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The Schott Foundation for Public Education is an organization whose mission is “To develop and strengthen a broad-based and representative movement to achieve fully resourced, quality pre-K-12 public education,” recently published some heart-rending findings on the state of Black males in public education. The report, Yes We Can: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males 2010 reveals states, districts, and public schools that are statistically making academic gains toward closing the achievement gap (i.e., graduation rates and scores on state standardized examinations) between Black males and their counterparts. For example, the report affirms that the top ten best performing states in regard to decreasing the graduation gap between Black and White males are Maine, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho, Montana, Utah, South Dakota, New Jersey, and Iowa respectively. The ten best performing districts in this regard are Newark (NJ), Fort Bend (IN), Baltimore County (MD), Montgomery County (MD), Gwinnett County (GA), Prince George’s County (MD), Cumberland County (NC), East Baton Rouge Parish (LA), and Guilford County (NC). In my opinion, the report would make a stronger argument and cause readers to give a heavy pause when looking at the data when it was combined with an explanation as to why these states and districts are showing an improvement in the graduation rates.
On the other hand, the report announces that the ten worst performing states for Black males in regard to decreasing the graduation gap between them and White males are respectively Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, District of Columbia, Ohio, Nebraska, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and New York. Moreover, the ten worst performing districts are Jefferson Parish (LA), New York (NY), Dade County (FL), Cleveland (OH), Detroit (MI), Buffalo (NY), Charleston County (SC), Duval County (FL), Palm Beach County (FL), and Pinellas County (FL). Within the document, it was noted that out of the 48 states that reported Black males are likely to graduate reasonably from only 15 of the states. In addition, Black males were seen to be more prone to severe punishment for school infractions than their White peers and have less opportunity to gain access to higher-level academic classes. Finally, by the time these students reach 8th grade in middle school, many were seen not be proficient readers and thus lose academic grounding as they proceed to high school.
In terms of these districts, what the report does not state is that for example, places like Jefferson Parish have recently been found to have to have high unemployment rates and a “drug incarceration rate of 186 per 100,000 people in 2002, ranking it seventh out of 198 counties or parishes with populations greater than 250,000.” Poverty in the United States, published by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2002, stated that Cleveland, Ohio has the highest poverty rate. Specifically, in 2004, children were indicated to be half of those living in poverty in Cleveland. Poverty has been shown in numerous studies to affect the academic and social outcomes of children. I have always said that if economic or social plights are affecting Whites heavily, these same concerns are being felt threefold by people of color. So, it is no surprise to me that the ten worst states and districts have high numbers of Black males not graduating or excelling on standardized examinations.
What the report does not state is the psychological trauma this failure has on the students. Many of them become disenchanted with their apparent lack of skills and at times begin to act out in disruptive manners. Teachers begin to label them “special education, emotionally disturbed, difficult,” etc. All of these labels and perceptions of the students’ potential fuel the need to isolate them within alternative educational facilities that are many times encased with frustrated White teachers who do not have the experience or knowledge of Black culture–or have their own racial biases toward people of color. In my own experiences within public schools, the curricula within these settings are sub-par and filled with worksheet after worksheet that presents nothing academically substantial to the students. In fact, their designated work is simply a tactic to occupy a population many have given up on or refuse to hear due to their inability to voice the futility of their situation. Many of these Black males end up dropping out and having some association with the criminal justice system.
The schools that do seem to work outside of the traditional paradigm and attempt to meet the academic and social needs of Black males are few and in between. Sometimes these programs are taken to task and/or dismantled due to outside pressures and perception that specific programs tailored for boys is not necessary or warranted. For example, in Prince George County (MD), a system that serves mostly Blacks, an initiative was started to help in regards to meeting the academic and social needs of Black males within the area. A year after showing promise, the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights felt it discriminated against females and was dismantled. In 1996, the city of New York proclaimed the success of the establishment of the East Harlem Young Women’s Leadership School that catered to mostly Black females. When the New York Times urged school administrators to start a school similar for boys, the School Chancellor said in response, “This is a case where the existence of the all-girls school makes an important statement about the viable education of girls…Presumably the statement would lose its force and point if an all-boys school were allowed to exist alongside (page. 39.” These are just a few of the anti-boy climates that exist within public education.
Who shall carry the cross and burden of the plight of Black males? The current plight could only be directed at Blacks, right? We have a Black president for God sake. Cosby was correct when he pointed that Jell-O pudding-pop-encrusted finger at the Black community, right?
In contrast to the historic racial barriers that are evident within the history of the United States in regards to economic and social growth of people of color, specifically Black males, President Barrack Obama is a beacon; a symbol that the Black male have the potential to break through the proverbal glass ceiling to the highest position afforded to an U.S. citizen. A large number of people here and aboard have joined in the celebration of his election as an end to the historic caste system that has hindered the progress of Blacks since the beginning of the nation.
In fact this celebration is nothing but a distraction that serves as a curtain to hide the underlying racial realities that affect Blacks, particularity Black males within the lower SES brackets. The gains that many discuss are in fact by primarily middle and upper class Blacks. The racial caste system that has been rooted since the founding of the country is still in full operation and witnessed within the workings of public schools. Since Blacks were first forced into slavery, regardless of the efforts of many in within the civil rights and equal rights legislation struggles, they have never moved from a caste system that deems them as inferior and treated as such within all facets of the country. In fact, being a part of the minority caste comes with it a negative ideology that dictates a set of behavior, actions, procedures, and policies directed by non-Blacks to Blacks within the major institutions; such as public and higher education setting. The modes of oppression and control that are imprinted within the foundation of education are incited into the psyche of Black American children in public schools in overt and covert fashions. The attempts to oppress and control are nothing but a continuation of the targeting seen within the early U.S. colonies with the institutionalization of the White racial frame. Therefore, I would argue that public schools are an equal partner in the plight of Black males. Therefore, the effects of systemic institutional racism and the existence of a caste system that are witnessed in the treatment of these children increase the likelihood of their internalizing the oppressive conditions and controlling the state of their environment through socialization, which in turn leads them to view themselves as unworthy in comparisons to their counterparts. The system within public education is not totally equal for females of color. But, simply, Black males have it worse. Many may be upset with this statement, but I am aligned with scholars such as bell hooks who states, that, “[d]espite all the advances in civil rights in our nation, feminist movement, sexual liberation, when the spotlight is on black males the message is usually that they have managed to stay stuck, that as a group they have not evolved with the times” (ix). Many scholars like hooks (2004), and often Black men themselves, believe that society is “fearful to acknowledge the truth – America has no compassion for black males” (p. Ix).
It will be virtually impossible for this country to meet the President’s mission to place the U.S. as a global leader in “post-credential attainment” if this trend continues. Schools are currently not moving beyond the paradigm of seeing the problem existing within the child–and are at the same time discounting other contributing factors within the school setting, such as the teacher to student relationship, and assumptions teachers have in terms of race and cultural differences. In my current position, I have many interactions with schools that implement the latest and greatest academic programs, instruments, and curriculum to combat graduation and standardized examination gaps. They also have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars by introducing new social and behavioral modification techniques that have warm, but empowering titles that claim to decrease behavioral issues among “difficult” students (code for Black and Latino) while enabling the entire school to simultaneously sing “Kum Bah Yah” as they march toward academic excellence. I have seen administrators shell out ten thousands of dollars for a motivational speaker (usually they are Black and have come from some difficult situations to preach to teachers that if they can do it, so can the students) to come for one-shot deals that leave fleeting positive words and emotions. Schools need to stop creating or looking for the holy grail that will help them elevate Black scores and graduation rates and learn that what is needed for females is not necessarily the same thing needed for males. Due to the fact that Black females are graduating at a higher rate and entering into college and graduate school more than Black males, schools are in need of analyzing the plight of Black males while separating from all others. What schools refuse to acknowledge is that you can dress up a pig, but it’ll still be a pig. No amount of money will transform a system that is meant to oppress a group while propelling another until the system is revamped, thus a revolution is needed. Until we realize the depths of the White racial frame and the existence of an operating caste system, I may one day look to up from the struggle for justice and see that I am alone.
New Education Report: High Levels of Racial Inequality, Again
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The National Center for Education Statistics has just released a very interesting and revealing 2010 statistical report– Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups–on children and parents, with a main emphasis on educational issues. Here are just a few of their findings:
photo credit: Steve Snodgrass
The percentages of children who were living in poverty were higher for Blacks (34 percent), American Indians/Alaska Natives (33 percent), Hispanics (27 percent), and Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders (26 percent), than for children of two or more races (18 percent), Asians (11 percent) and Whites (10 percent).
Forty-eight percent of public school 4th-graders were eligible for free or reduced- price lunches in 2009, including 77 percent of Hispanic, 74 percent of Black, 68 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native, 34 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander, and 29 percent of White 4th-graders.
These revealing data show extreme poverty levels for major groups of color, with very high levels qualifying for reduced-price or free lunches. Among other things the data demonstrate huge problems of structural inequality and racism that seem to be off the white-controlled policy agenda for the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”
In 2008, some 44 percent of White 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in colleges and universities, while in 1980 some 28 percent were enrolled. In addition, approximately 32 percent of Black 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in colleges or universities (an increase of 12 percentage points from 1980) and 26 percent of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled (an increase of 10 percentage points from 1980).
Inequality and structural racism at lower grades contribute substantially to inequalities up the line at college. Here, again, very substantial differentials. Some other data also tell us something significant about current immigration and demographic patterns:
In 2008, a higher percentage of Asian children (51 percent) had a mother with at least a bachelor’s degree than did White children (36 percent), children of two or more races (31 percent), Black children (17 percent), American Indian/Alaska Native children (16 percent), and Hispanic children (11 percent).
The Asian children are more likely to be the children of documented immigrants, who have come in under a biased U.S. immigration system that increasingly tends to “cream off” the world’s middle and upper middle classes. Thus, many documented immigrants come in with college degrees and some social or economic capital that facilitates socioeconomic their and their children’s mobility in the U.S. Other children of color are no so fortunate, including those who are the children of undocumented Latino immigrants. Other data are also revealing:
In 2007, a higher percentage of White (18 percent) children ages 12 to 17 reported drinking alcohol in the past month than did their Hispanic (15 percent) peers, peers of two or more races (13 percent), and Black (10 percent) and Asian (8 percent) peers.
I wonder why we do not have white leaders and politicians talking a lot about the “white problem” of drug (alcohol) use among white youth in the U.S.
And like other studies they also show the trend toward an more diverse society where whites are gradually becoming a statistical minority, especially among children:
Between 1980 and 2008, the racial/ethnic composition of the United States shifted— the White population declined from 80 percent of the total population to 66 percent; the Hispanic population increased from 6 percent of the total to 15 percent; the Black population remained at about 12 percent; and the Asian/Pacific Islander population increased from less than 2 percent of the total population to 4 percent. In 2008, American Indians/Alaska Natives made up about 1 percent and people of two or more races made up about 1 percent of the population.
And these demographic changes continue at a fast pace today.
No Post-Racial America: Racial Inequalities in US Medicine
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Over at diversityinc.com, Gail Zoppo has an important post—“Is There a Black, Latino Doctor in the House?”– on the huge problem of lack of people of color in U.S. medical schools and professions. Racial inequality remains central in the medical professions and facilities in this “post-racial America.” We still have relatively few black, Latino, and Native American medical students across the country. Zoppo underscores the slow pace of improvement, noting that three years these groups made up only 15 percent of the 40,000 applicants to U.S. medical schools, even as they make up a third of the U.S. population in their typical age range. (She does not discuss data on Asian Americans in her post.) This is a key result from this longterm reality:
That same year, only 8.7 percent of doctors were from these underrepresented groups, according to a study published in the Journal of Academic Medicine.
She then discusses where we are at in the recent American Association of Medical Colleges data, just slight changes since 2006:
Among the 42,269 med-school applicants in 2009, only 16 percent were Black, Latino or American Indian.
Other medical professions are also characterized by a lack of black, Latino, and Native American personnel:
… a mere 6.9 percent of people from underrepresented groups ended up as dentists in 2007, only 9.9 percent were pharmacists and just 6.2 percent were registered nurses.
One national issue is also that white medical personnel are much less likely to work in undeserved communities of color:
Black, Latino and American Indian/Pacific Islander physicians are nearly three to four times more likely than whites to practice in underserved communities, reports the AAMC.
On the positive side, Zoppo does discuss some important attempts to deal with this underrepresentation in medical schools and professions, such as the Rutgers University Office for Diversity and Academic Success in the Sciences (ODASIS)
Racism and the Stroke of a Brush–Arizona Again
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A farcical show of racism took place recently in Prescott, an Arizona city of 34,000, located 120 miles north of Phoenix. The cause was the opposition by some local citizens to a public mural located at an elementary school. The mural’s purpose was to advertise a “green transportation campaign.” Likenesses of four elementary school children of various races were part of the display.
The presence of nonwhite children in the mural bothered some of the local white citizens. Regarding the painted wall, one of the mural artists, reported that as the artists and some children worked on the project they were heckled. “We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics).”
Wall reported that subsequently school principal Jeff Lane asked him to make the children’s faces appear “happier and brighter.”
“It is being lightened because of the controversy,” Wall said. He added that, “they want it to look like the children are coming into light.”
It would appear that ‘brighter’ and ‘coming into light’ mean ‘whiter.’ Yet Lane denied any political pressure, asserting the changes were made “from an artistic view. nothing to do with race.”
It is important to note that the mural was funded by a state grant. Furthermore, Wall reported that thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project.
Nevertheless the ‘mural battle’ is a stark reminder that racism still is alive, even if sometimes it comes as tragicomedy.
England’s Smartest Family is Black
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Rollingout.com has a nice personal interest story, with a very important point. The story is about the Imafidon family, a black-British family, and its very-very-high-achieving children. First there are the two nine-year-old twins, Peter and Paula, who are the youngest to
ever pass the University of Cambridge’s advanced mathematics exam. That’s on top of the fact they have set world records when they passed the A/AS-level math papers.
Nine years old! But these two children are not alone, because their sister Anne-Marie
holds the world record as the youngest girl to pass the A-level computing, when she was just 13. She is now studying at . . . Johns Hopkins University …. Sister Christina, 17, is the youngest student to ever get accepted and study at an undergraduate institution at any British university at the tender age of 11. And Samantha, now age 12, had passed two rigorous high school-level mathematics and statistics exams at the age of 6…
The father immigrated to London from Nigeria three decades back, and he makes a key point about why these working class children have done well in England:
….. he denies there is some “genius gene” in his family. Instead, he credits his children’s success to the Excellence in Education program for disadvantaged inner-city children. “Every child is a genius,” he told British reporters. “Once you identify the talent of a child and put them in the environment that will nurture that talent, then the sky is the limit. Look at Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters … they were nurtured.”
Doubtless, he is underplaying parental efforts here, but still his point is dramatic.
So, of course, in the U.S. we starve and re-Jim-Crow our inner-city educational programs for decades, then when the Bush Depression kicks in, our governments’ solutions include giving a trillion dollars in aid to Wall Street’s white-collar, low-intelligence deviants, but cutting back on many local educational and other social support programs that develop young talent in areas where we need it.
Perhaps we need to send our (mostly white) politicians to study with this savvy father and his very talented kids. Maybe they can get their “low IQs” up a little?
Revisiting the Kenneth Clark Study: White Racist Children, a Surprise?
Posted by: | CommentsCNN has had a University of Chicago professor, Margaret Beale Spencer, to test 133 black and white children (in two groups, one 4-5 and one 9-10 years old) in eight schools in New York City and Georgia, to see their preferences for white and black skin, a sort of contemporary testing of issues that psychologist Ken Clark raised many years ago – and that were used in the famous footnote to the Brown decision. The CNN website gives this summary:
Spencer’s researchers asked the younger children a series of questions and had them answer by pointing to one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark. The older children were asked the same questions using the same cartoon pictures, and were then asked a series of questions about a color bar chart that showed light to dark skin tones. The tests showed that white children, as a whole, responded with a high rate of what researchers call “white bias,” identifying the color of their own skin with positive attributes and darker skin with negative attributes. Spencer said even black children, as a whole, have some bias toward whiteness, but far less than white children.
Spencer adds this point:
“What’s really significant here is that white children are learning or maintaining those stereotypes much more strongly than the African-American children. Therefore, the white youngsters are even more stereotypic in their responses concerning attitudes, beliefs and attitudes and preferences than the African-American children.” … Spencer says this may be happening because “parents of color in particular had the extra burden of helping to function as an interpretative wedge for their children. Parents have to reframe what children experience … and the fact that white children and families don’t have to engage in that level of parenting, I think, does suggest a level of entitlement. You can spend more time on spelling, math and reading, because you don’t have that extra task of basically reframing messages that children get from society.”
Well, whites invented and maintained the system of racial oppression, and its rationalizing white racial frame, with many anti-black and anti-other stereotypes–and lots of pro-white stereotypes as well. So, the white children get a much better “education” in racist stereotyping 101. And the Black children are having to fight back against this white racist framing of both virtuous whiteness and negative stuff about their own group. And of course black parents and children have to reframe this racist stuff. There is a strong, 380-year-old black counter frame against the white racial frame, in much of black America. Apparently, psychologists do not think much in historical and structural terms, or read research on systemic racism and the old white racial frame.
Then there is this comment in the CNN article:
Spencer was also surprised that children’s ideas about race, for the most part, don’t evolve as they get older. The study showed that children’s ideas about race change little from age 5 to age 10.
Again, there is some good sociological literature over the last decade that shows just how early white children learn the white racial frame of African Americans and other Americans of color – which CNN and these psychologists might well have consulted too.
Arizona Legislators Take on Ethnic Studies — as Subversive
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Well, if the Arizona legislature’s autocratic approach to its large immigrant-worker population was not enough, last night the wild-west legislature’s white legislators decided to take on first amendment rights to freedom of speech in the form of courses being taught in the schools. Of course, the attack once again is centered on its Mexican American population, and other people concerned with the histories and racist realities faced by Americans of color, and with creating pride in groups resisting oppression. One news report by Capitol Media Services today puts it this way:
HB 2281 would make it illegal for a school district to have any courses or classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity “instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” It also would ban classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people.”
So I guess an honest discussion of the history of whites’ racial oppression targeting Mexican Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, and other Americans of color in the southwest and elsewhere will be out of the question when and if this legislation goes into effect. Truth-telling about our white-racist history, and resistance to it by Americans of color, that gives people honest understandings (and/or group pride) will actually be illegal, as seen in this legislation of the folks in the Arizona legislature. They clearly fear that such a history might create resentment toward the oppressors. Will other states soon follow up on this lawmaking?
One Tucson state senator, Democrat Linda Lopez, has pointed out that an immediate cause of this white attack seems to be an academically successful program by the school district’s Mexican-American studies department that
simply provides historical information, which conflicts with state School Superintendent Tom Horne’s assessment the program is promoting racial hatred and “ethnic chauvinism.”
Senator Lopez has also pointed out just how serious is this attack on honest discussion, indeed pointing to its absurdity:
To make her point, she proposed schools be prohibited from teaching about the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor because that would promote hatred of people of Japanese ancestry. The proposal was rejected. She had no better luck with a measure precluding teaching about the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Lopez said the 700 incidents targeting Arab-Americans in the nine weeks after the incident prove that teaching about the event promotes resentment toward a class of people.
The courses actually being taught seem to be rather modest in orientation, yet they are stimulating this type of white supremacist reactions. Freedom of thought and honest discussion of the U.S.’s racial history are once again considered to be dangerous. (Here is one honest history of white-on-Mexican oppression by the major social scientist Rodolfo Acuña, which will not likely be seen in Arizona public schools if this becomes law.) Arizona seems to be pioneering in this police-state approach to U.S. polity and society. It is interesting that those who say they fear government and oppose government intervention in regard to things like federal health care legislation are often the first to push government intervention when it comes to their often reactionary notions about society.
Diversity in University Administration – Myth or Reality?
Posted by: | Comments[Note: I am posting this anonymously for someone who knows these issues very well from the inside.]
Frequently on college campuses you will hear people say that there are too many administrators and their pay is too high. Few understand the fragile and precarious working conditions of administrators. Unlike faculty whose careers promote individualistic accomplishments solidified through tenure, university administrators typically serve without employment protection or tenure to support the success of the whole institution.
Diverse administrators are only beginning to break the glass ceiling in the 277 American research universities. Only a decade ago, no Hispanic female administrators had been appointed, and between 1997 and 2007 this number increased 207 percent to 2665 a decade later. Over 80 percent of the incumbents in administrative roles are white, with white non-Hispanic women now outnumbering their male counterparts in 41% of these positions.
Yet women and minorities tend to be clustered in lower ranking administrative positions. For example, a revealing study by the American Council of Education in 2007 indicates that only 10 percent of chief academic officers are minorities, and women represent only 23 percent of incumbents in senior academic roles, the typical pathway to the presidency (See pdf here).
These statistics still indicate that leadership and decision-making in the research university mirror the racial stratification of our society. As social theorist Joe Feagin points out in The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing (2010), “we still live in a very hierarchical society in racial, class, and gender terms, one where white men continue to make the lion’s share of major decisions about our economic development, laws, and major public policies” (p. 193).
Going beyond the numbers, however, new research on micro-inequities, micro-invalidations, and micro-aggressions illuminates how forms of everyday discrimination can still isolate, marginalize and exclude diverse individuals in the workplace. Take Stephen Young’s ground-breaking book on Micro-messaging. Micromessages are small, cumulative behaviors with monumental impact. These micro-inequities can take place through facial expressions, hand gestures, choice of words, eye contact, and tone of voice and reveal what is behind the masks that connect myths of incompetence with race, gender, and other factors. Psychologist Derald Wing Sue of Columbia University describes the cumulative impact of micro-aggressions, micro-invalidation, and micro-assaults that create unfair disparities between minority and majority individuals.
In the effort to develop new leadership models within the university that emphasize empowerment, collaboration, and equity, women, minority and LGBT administrators have an important role to play in the change process. Through collective action and mutual support, they can lead institutional efforts to create systemic organizational learning initiatives, institutional policies and processes that help overcome subtle forms of discrimination and foster inclusive excellence.
Institutional Racism in Employment and Unemployment, Again
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Aaron Glatnz has a good but too brief article at NewAmericaMedia on the continuing racial impact of the Bush recession/depression on the US, with its still 9.7 percent unemployment rate:
The unemployment rate for whites held steady at 8.8 percent compared to February and went down for Asians from 8.4 percent to 7.5 percent. But it rose to 16.5 percent for blacks from 15.8 percent. Hispanics showed a slight increase as well from 12.4 percent to 12.6 percent.
White and Asian Americans, according to these statistics, are not hurting as much as groups of workers as black and Latino Americans. One major reason for the differential is that governments are now cutting public services on a huge scale, as a quote from Seth Wessler, a researcher at the Applied Research Center, indicates:
“If the bus line you depend on is cut, it’s impossible to look for a job or even hold onto the one you have . . . and we know that across the country – from New York to Los Angeles – bus service is being cut and fares are increasing.”
Glatnz also quotes Peter Edelman, director of the Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy at the Georgetown University, about where job growth will come as the economy presumably recovers:
“The jobs that we project over the next decade that are reasonably well paying involve a degree of skills and a degree of preparation…and people of color have disparate educational attainment,” and will be less able to land that work without an associates degree or certificate from a local community college.
Census jobs may help some communities, but only temporarily and with modest paying jobs. They will be gone soon. And inequality in education looms again as a large factor in maintaining the systemic racism still foundational in this society.
There are many angles to this sorry story, and one recent one is how poorer American students are increasingly dropping out of college or seeking out the weak diploma mill colleges as a solutions to soaring costs. One recent investigative report by Peter Byrne discusses this issue in connection with an assessment of the situation of the University of California’s wealthy regents who are business investors, such as the chair of the regents who
has an abiding interest in education—a financial interest: while serving as chairman of the Regents, and head of the investment committee, he took control of a very profitable, national network of “diploma mills,” worth about $3 billion. These “career education” schools rely on federally subsidized student loans to generate profits that are then privately invested. Some of Blum’s schools have been investigated by government agencies (and sued by individuals) for, allegedly, delivering substandard educations, and, allegedly, concentrating on generating government-guaranteed student loan revenue at the expense of providing students with quality educations.
This article discusses the “creeping privatization of the University of California system,” a reality that means
as the UC system becomes increasingly expensive (and racially exclusive), lower income students are turning toward diploma mills.
The same is likely true for other major universities across the country. This is a structural and national problem, not just a local one, as the country becomes ever more unequal along racial and class lines.
