Depaul College Visit

On Columbus Day (or as the Venezuelans call it, the Day of Indigenous Resistence) my Tutor/Mentor Connection colleague Nicole and I accompanied a group of potentially college bound students from Cabrini Connections on a private visit to Depaul University. I set up this visit (and numerous others) to give the kids an opportunity to learn more about the different options they will be presented with once they graduate high school. On this particular visit, our students, Yolanda (Yoyo), Breonca
(Beebee), Cierria (Cici), Dijana and Charles, learned about the potential advantages and disadvantages of attending a large private Vincentian university right smack dab in the middle of Lincoln Park. I was impressed by the diversity of the student body and their emphasis on learning through service. The kids were very interested to learn that according to Princeton Review, Depaul has the most diverse student body in the nation as well as some of the happiest students.

Yoyo, being interested in business and marketing in particular was happy to find out that business is one of the most popular areas of study at DePaul. Cierria, on the other hand, was surprised with the lack of courses offered in design, particularly fashion design. For Dijana, our current student in the spotlight, this visit served to confirm her desire to attend Depaul once she graduates so that she can study education and mathematics to prepare for a rewarding career as a High School math teacher. During our visit, Dijana made particular inquiries about dorms, trying to figure out which of the various living and learning communities would be best for her. We look forward to helping her set up these future visits if necessary and ensuring that she has adequate resources while working on her Depaul application.

It was clear that during our visit, our students learned a great deal about not only the college admissions process but the whole college experience. Since we scheduled the visit on a day where Depaul students were in school, but Chicago Public School students had off, our kids were able to see students hastily making their way from class to class, relaxing in the quad, signing petitions in the student union and organizing fundraisers in the dining hall. Though everyone said that the experience was beneficial, it was especially encouraging to hear that every one of our students is planning on attending the next college visit I've planned, which will be next Friday, Oct 24th, at Westwood College. In fact, the kids don't know it yet, but I'm planning on having them tell the rest of the students about how eye-opening their Depaul University visit was at our tutoring sessions this week in order to ensure a better turnout to our upcoming visits (which include Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago State University, University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University).

While on the subject of college preperation, I'm in the process of compiling a college prep library for our high school students that will consist of ACT and SAT prep books/CDs, princeton review and other guides to colleges, SAT subject test prep guides as well as a collection of successful admissions essays from various schools. Therefore, if you have any of the materials that I just mentioned, and I know you must if you are either attending college now or are a graduate, please consider donating them to Cabrini Connections so that our kids might benefit. Please email me at chris.warrens.mail@gmail.com, call me at 312-492-9614 or leave me a comment here on the blog and we can coordinate a way to get your college prep materials in the hands of some kids who could really benefit from them. Thanks so much for your time and generosity. I hope to be hearing from you soon.

Volunteer Spotlight: Nicole Gordon

This week, we’d like to put the volunteer spotlight on Nicole Gordon! This is Nicole’s third year as a tutor here at Cabrini Connections where she’s been offering help and guidance to LaRoyce Ratcliff (a.k.a. Chucky), who started the program the same time that she did. She has been very flexible with both Cabrini Connections and Chucky, her student, trying to accommodate Chucky’s schedule as well as the fact that he has a very long commute to Cabrini Connections each week. Nicole and her husband, Peter John Flory (pictured below with Nicole and Chucky) have been enthusiastic volunteers and mentors constantly offering to go above and beyond. For example, Nicole is involved with the art club, which meets on Monday nights. There, she shares her considerable artistic talent with our youth, three of whom are pictured with her above, encouraging them to develop their own skills and techniques.

We are especially lucky to have Nicole with us because she is a professionally trained, up and coming Chicago-area artist! She studied art in Italy at Lorenzo Medici University and then got her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Michigan. Check out her amazing art on her website www.nicolegordon.com or in a number of galleries, museums, collections or public facades around the Midwest and East Coast. Astute viewers may note that her unusual style is fueled by inspiration from well-known Medieval and Renaissance artists. Her artwork explores the complexity of human nature and illustrates human weakness throughout history allowing viewers to have the opportunity to study and question, themes that she emphasizes as she works with our youth .

Thanks Nicole for lending your time and talents here at Cabrini Connections!

Radical Math

Hey all (and particularly those in education)-- So as I was going through the extensive collection of web links (nearly 1500) that the Tutor/Mentor Connection has compiled to help our students and mentors easily access resources on the internet, I came across one particularly interesting link I'd like to share with you all. I don't know about you all, but I've never really been a math person. This makes it particularly difficult for me to get our students excited about doing their math homework during tutoring sessions, even on the off chance that I actually retained enough trig, calc, agrebra...etc to be able to help them in any meaningful way. For me, and I suspect more than a few others, my distaste for math was primarily because, unlike science or social studies, I didn't really see any potentially useful real-life application of the knowledge, particularly in my more advanced courses. Even if I could utilize trig in real life and figure out how tall a building was based on its shadow, I wasn't convinced that applied trig was going to change the world; Thankfully, the folks at "Radical Math" believe otherwise.

Radical Math is a resource for educators who are interested in integrating issues of social and economic justice into their math classes and curriculum. If you check out http://www.radicalmath.org/ you'll find over 700 lesson plans, charts, data sets, graphs...etc that allow teachers to spice up their math instruction by bringing these ideas into the classroom.

So how does one combine social/economic justice issues with math you ask??? Let me give you an example that is currently part of the curriculum at Chicago's own Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice.

I'm confident most of my readers are aware of the events surrounding the so-called Jena 6, if not (which is understandable since the trial has been more or less absent from mainstream media), it is summarized on page 4 of this document, which is a lesson plan that uses the Jena 6 to engage students a variety of subjects. The mathmatics component of the lesson plan teaches kids combinatorics (i.e. permutations, combinations n C r..etc) by having students perform such operations as:

Determine the probability of randomly selecting a 12-person, all-white jury from a town
that is 85.6% white, 14.4% people of color (mainly African American), of 2,154 adults
(2000 census)

and then generalizing the formula for combinatorics ( n C r )

This exercise also allows students to investigate the concepts of randomness and what it is like to "think like a mathematician while at the same time seeing how knowledge of fundamental mathematical concepts can lead to greater understanding of complex social justice issues like racism.

This is just one of hundreds of ways that Radical Math's curricula fuses social and economic justice issues with mathematical concepts to increase the relevance and understanding of both among students. Here, you can find some of the other ways they suggest augmenting math curricula with social and economic justice issues such as the following:

Prisons, racial profiling, death penalty
Poverty, minimum/living wage, sweatshops
Housing, gentrification, homeownership
War, defense budgets, military recruiting
Public Health: AIDS, asthma, health insurance, diabetes, smoking
Educational access, funding, testing, achievement gaps
Environment: pollution, hunger, food and water resources
Welfare, TANF
Immigration

Man I wish my math teachers used some of this curricula instead of boring me out of my gourd for all these years! Have a great weekend everyone and please do a whole generation of kids a favor and tell the educators in your life about Radical Math, it just might help us eventually bring about some real change.

over and out

Volunteer Spotlight: Alexandria Hill

Aquarius and former Cabrini Green resident Alexandria Hill was looking for a place to volunteer her time last year when she found out about Cabrini Connections. After finding out that we work with kids from the neighborhood where she spent part of her childhood, she was eager to get involved and so, after mentoring a student, Shaquita, last year, she offered to become one of our Wednesday night Volunteer Coordinators! Alexandria has repeatedly gone above and beyond her duties as Volunteer Coordinator and has demonstrated a true dedication to our kids and our organization. For example, over the summer Alex helped us organize our Welcome Back Brunch and 3 day long Edgewood College Experience. Last weekend, Alex woke up early to present a well-attended seminar at our Tutor Training Conference about student behavior, how to build boundaries and manage expectations in mentoring youth.

Alex is a recent graduate from Illinois State University where she studied psychology, which she says has helped her a great deal in working with our youth, particularly her background in behavior modification. During her time in college she volunteered at the Normal Public Library for their Partners in Reading program. There, she offered reading help to elementary school students.

Alex is currently working as a Senior Representative for Primerica Financial Services where she helps families get out of debt and build assets. When she’s not working or volunteering her time at Cabrini Connections, you can probably find Alex at Pepe’s, her favorite Mexican restaurant in Chicago and/or reading horror and suspense novels by her favorite authors Stephen King and Dean Koontz. In fact, when she was younger, she wrote poems and short stories inspired by her favorite authors and wanted to be, in her own words, “the female, black Stephen King.” As much as we’d love to read Alex’s twisted prose, we here at Cabrini Connections are glad that Alex has decided to dedicate herself to helping others find their way out of poverty, rather than just scaring the crap out of them.

Good article about racism in the NY Times today

Hey everyone, I just wanted to direct you all to a great little piece by Nicholas Kristof that's in today's New York Times. It addresses some of the same issues surrounding racism that I discussed in my recent post in relation to the election. It cites a few more interesting papers that deal with racism in the hiring process for black applicants. The crux of his argument is that, in general, we have implicit racial biases that affect our behavior and cognition even though we may not be aware of their existence. Psychologists have termed the unconscious racial discrimination that occurs as a result of these biases "aversive racism" and research has shown that this type of racism has not declined significantly over time, despite the fact that conscious prejudice (or outright admitted racism) has in fact declined significantly. In other words, evidence shows that people still maintain unconscious racist beliefs yet do believe that they are racist... a phenomenon that Kristof dubs "Racism Without Racists".

If the earlier link doesn't work, the article can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05kristof.html?em

Student Spotlight: Eboni Rivera

One student who has taken full advantage of all that Cabrini Connections has to offer is Eboni Rivera. She’s one of our graduating seniors and will be finishing up her 6th year here at Cabrini Connections. That means that she’s been with us since 7th grade, for the full duration of our program! She’s been paired up with her mentor, Susan, for the past 3 years and they have become a tight-knit pair, sharing everything from their birthdays, to nights out on the town!

Despite being actively pursued by elite schools like Northwestern University, Eboni, who attends Kenwood Academy High School, has her sights set on Florida A&M University, which she fell in love with during a campus visit last year. She hopes to be one of the first graduates of their brand new college of journalism where she plans to specialize in broadcast journalism. She has been diligently taking all of the required journalism classes at Kenwood and is active in both her school newspaper, and the Cabrini Connections writing club. Since her father is Puerto Rican and her mother African-American, she is particularly excited about engaging both aspects of her ethnic heritage at a historically black university located in a state with a large Latino population.

Eboni is also very active in her church, the Christ Universal Temple, where she participates in the Project A.C.H.I.E.V.E. program, a series of Saturday college prep seminars that offer: tutorial classes to prepare students for college placement tests and exams like the ACT and SAT, scholarship opportunities, as well as their annual tour of historically black colleges and universities. She visited Florida A&M through this program last year as well as Clark Atlanta University, her second choice school. We will be working with Eboni throughout the year during the college admissions process to ensure that she gets into her top choice schools and can negotiate the best financial aid possible.

Eboni tells me that “For me, Cabrini Connections is like a second home. I come here for everything I need. I can always use the internet, get help with my college applications, my math homework, and use whatever supplies I want.” Since Eboni will be the first to admit how much she has benefited from her relationship with her mentor and other resources here at Cabrini Connections, she and a friend from church, Kelly, are currently organizing a mentoring group at her church for girls ages 6-18. They hope to offer some of the same types of resources and relationships for at-risk girls in their south side community that Cabrini Connections offers to kids in the Cabrini Green neighborhood. We are so proud to have students like Eboni who are not only on the fast-track to success but are also making efforts to help others follow in their footsteps.

Knowing the Research: Racism in the Job Market

Hello everyone! So we are in our third week of tutoring here at Cabrini Connections this week and everything is running very smoothly! Our clubs are going well, we're getting a lot of student interest in our new college-prep curriculum and dozens of kids have signed up for our 5 scheduled college visits. Since our program is running so well, I thought I'd indulge and write a post about some recent research I read about discrimination in the job market. Since it's difficult enough to get a decent job these days, it's important to realize the unique disadvantages that African-American applicants face, particularly low-income applicants such as our students who already suffer a lack of resources and flexibility afforded to other job-seekers.

In the last 15 years or so, much research has tried to investigate the types of discrimination that job applicants of color face (particularly Blacks and Latinos). Arguments have been made claiming that the real reason why applicants of color are not offered jobs at a rate consistent with white applicants is the difference in skill and experience between the candidates (Farkas and Vicknair 1996; Neal and Johnson 1996). These studies also argue that racial inequality in wages is largely explained by differences in cognitive skill. However, a recent study by Pager, Western and Bonikowski of Princeton University demonstrated that in fact there is a significant racial preference for white candidates among hundreds of New York City employers when confronted with otherwise identical White, Latino and Black applicants.

In this study, Black, Latino and White men were recruited and then matched on age, height, verbal skills, interactional styles and physical attractiveness, were trained together and given fictitious resumes indicating identical educational accomplishment, work experience and neighborhood of residence. These so-called "testers" then presented themselves at a series of randomly selected job interviews as high school graduates with consistent work experience in entry-level jobs in order to see which applicants were more likely to be called-back for another interview and/or hired. Great care was made to ensure that every possible difference was controlled between the applicants in each set.

After the each matched set of Black, Latino and White applicants interviewed individually at 171 NYC employers, their call-backs were tallied up. Remarkably, the White applicant in each group received callbacks 31% of the time, more than the 25% callback rate of the Latino applicants and significantly more than the 15% callback rate of the Black applicants. Remember, these applicants were matched so that they were identical in every way, except their race... yet Black applicants were half as likely to get a job offer than White applicants! This suggests that a Black applicant would have to look twice as long for a job than an equally qualified White applicant!

Even more shocking than this was the second part of the experiment, where matched Black and Latino applicants applied for the same set of jobs as an equally qualified White applicant... except the White applicants were instructed to reveal that they had just been released from an 18 month prison stay for a drug felony (cocaine possession with intent to distribute). Amazingly, these white applicants with a criminal record got callbacks from 17% of the 171 employers, compared to 13% of employers for otherwise identical Black applicants with no criminal record!!

The results of this study, which are consistent with earlier work ( summarized in Heckman and Siegelman 1993) show that we are most certainly not yet living in what some social commentators are calling a "postracial" society. Clearly race continues to play a large role in the hiring practices of many employers, which puts qualified African-American applicants at a significant disadvantage compared to Whites and even Latinos. For this reason, we here at Cabrini Connections are committed to offering our students, who are overwhelmingly African-American, the resources they need to help surmount the additional challenges that Black youth face growing up in poverty. By getting these youth involved in one-on-one relationships with a dedicated mentor, it is our hope that our youth can benefit from access to their mentors' networks, which will give them a leg up in the quest for employment, college admission and future success in their chosen careers. We hope that these mentors can connect their mentees with jobs and pull them towards careers that they might otherwise be impeded from seeking.

It is a sad fact that we still have to deal with racism in today's society. However, rather than sweep it under the rug and ignore it's consequences, allowing it to fester and grow, studies like this one confront its effects head on, forcing us to address it's existence and actively combat it, knowing that, to quote Malcolm X, "all human beings are respected as such, regardless of their color".

References

Farkas, George. and K. Vicknair. 1996. “Appropriate Tests of Racial Wage
Discrimination Require Controls for Cognitive Skill: omment on Cancio, Evans,
and Maume.” American Sociological Review 61:557-60.

Heckman, James and Peter Siegelman. 1993. “The Urban Institute Audit Studies: Their Methods and Findings.” Pp. 187-258 in Clear and Convincing Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America, edited by Michael Fix and Raymond Struyk. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Neal, Derek, and William Johnson. 1996. “The Role of Premarket Factors in Black-White
Wage Differences.” Journal of Political Economy 104:869-895.

Pagar, D., Western, B., Bonikowski, B. (2006) Race at Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the New York City Job Market. Report prepared for the 50th Anniversary of the New York City Commission on Human Rights.