Review: Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education

Review: Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education
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Rose, Mike. Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education. New York:
The New Press, 2012.  Print

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            In Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, Mike Rose makes a compelling case for the importance of a “second chance” education.  Second chance education targets so-called “non-traditional students” and happens in places like “working class schools, blue collar job sites, adult schools, literacy programs and remedial classrooms,” (117) places that rarely figure in the national conversation about postsecondary education. He emphasizes this point in his one-page preface, titled “Second Chances”:

Back to School demonstrates what education can do, even though it was often earlier schooling that let people down. . . . When we are at our best as a society, our citizens are not trapped by their histories. Sadly this possibility is shrinking, partly because of a damaged and unstable economy but more so because of our political response to the economy. There are better ways to respond and to foster the growth of a wider sweep of our population. I hope Back to School points us in that direction (xiii).

Published in 2012, the rest of the book consists of six chapters and a conclusion where Rose documents the real-life stories of the people he interviewed and relies on his own experience working with non-traditional students to tell their stories.  Rose conducted extensive research and interviewed adult students attending community colleges, occupational and other educational programs.  He interviewed back-to-school adults who ranged in age from their early 20s to their 50s. Many of them were employed at low-skilled, low-paying and often unstable jobs. Most of them were caring for children and families in addition to attending school, while some were living on unemployment or supporting themselves with jobs at their schools.   Not surprisingly, the majority of these adult students expressed an economic motive for going back to school. 

Written in an easy-to-read anecdotal style, Back to School is a must read for anyone who cares about the education of America’s underprivileged class.  Rose writes more like a journalist in this book rather than in the academic language of a professor at UCLA.  In fact, reading Back to School seems more like reading a series of feature articles in a major news magazine.  Maybe that is Rose’s point: to make reading Back to School accessible to as many audiences as possible. 

  Rose uses detailed words to paint sympathetic portraits of individuals who he meets while visiting different community colleges and adult educations centers.  His narratives are up close and personal.  Overall Back to School is a mélange of head and heart—social science research mixed with heart-tugging stories about overcoming systemic and personal obstacles.  For instance, in the introduction of Back to School readers are introduced to Henry who is working toward his associate of arts degree.  Rose describes him as:

a stocky guy, broad across the chest, with powerful forearms from years in a wheelchair.  He wears a baseball cap backward, a sweatshirt—both with the local team’s logo—fingerless gloves, baggy shorts and socks that come up to his knees.  His face is vibrant with earnestness (1).

Henry who did well during his first two years of high school is shot by a rival gang member and paralyzed from the waist down.  Eventually, he comes to the realization that he has no place on the streets.  Henry thought to himself: “I don’t have the use of my legs but I have the use of my mind” (3)  One night, Henry stumbled across the local community college website and the next morning he got on a commuter train and decided to enroll right then and there.

When Henry receives his certificate as a computer security specialist, he decides to take some general education courses, including sociology and history.  Eventually, he decides that he wants to apply to a four-year university, and he tells Rose that he would like to work in conflict resolution, helping “at-risk” kids who are “searching for an identity.”

Helping poor and working-class students like Henry costs money, but Rose seems disgusted with how debates about adult education, in particular, always seem obsessed with the money and quantitative measurement.  “These days,” Rose says, “the economic rationale is the only one that has a prayer of swaying policy makers” (28).  One thing that is really refreshing about Back to School is that it is very personal, and Rose offers an alternative voice to the number- crunching bureaucrats who are only concerned with the bottom-line: statistics.  Rose reminds us that there are real people behind the numbers and that numbers fill in only “part of the picture of complex human reality” (14).

While Rose acknowledges the importance of education as a vehicle of social mobility, he says that society needs to think seriously about the moral and civic components as well. Rose uses stories like Henry’s to illustrate how students at some point can conclude on their own that college is about a lot more than simply earning a credential so that they can make more money.  He says people enroll in college “to feel their minds working and learn new things, to help their kids, to feel competent and to remedy a poor education” (41).  Or, as one community college student tells Rose, to “discover somebody you never knew you were” (6).  Rose implies that if we democratize knowledge in America that our society will produce well-rounded citizens—people who are more likely to vote, pay taxes, and take better care of their health, among other things.  In that way, Rose is presenting a counterargument to conservatives who believe that free market policies or the “invisible hand” of the economy are the only way to solve the socioeconomic issues of working-class and poor Americans.

Unfortunately when many of these students enroll in college they are inadequately prepared for the rigors of academic life.  Rose draws attention to the nearly invisible world of remedial and vocational education.  For example, remedial courses, especially in writing, generally need to be passed before students can take college courses for credit.  Rose argues that remedial education suffers from a kind of “academic snobbery” and that it is out there somewhere in the “hinterlands of higher education” (186).  He also refers to a history of disparaging terms for remedial students from the “shirker” and the “dullard” to the “immature” and the “socially maladjusted.”  Basically, Rose demonstrates how the image of the remedial student has always been sullied by social Darwinist theories about race and class—that is, the notion that poor, immigrant and minority students who are the largest block of remedial students generally do not have the brains or the work ethic to succeed academically.  He says that we tend to perceive remedial students as apathetic, undisciplined and slow and that we tend to blame their shortcomings on individual failings and character defects rather than on institutional failures or difficult life circumstances.  To illustrate his point, Rose says that a student who fell asleep in class will more than likely be seen as being lazy and disrespectful when in actuality the student may have come straight to school from the graveyard shift.  The majority of community college students have jobs.

Conventional wisdom has it that remedial students have problems learning so their curriculum needs to be dumbed-down in order to meet them on their level.  According to Rose, remedial education clings to “bankrupt assumptions about teaching and learning that profoundly limit its effectiveness” (186).  Rose says that educators assume that material must be stripped down to its most basic level in order for students to understand it.  This situation results in a “skills and drills” curriculum that Rose aptly characterizes as limited to “narrow, mechanical pursuits stripped of fuller meaning” (126). 

For Rose, the way out of this dilemma is to add authentic scholastic content to remedial courses. Basic writing instruction, in Rose’s view, should attempt to “explain the origins and purposes of the conventions of literacy” (129).  This explanation would include grammar and punctuation, as well as, discussion about complex ideas such as genre.  Rose says that he wants to get rid of the model of writing that students have come to expect.  He writes:

I wanted them to begin to conceive of writing as a way to think something through and give order to those thoughts.  I wanted them to understand writing as persuasion, to get the feel for writing to someone, a feel for audience.  And I wanted them to revise their writing process, which for most them was a one-draft affair typically done the night before or the morning the assignment was due…I wanted them to see that good writing was more than correct writing (137-8).

Now when it comes to vocational education, Rose believes that schools should also increase their scholastic content.  Rose says, “Imagine how the house or the automobile or the computer could be the core of a rich, integrated curriculum: one that includes social and technical history, science and economics and hands-on assembly and repair” (172).  Basically what Rose is advocating is the integration of vocational training with academic school subjects or an “integrated curriculum” that would bridge the academic-vocational divide that he sees as a major dilemma of adult education. 

One has to wonder if Rose is indirectly trying to remove the stigma that comes from blue-collar skills and manual labor.  The fact is, rightly or wrongly, that blue-collar work does not enjoy the same social and economic prestige as professional or managerial work. Yet, Rose maintains that there is “a level and variety of mental activity involved in doing physical work that is largely unacknowledged, even invisible” (133).  He gives some examples from welding to show that it can be cognitively demanding.  Here, at this juncture, some critics would accuse Rose of trying to link brains and brawn. 

It is clear that Mike Rose has a dilemma.  He has a worthwhile vision of democratizing knowledge for all Americans.  Yet, if his goal to democratize all kinds of knowledge, including vocational knowledge, this desire will require some kind of reimagining on the part of society to buy-in to his vision of the melding of academic and vocational instruction.   How would our educational system look if educators had to use, for example, cosmetology, as a springboard into the standard academic system?  What kind of academic courses would cosmetology students take?  Do they have to take chemistry?

In order for Rose’s vision of an expansion of knowledge in America to come to fruition, there would need to be more of an investment in America’s community colleges.   Here’s why: More than four out of every 10 undergraduate students attend a community college.  Some 1,100 community colleges across the country serve a student population of around 13 million.  They are vital institutions, providing access to higher education for low-income, minority and first-generation college students, the latter making up more that forty percent of all community college students. 

In Chapter 6: “The People’s College”, perhaps the best chapter in Back to School, Rose offers suggestions on how to make community colleges more welcoming, user-friendly and effective.  The title alone speaks to the grassroots work that takes place in community colleges.  This chapter is particular strong because it offers achievable, progressive and practical suggestions for improving the college experience for many non-traditional students. For example, Rose points out that a single instructor could make a huge difference just by holding mandatory office hours so that students can become more comfortable speaking to faculty members.  In addition, if a student does not know how to take adequate notes, an instructor could give students real examples of exemplary and lackluster notes and ask them to highlight what the key differences are between them.  Rose even discusses how the physical environment of the campus can affect a student’s well-being.  Overall, Rose reminds us that by empathetic we can create valuable experiences for all students.

It is hard to read Back to School and to walk away without concluding that these students deserve a second chance and that society needs to find a ways to make more resources available for second chance students and the community colleges they attend.  Mike Rose brilliantly dishes the academic jargon for empathetic storytelling and in the process democratizes the discussion outside the usual cast of characters: teachers, students, administrators and policymakers.  Indeed, the issues raised in Back to School affect us all.