Low-income students see plenty of inspirational messages on the cinderblock walls, writes Education Trust playwright-researcher Brooke Haycock in The Writing on the Hall. They’re told to dream big. But students get a very different message in the classroom and the guidance office.
For all the talk of rigor and grit, many educators shield students from “the possibility of failure . . . woefully underestimating their abilities to tolerate — and even thrive with — challenge,” writes Haycock.
I met Isaiah, a Latino 11th-grader, in the back of an English classroom at a suburban high school just outside of Washington, D.C. While the class down the hall read Macbeth, Isaiah and his classmates — at least those still awake — sat hunched over a Xeroxed reading passage about a squirrel.
Deja, a high-achieving Michigan senior, told her counselor she was going to college.
Deja went on to tell me that she’d taken “all” the science classes, “through biology,” and that she took geometry her junior year. “My counselor,” she assured me, “said I can get into A LOT of colleges.”
What no one bothered to tell Deja is that these aren’t even close to the full set of college prep courses required for entry into most four-year colleges — nor even, frankly, into credit-bearing two-year college coursework.
While 76 percent of high school sophomores want to go to a four-year college, only 27 percent take the courses they need to succeed in colleges, writes Haycock.
A year after her high school graduation, Deja was temping at a community college and saving money to enroll in the remedial classes she had tested into. “You do everything everyone tells you to do in school, and you work so hard,” she said. “And then you learn it’s not enough.”
The Writing on the Hall is the first of Ed Trust’s Echoes From the Gap series.