I think something I can never wrap my head around when thinking about making change in public education seems to require so many different (competing?) groups to come together. Brier and Fabricant’s framing of Pathways is something that resonates with a lot of the experiences I’ve had teaching at CUNY. Essentially, Pathways is a kind of standardization across campuses that makes it easier to transfer – a standardization that “streamlines” and, thus, makes it easier to hit our numbers re: graduation. This IS an austerity measure and it also IS something that is ostensibly good for students and that they want, BUT what is lost in this process? Brier and Fabricant would say this notion is lost: “Our belief is that higher education must enable students to locate what and how they are learning within the context of their experience. Ideas must travel back and forth between their history, a larger social context, and the independent life of an idea or body of ideas. Without such a progressive trajectory, learning is stagnant and unlikely to be dynamic or of enduring value” (249).

This framing really contextualized some of my experiences teaching at CUNY Start (CS) at QCC. CS was founded as an intensive alternative to non-credit remedial courses, one that was $75 dollars, all inclusive. Students essentially are in class for five days a week, five hours a day, 2.5 hours for English and 2.5 hours for math (instructors taught two sections a day, making a whopping 25 contact hour week). It’s a very hard program to explain to people, and it has some similarities with the original SEEK program (although, notably, SEEK explicitly articulated itself as a racial/economic justice program, which CS does not). Back when I was hired, there was a VERY robust training process that was genuinely transformative for me, especially insofar as it valued the nurturing of learning communities. Even though, when I was initially hired, the final assessment would be the standardized CUNY exams, the training really emphasized that this was not a test prep program; while we would do some work to familiarize students with the exams, the core of the work would be in reading, writing, and critical thinking more broadly. And it genuinely did feel like that. It was the first time I had taught without grading – at all, and I think it was in these days that I really strengthened my ability to nurture intrinsic motivation and help maintain an environment based on mutual trust; it was MORE pressure to create engaging assignments, lessons, etc.

When the tests were eventually de-emphasized with the hope of phasing them out completely, at first I was happy because the tests were bad. What became clear, though, is that the dropping of the tests was about money and about “streamlining” remediation; QCC planned to get rid of conventional remedial classes altogether at this point, and so our program was a key player in this “streamlining” effort. So I found myself involved in fewer conversations about teaching, and more about…norming and rubrics, none of which involved critical thinking or creative thinking or commanding voice or anything like that, and bringing that up would almost be treated like a distraction to the “real” conversation – so much so that I thinking reading AB and all the work on SEEK in Professor Brier’s class had this kind of like, “holy shit! I wasn’t thinking completely ridiculous things” effect on me. And also it just became increasingly clear how the desire for students to get out of remediation quickly was not matched by initiatives to improve the quality of their education or provide them with more resources. Something that started emerging was hard decisions about whether or not to pass students who would almost definitely not pass a 101 class; both options seemed harmful because neither would help the student get the necessary resources. With reservations, at this point I actually advocated for “pass” to be a 70 as opposed to the suggested 65 or 60; it seemed to me to send a demoralizing and insulting message to students to tell them a D was “good enough.”

I think I just told that anecdote to give an example of how austerity driven measures (like streamlining) can SEEM good and in some ways actually BE good, but it throws the vision Brier and Fabricant have of education out the window. It’s a cheery vision of what school can do, for sure, that our conversations in this class have me questioning. I’m re-reading this book at the same time as I’m reading The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein, and I just finished the chapter about teacher’s union conflicts with community control advocates, and reading it it’s really wild to me how conversations and debates around public education have been really just recurring. Brier and Fabricant argue for the necessity of forming a “coherent” language that really fundamentally shifts people’s conception of education, one that will create a situation where faculty, students, and community members fight against austerity measures together. I think one example of that is naturalizing an idea like, say, “Our teaching conditions are students’ learning conditions.” But so many things are hard about solidarity. So many different people in the PSC, with ostensibly different interests….also teacher solidarity can be hard when CUNY does have actually bad teachers….

I’m obviously getting tired and should stop before elaborating on that last point. I wanted to end by really encouraging people to read about SEEK, and especially…if we get back to campus because I don’t think there are digital versions?…read the work by June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich re: their time in SEEK that has been compiled by the Lost & Found Project.

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