Thoughts on "Readiness"

I see things differently than I used to. It gives me hope that others can too. Although I have seen poverty as a central issue for most of my adult life, I have definitely evolved in how I approach the issue. As I have pushed my team toward a more poverty informed approach (and pushed myself personally), one of the paradigm shifts we have wrestled with is the idea of who is "ready" for college. It's an issue that resonates across the country and a quick Google search will give you plenty to think about. I've come to believe that a poverty informed approach, at an open-admission institution like mine, means readiness is signified by the act of entering our doors and telling us you want to go to school. Let me tell you how I got there and why.

My career in higher education started in 2002, and I was a K-12 teacher before that. I came into K-12 right as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was at its peak. NCLB was flawed to say the least, but I've always loved the K-12 ethos of finding a path to success for the student in front of you. We often fell short, but I heard a lot less talk about readiness in that world. When I transitioned to the college, I was surprised to hear a lot about assessment and placement testing (but the kind that only placed you in remedial work), and even though it felt odd, I started to internalize the idea you had to be "ready" for college. Occasionally, I'd question it at a meeting, saying it seemed odd to assume we knew what "ready" meant. I'd say it implied we had figured out exactly how college should work, and that seemed improbable. I'd like to say people found me compelling and the world started to shift, but mostly they would look at me like I was from another planet. Eventually, this led to me deciding they must be right, and I must be wrong. Maybe someone from K-12 just didn't get it? Nowadays, I would argue K-12 is way ahead of us on this, but I didn't feel that way back then. I felt like an uninformed outsider.

Deciding we "knew" what it was to be "ready" led to a part of my career I'm not very proud of in hindsight. I recall staff meetings discussing students who were struggling and saying things like "s/he just needs to get some things straightened away, before it is time for school" and other such sentiments. The problem was, we rarely knew exactly how or where they would straighten these things out. We would talk about them needing to "get more stable", when reality was coming to school was seeking stability. Reality was the wages you could earn without post-secondary training were never going to stabilize you. We had invented a imaginary world where students could go fix themselves, and then return to this thing called college when they were ready. It seems like lunacy to me now but listen at your campus, and I'll bet conversations like that occur often. It's in the DNA.

My personal shift started in about 2010, when we started to have discussions about "the profile of the successful student" in preparing for a Title III grant application. The idea was we could identify the behaviors of these students and then teach and encourage other students to emulate them. It was well intended, but it sat wrong with me immediately. I knew enough about poverty to know the successful student wasn't generally in poverty. I also knew enough about our success rates with other marginalized groups and was terrified we would use the "successful student" approach to assume

those groups had deficits and struggled for that reason. So, I started to say the same thing in every planning meeting "Let's prepare the college for the students, not the other way around." I felt pretty brilliant, although later I realized I had "discovered" that idea, about as much as Columbus "discovered" America. People much smarter than me had been talking about the same concept for some time, and it led to great work like the book pictured here "Becoming a Student Ready College." I wish I'd written it, but I certainly didn't. However, I did help shift our grant to the idea that we would research who are students actually were, and then invest in developing our faculty to help them more effectively. We weren't talking about poverty directly yet, but we had put the onus back on the institution, instead of the student. It was an important moment. But our real seismic shift occurred a little over a year ago, when we started to look at our flawed assessment and placement structure. After much debate, there came a clear directive from our leadership to open the doors much wider to students, and then identify the supports they need for success. The work continues today. We started with academic support, but quickly realized what many of us knew instinctively. We didn't lose students due to intelligence or grit, we lost them to life circumstances. Or as I've become fond of saying, "Our students aren't broken, they're broke..." The transformation to being truly poverty-informed will be key to fulfilling our promise.

So, at the end of the day, I have no idea what "ready" means for college. Of course, there are some obvious outliers, but there is so much room in the middle, I'm not sure I care to work on readiness anymore. Like the author's above, I believe our best future is a student ready college that unleashes potential that has gone untapped too long. I believe a campus that takes poverty on in a concerted and focused way could change the world. It's not just good for the individuals we serve (although it certainly is a good thing). My community has a workforce shortage, and so do many others. A technical college that addresses poverty barriers directly and effectively will create a workforce from a population that has been left out of the sunlight of opportunity. That is good for everyone. To do this, we must once and for all, let go of the concept of "readiness." The difference between success and failure is so small and fragile. I'll leave you with a recent story from a student. She was describing her journey from addiction, homelessness, and poverty, to a future at school. She talked about feeling defeated when one staff member implied someone with her background might need to wait to be ready for school, and she talked about how she could have left that day, but another staff member gave her hope and a bag to keep her things in. She shared even now, her success is fragile. She told me a story of forgetting her ID one day, which also serves as a bus pass. She shared she didn't know how she would have gotten home that day, and how she felt hopeless and like school was futile. But she also shared the administrator in that poverty informed department saw her and asked if she was okay, and when she said she didn't know how she was getting home, he found $5 in petty cash and got her on the bus. He didn't know she told a friend later, that for the first time in a year, she had thoughts of giving up and walking to a drug house near campus, and five dollars' worth of kindness eliminated those thoughts. What if we'd told her she needed to go away and fix herself? What would the lost potential of a person be? So, we will be poverty informed and student ready. We must, it's not optional.