Cleaning House
Anyone who knows me well will tell you: There are few things I enjoy more than cleaning my apartment. Of course, there are days when I am feeling rushed and tired and not quite up to the task. On those days, I will do a cursory cleaning job, just enough to get rid of the dust and dirt where it shows. However, on the days when I have plenty of time, have planned accordingly, and am well-rested, I get into the dark corners and hidden spaces behind and underneath furniture where the dust and dirt have accumulated.
I compare the diversity efforts of independent schools to cleaning house. There are schools that do a cursory clean-up job, window dressing if you will. They will hire one or two TOC, admit a few students of color and conduct a Dr. King program on cue in January. Then there are other independent schools which go a step further and add some books by well-known authors of color to the English department reading list. Bolder still are the independent schools that hire a director of diversity, send faculty and administrators to diversity conferences and workshops, and organize student groups around issues of diversity and multiculturalism.
However, the real test of an independent school’s commitment to diversity and multiculturalism is demonstrating the moral courage to get into the dark corners and to look underneath and behind the furniture. This is usually done via a multicultural self-assessment. When an independent school undertakes a multicultural self-assessment, it is forced to examine all that it believes is right and good and true, and hold it up to community scrunity: an airing of the proverbial dirty laundry. It is not easy for the guardians of all that is right, good and true to confront the good, the bad and the ugly, although somewhere deep down they were well aware long before the self-assessment ever began. Ignorance, denial, neglect - benign or otherwise, and a lack of moral courage almost always prevent the guardians from doing the necessary housecleaning, and it is almost always POC which precipitate the housecleaning by speaking truth to power and pulling up the rugs to reveal what has been lurking underneath.
Should every independent school engage in a multicultural self-assessment? The idealist in me says, “yes”. Although there is no written mandate from NAIS to do so, many independent schools have stepped up to the challenge of becoming more diverse, inclusive and multicultural learning communities for students and adults. Conversely, the realist in me says that there are independent schools which do not have their hands on the right things, and therefore will not become any more diverse and multicultural than they are at the present time. In short, they will not get beyond the window-dressing stage. As a former grad. school prof. once told me, one does diversity only if one wants to. While she was speaking of individuals specifically, I would extend this to independent schools at large.
Having said the aforementioned, if independent schools desire to be 21st century schools, and, if they intend to survive and thrive, then they must be places which are inclusive, diverse, and multicultural in the truest sense. After all, we are doing it for the kids, and I can think of no better reason for wanting a clean house.
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As you know, I look at the independent school picture more from the board-member point of view than the teacher or parent point of view.
A big piece of diversity is socio-economic diversity. A great many private schools neglected to collect endowment specifically to fund scholarships. Putting it another way, they don’t have sufficiently large scholarship endowments to do much in the way of increasing socio-economic diversity.
Let us posit a school having a tuition for the 07-08 academic year of $18,000, and a total enrollment of 200. The school’s mission statement calls for 20% of the student body to be on scholarship, with at least 10% on full scholarship.
If the school has to raise that money from scratch each year, that’s (360,000+ 180,000) = $540,000 to raise a year, out of a total of $3.6 million. YIKES! That’s a big job. 15% of the budget and we haven’t yet talked about raising money for faculty salary/benefits improvement or the costs of running the physical plant.
How about raising it all from endowment: assuming a 5% average annual yield on invested funds, $10.8 million in endowment is required.
The reasons for the skimpy endowments are many — independent schools came late to the endowment party (I can recall being in a board meeting in the late 1970s when the thought of having an endowment for anything other than bricks and mortar was roundly thrashed); current costs rose very fast in the 1970s, making it difficult to balance the budgets, let alone build endowment; the baby bust of the same era, etc etc etc.
And of course, then there’s the founding-date “tax”. A school founded early in the 20th century probably has dead alumni, who might have left $$$ to the school in their estates. A school founded in the 1990s doesn’t have the numbers.
Liz Ditz - March 23, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I just wanted to say that your metaphor is a very good one. I was just considering whether to write an actual essay about the problem most schools face with “doing diversity” because of an add 1 and stir mentality or to blog it.
The questions of funds you raise also gets at the heart of failed diversity efforts at poorly funded schools, who, at least in my experience from the University end, cannot afford to pay top scholars, make more demands of the scholars time and service energy than other schools, and then make excuses for the dumbing down of classrooms and milieu to cover up their mistakes. I have often seen chairs of departments and programs encouraging people to focus on sports because they know the education we are providing is not up to parr but the sports activities are well funded by endowments from rich professional player former graduates.
anyway, I’m still collecting my thoughts but your article has certainly added to the issues to consider in a very good and welcome way.
prof blackwoman - March 23, 2007 at 9:20 pm
A related post from Dana Huff on transparency in schools:
http://www.huffenglish.com/?p=299
Liz Ditz - March 25, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Liz - thank you for the link, and for your comments. I do, however, have to disagree to some extent. Independent schools, having worked in the system for 13 years now, make choices re:where to devote their funds and spend their money. The thing about creating diverse, inclusive and multicultural independent schools is that it is an intentional act. And, there are schools which have only been in existence for 40 years and have been highly intentional in their efforts. So, I think that to give independent schools a pass and attribute the lack of diversity and multiculturalism on their campuses to insufficient endowments is insufficient. There are grants, and one can appeal to a wealthy donor - if the school is intentional and really wants to make change. As far as schools founded in the ninteties - I think that such schools are remiss for not having diversity and multiculturalism as a founding principle, and for not creating a seed fund to build up the resources to support their efforts.
Perhaps as a person of color, I am not willing to be as flexible in my thinking on this one. There are too many independents which have been around for a long time, and they need to have a commitment to the cause. While I am seeing things from a teacher’s perspective, perhaps it’s a perspective that more trustees of more independent schools need to adopt.
Prof - Thank you for the props. What you describe is a travesty, and is being played out not only on college and university campuses, but also on independent school campuses.
missprofe - April 1, 2007 at 12:04 am