Confronting the Brutal Facts

I have worked in Higher Education since 2002. I have been an administrator since 2003 and dean 

since 2008. I'm sharing not just to point out my advancing age, but to start making a point. The point is it's been interesting to have people ask me in the last year questions like "why do you seem different now?" Poverty has been my topic of choice for most of my career, so I was a little taken aback by the question. But it has been different in 2018 as we have tried to move to concrete action from our ideas.The other point I'm trying to make about my long tenure is it can lead to struggling to see your environment for what it really is. You live in it for so long, and you get invested in what you've been doing for years. I think my economics classes in college referred to those as sunk costs, and maybe the change in me is that I stopped chasing them. That started with what the author Jim Collins called "confronting the brutal facts" in his book Good to Great.

"You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts" 30% was the first brutal fact I had to confront.

The Community College Research Center tweeted out the stats pictured here. My team and I worked our tails off and took pride in offering great developmental education courses, but here was pretty incontrovertible evidence showing the work to be kind of futile. I knew the attrition rates in those courses as well as the pass rates. One of our measures of success is moving students onto credit coursework and here was research saying, just skipping us was about as effective. That was a brutal fact. How do you deal with the fact this work you take such pride in and work so hard at, really doesn't work? In your 16th year (if you're me) you have to accept that your foundational beliefs are false...

Admitting you have a problem is a first step, and I had admitted mine. That started to change things. The next brutal fact I had to confront was there was an ethos in working with students in poverty that they should be grateful for whatever they got. It's hard to think maybe I even participated in it at some level. I've talked before about building systems of help that in reality were coercive (my mistake) and actually the opposite of poverty informed. When you see that people are conditional about who they want to help, you can't unsee it. I've heard people who need help referred to as "good bets" or "bad bets" which is pretty darn dehumanizing when you think about it, even just for a second. I hear criticism people don't behave the way we expect. Well that's from our context not theirs, and it's almost always about showing enough gratitude. Why do we require you to be eternally grateful for getting what my children get just from an accident of birth? It's insidious really. But like Collins said, you can start to make a new series of decisions when you confront the brutal facts. I knew our next decision had to be to remove judgment in every place possible and to better understand the context of the students we serve. In other words, we need to fix ourselves, not them.

If you have decided what you used to do (no matter how well intended) was the wrong approach, you confront the fact there are no sacred cows. That's excruciating for me. I'm a person who likes context and history, and I wanted the story of our division to be positive though the years and about growing to our best selves. I wanted it be a story built on foundations that lead to continuous improvement and greatness. But the facts were saying that wasn't the case. I wanted to look backwards for the lessons to learn, but the landscape had shifted. It was freeing on some level. We no longer had to display loyalty and fidelity to history (which as we know, might not even be factual, even the part I participated in), we needed to focus on what we were trying to do! When people asked what has changed, that's probably the biggest thing. Disconnecting from trying to serve historical precedents allowed us to say we exist to move people to post-secondary training as quickly as possible so we can help change their economic reality. It allowed us to declare our poverty informed movement and our guiding mantra Every Barrier That Can be Removed, Should Be Removed.

So, as my team and I try to find our way in this nascent #RealCollege movement, we are committed to dealing with brutal facts while retaining an absolute belief in what we can do and the people we serve. Our version of that bit of wisdom from Collins is employing optimism and amnesia at the same time. We believe in people and when they fail, we forget and believe in them again. We know for a fact our students have complicated lives and as one of our teachers said, emergencies most of us don't have to deal with. The brutal fact is if we are poverty informed, we must design systems which work for those students too. We must find a way to get them the learning that can change their reality. This will lead us down paths that look very different than our historical ones. So be it. Our goal is not just to get better, it is to be the single most poverty informed division (and I believe my college will follow) in America. Our goal will not get done in half-measures and by compromise. It will get done by a fearless inventory of the brutal facts and a willingness to go where they lead us. Our students deserve that and more.