Blog Archive » 2007 » February

Faster than Britney Spears could shave her head, the stock market had its own weird meltdown on Tuesday, plunging hundreds of points in a few minutes because of a computer problem after sagging all day on news of a crackdown in China on stock speculators and sluggish durable goods orders in this country. "Stocks in Shocking Nosedive" screamed the New York Post. "Don't Panic" counseled Newsday even as anxious investors dialed their brokers.

Other commentators can slice & dice the nuances of trading and Greenspan and Bernacke and the forces swirling around Wall Street. What's more interesting to me is the utterly bizarre effect of the 24/7/always-on news culture on everything today, even our pension funds (which is the only way most of us will ever get near the stock market!!). How much of The Plunge was a result of Too Much Information Screaming From the Screen? The Market runs on sheer psychology, and investors seem as fickle as Hollywood starlet couples, ditching their love affair with a company's stock as soon as trouble appears on the horizon. The "butterfly effect" turns a breeze into a tornado — a rumor in Hong Kong, a slowdown in Detroit, a car bomb in Afghanistan all trigger stampedes — especially when the mid-day headline on Drudge is CRASH!

The next day, recovery, escape from rehab, claims that all is fine — until the next binge. Just a little blip. By late afternoon on Wednesday, the day after the alleged "crash," the blaring headlines were back to normal — the latest on Anna Nicole's sad demise, the search for Britney's children, Prince Charles lamenting Big Macs, the strange case of the American Idol contestant somehow losing most of her clothing in the WWII Memorial's fountains.

Somewhere there's a war on. Somewhere there's a Presidential campaign. Billions went down the drain on Tuesday due in part to a computer glitch. But the latest on Paris Hilton is only a click away.

See Greenspan, bernanke, economy

"Wimbledon to Pay Men and Women Equally" was the link on washingtonpost.com that caught my eye this morning. What's this? A throwback story from the 1970 archives? An interesting precursor to Women's History Month? A quaint reminder that there once was a time when it was socially quite acceptable to pay women less than men for doing the same thing?

No. This is 2007, and the story is TODAY. The much-vaunted Wimbledon (think Super Bowl of Tennis) bit its stiff upper lip and leapt over the net into modernity. The All England Club announced yesterday that it would pay male and female Wimbledon winners the same, the last of the major tennis tournaments to do so.

Wimbledon may be far from our own experiences and concerns, but let's not underestimate the impact of this decision on other opportunities for girls and women. 20-time Wimbledon Champion and Women's Sports Legend Billie Jean King aptly summarized the importance of this decision in today's New York Times: "But remember, it's not about the money, it's about the message it sends to women and girls around the world….Every time we can change a benchmark like this, it helps people ask in their daily life, 'Are we insisting on equality for our sons and daughters?' So that makes it a very important moment in history."

I've heard Billie Jean speak on numerous occasions about the blatant discrimination she faced during her playing years as she won tournament after tournament, but taking home remarkably small paychecks compared to her male counterparts. She founded the Women's Sports Foundation as an educational and advocacy organization to improve conditions for girls and women in all sports. Thanks to her unrelenting advocacy and the great work of the Foundation (one of Trinity's most valuable partners in helping us to establish the Trinity Center for Women and Girls in Sports!), the opportunities for girls and women to play sports in schools and universities, and to pursue professional opportunities in sports have never been greater. In particular, the Women's Sports Foundation has successfully sustained Title IX, the law that protects equal rights for girls and women throughout all levels of education, including in sports opportunities.

Just last night at dinner, a friend asked our table if we thought there would ever come a time when we did not have to be concerned about gender equality, or equality among people of different races and ethnic backgrounds. One colleague, citing the recent advances of women like Nancy Pelosi and Drew Faust at Harvard, said she thought in her daughter's lifetime there would be broader acceptance of equal opportunity, less emphasis on difference. I'm not so sure, given the profound fissures across race and social class, in particular, that traverse our landscape.

But it's true that we are in an extraordinary era for women's rights and advancement, with old barriers shattered and new advances for women appearing almost daily. Let's always remember that this progress has not occurred by happenstance; change occurs on when the courageous voices of women like Billie Jean King and her colleagues on the Women's Tennis circuit, and in the Women's Sports Foundation, raised in sustained advocacy over a long period of time, are finally heard in the club rooms and board rooms where the power resides to ensure equal opportunity for all.

wimbledon, women's sports

Samantha Cleaver felt called to teach children with disabilities. She joined the D.C. Teaching Fellows program, and enrolled in Trinity's School of Education to earn her certification. But after a tumultuous year and a half inside the D.C. Public Schools, she's called it quits. She wrote about her experience in the Washington Post Magazine this past Sunday, "A Special Challenge."

Perhaps the most appalling part of her story is not the condition or behaviors of the children, which might be expected given their personal challenges. The real scandal is the behavior of the adults. The disorganization and non-responsiveness of "825" — shorthand for the central administration of the D.C. Public Schools — is legendary; but translated into the story of this one young teacher, it's devastating.

Ms. Cleaver is not an isolated case. In a survey of a group of 22 D.C. Teaching Fellows in a Trinity class this year, only 6 said they would return to teach in DCPS after this experience. The comments they offered were uniform in citing a lack of support, lack of resources, absent or incompetent principals, lack of books, and grim conditions in the schools. Only 1 of 22 Fellows had the required in-school mentor.

D.C. Teaching Fellows are selected as among the "best and brightest" future teachers for our city. If their experience as student teachers is so discouraging, who will remain to teach our children?

Trinity is committed to working with the D.C. Public Schools to try to improve conditions for students and teachers and principals. We provide extensive educational services through our School of Education for teachers, principals, guidance counselors and other school professionals; we meet NCATE standards; we work with New Leaders for New Schools and other programs focused on improving the conditions of education in D.C. We also educate many graduates of the DCPS, and we are quite familiar with the many challenges our local school system faces.

However, when a school system treats a young, aspiring special education teacher in such a demeaning way that the soon-to-be-ex-teacher writes, "I hate everything about my job" on the course survey, I'm at a loss for words. There's no excuse imaginable for the utterly devastating experience of these students who are walking away from teaching in D.C. to pursue less stressful placements, probably in the suburbs. What a terrible loss of potential for our city schools!

I should footnote here that, in yet another dismal affront to these aspiring teachers, the school system failed to pay them on time for most of the Fall 2006 semester. Only after repeated calls to the Superintendent's Office, and a very embarrassing story in the D.C. Examiner, the Fellows were eventually paid sometime in December. There's just no excuse possible for this shameful treatment of the future teacher corps for the city's schools.

Who will teach the children if the system continues to discourage the rising generations of teachers? The challenge of reform for the D.C. Public Schools grows larger each day. The challenges are most egregious in the schools and classrooms where the children and teachers are left to cope while the powers-that-be argue about governance at the top. Perhaps the Mayor, the Council and the School Board should have to spend a week or two in the shoes of teachers (incognito, no entourages, just them and the children) to understand what really needs to be done.

A woman at the helm at Harvard! A distant dream not so long ago, when the last Harvard President (Larry Summers) was questioning the ability of women to succeed in the sciences, this weekend the Harvard Corporation (their version of the Board of Trustees) announced the appointment of Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust as the 28th President of Harvard.

Best news: Dr. Faust is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, one of the nation's distinguished women's colleges. And she takes the helm at Harvard from the position of Dean of the Radcliffe Institute, the branch of Harvard that was once the estimable Radcliffe College, one of the "seven sisters" women's colleges. For more on Dr. Faust's background read today's article in the New York Times and Jay Mathews' profile of her in today's Washington Post.

2007 is shaping up as a great year for women's colleges and our alumnae. In a few short weeks, we've seen one of our graduates sworn-in as the highest-ranking woman ever in the American government and the first female Speaker of the House — our very own Nancy Pelosi, Trinity '62. Just a few weeks later, another women's college graduate — Wellesley's Hillary Rodham Clinton — launched her campaign for the U.S. Presidency, and she's the first woman ever to have a serious shot at winning.

Now, today, Dr. Faust joins this rarified group of exceptional women leaders who are blasting through some of the most significant barriers to women's achievement in contemporary culture.

The fact that this group of women are all graduates of women's colleges is hardly surprising to those of us who know the power of the graduates of women's colleges. These three women exemplify all of the reasons why Trinity and other women's colleges persist in this important mission. For more than a century these institutions have produced some of this nation's most outstanding women leaders — in numbers quite disproportionate to the actual size of our institutions in American higher education. Consider Trinity: a relatively small institution that has had two members of Congress (Nancy Pelosi and now-retired Barbara Kennelly '58), including the Speaker of the House, a Governor (Kathleen Sebelius '70) who is now the first woman to head the Democratic Governors Association, two federal judges (Rosemary Collyer '68 and Claire Eagan '72) and scores of other public officials and citizen leaders.

Some people say that, with coeducation now normative, there's no longer a need for women's colleges. I say: behold Speaker Pelosi, Senator Clinton, President-elect Faust. They are the latest, but far from the last, in a centuries-long tradition of women's achievement that is promoted, honored, respected and advanced by colleges and universities that focus on women's education and leadership. Imagine how impoverished our world would be without these and so many other pioneering women who are among our alumnae. Our day is not over, far from it — inspired by the great example of these women leaders, I wager that women's colleges and our students will grow even stronger in our determination to succeed and surpass their achievements! In the ways in which we honor, encourage and expand women's horizons, the value of this form of education to our world will continue to be a gold standard for women's education everywhere.

Visit the website of the Women's College Coalition

See harvard

Washington Post article

"Woman Chosen to Lead Harvard"

On the opening day of school each year, we gather the new students and their families at the Trinity Center for some words of welcome and orientation. Invariably, at some point during the festivities, I am struck by the presence or absence of parents among the clusters of freshmen who are eagerly (often anxiously) venturing across the threshhold of college life. In some cases, parents and entire families turn out in force to support their daughter as she takes this great step forward. In many cases, the parent is a single mother or grandmother. In a few other cases, I see young women who appear to be utterly alone, or sitting with just a few other students with whom they may have attended high school. Some of these students come to college over the serious objections of parents who would prefer that they go to work instead.

If I could map the collegiate trajectory of the students sitting with or without families on opening day, while all have the potential to succeed at Trinity and many do, those with the best chances of successful and timely completion of their baccalaureate degrees are those with a familial support team, especially attentive parents or at least some signficant adult presence in their lives. Those who start out alone have great courage and determination, which often does lead to their success, but their path is much more difficult — financially, emotionally, socially, spiritually.

About half of Trinity's full-time undergraduate students come from the D.C. Public School — indeed, Trinity educates more DCPS graduates than any other private university in the nation — and so we are particularly attentive to the conditions of these schools and the controversies surrounding the deficiencies of DCPS, the school governance quarrels, and the bleak outlook for DCPS graduates who manage to complete high school and get into college. Trinity has had some noteworthy success in retaining and graduating DCPS alumnae — 65% of the students in our D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program since 2001 are still enrolled or have completed degrees. This is remarkable in light of the "Doubling the Numbers" report released in November that forecasts a collegiate completion rate of just 9% for today's DCPS ninth graders.

Political leaders in D.C. have been struggling over control of the schools since Home Rule came into being more than 30 years ago — see my last blog "Hobson's Choice" on this topic. Today's debate over school governance may well result in a dramatic change — people I talk to seem to think that Mayor Fenty's proposal to take over the schools will pass the City Council and become reality soon.

Problem is, governance is all about what happens at the top, while governance has little to do about what happens in the life of a 16 year-old girl or boy who has read very few books in her young years, who spends his nights cruising the neighborhood streets, who feasts on fast food every day, who possesses a gun but not a computer, who may already have become a parent herself. Yes, improved governance can help reform the overall structure of the school system, impose curricular standards and outcomes measurements that will appear to be more normative, and provide some satisfaction for the current generation of politicians that they've done all that they can to address the problems of the DCPS.

But improved school governance without improved neighborhoods, families and communities will do little to change the outcomes for the students who are most at risk of failure, which is the majority of children in D.C. Poverty, homelessness, neighborhood violence, domestic abuse are all conditions that feed into the educational risks for D.C. children. This city needs a master plan for education — and that plan must include a plan for families and neighborhoods, not just a plan for governance.

I mentioned this to Mayor Fenty at a meeting with the college and university presidents last December, and he seemed annoyed that I was implying that his governance plan could not work without more attention to the sociology of the neighborhoods in the eastern half of the city. I'm not advocating opposition to the Mayor, just pointing out from long experience with the graduates of DCPS that it takes families and communities to educate a student well, not just schools and governance structures. Washington Post Columnist Colbert I. King is writing eloquently on this topic today and in a series of columns that are well worth reading. A broad vision to make D.C. an educational capital must include broader attention to the conditions that undermine families and communities, notably poverty, illiteracy and poor prospects for all but the most menial jobs.

Let's start by expanding the vision for education itself. If we take at face value the "Doubling the Numbers" factoid that only 9% of today's ninth graders will complete college, what's going to happen to the other 91%?? We know from experience that some percentage of students will complete high school diplomas (via the GED most likely) and college degrees in their adult years. An educational master plan for D.C. must include a healthy and broad vision for improved adult education as well as early childhood, elementary and secondary.

Trinity already has a great deal of experience educating mothers as well as daughters — my dream is to be able to expand our programs some day, particularly at THE ARC in southeast Washington, to create a more comprehensive family education program that would provide a spectrum of educational services to children and parents together, in partnership with other organizations with similar goals. All studies show that the educational level of parents correlates strongly with the educational attainment of children; a program that encourages parents to complete their schooling would have direct impact on the educational opportunities of the rising generations of D.C. students.

See DCPS,the DC Education Blog, Adrian Fenty