and schools to fight the war on poverty when we won’t even admit that we are doing exactly that.

The hundreds of millions already spent and wasted by LAUSD on this misadventure serve as a very expensive cautionary tale.

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