Academic Triage: Challenges Confronting College ...

Academic Triage: Challenges Confronting College Preparation Programs QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 2004

William G. Tierney University of Southern California By way of portraiture, the author recounts his interactions with three young adults engaged in a precollege outreach program. By contextualizing the students’ experiences, he provides insight into the emotions, needs, and educational challenges faced by students in high school intervention programs. The findings point to the necessity of recognizing the social context in which college preparation programs occur, the importance of offering systematic and sustained support to students, and the embedded nature of college preparation programs requiring coordinated and comprehensive communication across high schools, universities, and outreach programs. Keywords:

portraiture; access; agency; college preparation; poverty

Triage: the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients, and esp. battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors.

With less than an hour to midnight, the meeting finally concludes. Discarded take-out boxes from a nearby Chinese restaurant lie haphazardly around the room, and candy wrappers are everywhere. Although we have been meeting virtually nonstop for 2 days, there remains a surprising degree of energy in the room. Few of the 25 high school teachers, counselors, and assorted extras have rushed back to their college dorm rooms for some well-deserved sleep. Instead, people continue to talk in small groups about the students we have worked with while participating in the college preparatory writing program. “She’s a great kid, and she works hard. I just don’t know if she could make it away from home. Maybe we should think of a college closer to here.” QUALITATIVE 10.1177/1077800404269441 Tierney / ACADEMIC INQUIRY TRIAGE / Month XXXX

Author’s Note: The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful comments of Yvonna Lincoln, Mike Rose, Jonathan Kozol, Cheryl Fields, Zoë Corwin, Julia Colyar, and Michelle Knight. Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 10 Number 6, 2004 950-962 DOI: 10.1177/1077800404269441 © 2004 Sage Publications

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“Somebody’s got to help him get his green card. He says he’s filed for it, but there’s so much paperwork—he can’t do it on his own. We can’t let him slip through the cracks.” “He was really nervous about coming here. But I think it’s made a difference. Maybe this will be the thing that gets him focused for next year.”1 The conversations continue as people begin to drift back to their dorm rooms. I absentmindedly wonder what critics of schoolteachers are doing on a steamy weekend night, when the teachers I am observing have given up a summer weekend to help low-income, urban youth prepare for college. The mission of this particular college preparation program is similar to most other college preparation programs: to get underrepresented students into college. An ancillary goal is to enable these youth to persist in college and graduate. The manner in which this program seeks to achieve its goal is twofold: an intensive writing/counseling weekend for soon-to-be high school seniors and follow-up counseling and guidance sessions throughout the senior year at the students’ high school. During the weekend sessions, students receive guidance on writing their college essays. The teachers and counselors spend the late afternoons and evenings discussing each student’s strengths and weaknesses and what might be done to help the student during the senior year. The assumption is that low-income, urban students do not have the familial or educational support structures that exist for wealthier students. The result is that many students who are able to go to college do not. Hence, the program’s goal is to enable those low-income, urban students who have the ability, but not the support, to get into college. The program’s objectives are to provide the counseling and structure that enable these students to consider college as an option when they graduate from high school. As with the majority of other college preparation programs, this one is largely geared neither toward the highly gifted nor the weakest students. The premise of the program is to focus on students of average ability levels. However, many such programs often serve students who might seem as if they are above average, but because of their surroundings, they are able to participate. The underlying assumptions of college preparation programs are not unlike triage for soldiers or disaster victims, albeit all of these patients are young and poor, and most are either African American or Latino. The school years for these children are akin to a battlefield or a disaster site, and the weakest students are reminiscent of victims on the field. With limited supplies, one cannot save everyone; efforts are made to help the most likely survivors. In what follows, I offer the stories of three students who received academic triage. I have kept in touch with them during the course of their senior year through follow-up interviews and e-mail correspondence. My purpose in providing portraits of the students is to develop an understanding of how


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they view their academic and social worlds. In soliciting their perspective, I am suggesting that it is possible to improve these worlds with them.2 Far too often, the literature on the transition to college, and college preparation programs in particular, is void of student voices. It is as if programs exist populated by faceless entities. In the business-minded ethos of the early 21st century, researchers and policy analysts search for outcomes that are cost effective. The call goes out for “bottom lines” based on “high standards.” Researchers search for, and develop, instrumental actions focused on standardized tests so that the test takers will be competitive in the marketplace. The dialogue surrounding educational life has become primarily managerial and technocratic, and student voices are absent (see Finn, 1991). Accordingly, I have used the idea of “portraiture” as an entry point to understanding the challenges that students in college preparation programs face. As Lawrence-Lightfoot and Hoffman Davis (1997) have commented, portraiture uses quite standard empirical data with aesthetic expression that blends art and science, humanistic sensibilities and scientific rigor (p. 3). My purpose in developing these portraits has been to capture the richness of these students’ lives that gets framed not only by their everyday school experiences but also through the complexity of their sociocultural backgrounds. Portraits are dialogical paintings that get developed through intense interactions between the portraitist and the individual portrayed. Portraits are less historical documents outlining how individuals arrived at a particular point in time and more examinations of the cultural situation in which individuals find themselves that points to where they want to go. Portraits are also developed for individuals beyond the rarefied air of the academy. Instead of a language that is often arcane and esoteric, portraits try to invite the reader to reflect on a painting in much the way someone would do when looking at a piece of art at a museum, a gallery, a street fair, or by a friend. Portraits are aimed at enlarging the conversation about a pressing social problem. Rather than assume the stance of the disengaged researcher by employing the passive voice, the author of the portrait acknowledges his or her relationship to the portrait by the use of the first person. As Lawrence-Lightfoot and Hoffman Davis (1997) summarized, The portrait, then, creates a narrative that is at once complex, provocative, and inviting, that attempts to be holistic, revealing the dynamic interaction of values, personality, structure and history. And the narrative documents human behavior and experience in context. (p. 11)

Through the use of portraits, my intent is not only to come to a greater understanding of the specific lives of the three students portrayed here but also to gain a sense of how college preparation programs might improve. College preparation programs are latter-day MASH units focused on improving the economic worth of low-income youth by “fixing” them up and sending them off to college. What gets overlooked when the language of “bottom



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lines” and “high standards” is used is an understanding of the hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows that children face along the path to adulthood. Children are not little adults merely being readied for the workforce. We shortchange youth when we first think of schools as performance-referenced organizations and then place the poorest students in schools that enable the invocation of metaphors such as triage. On the one hand, the tenor of educational discussions needs to be more protean and full bodied; perhaps if children’s faces, bodies, thoughts, and desires were more central, then practitioners and policy analysts would be less obsessive in their language over utilitarian outcomes. On the other hand, if researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners were equally focused on the worth of all children, then no child would be allowed to attend a school without books or assume that some will simply be left behind beyond medical repair. What is lost when we reduce education to a system of formulaic utility and we are unable to envision any other model? As Jonathan Kozol (2001) has cogently asked, “Why do our natural compassion and religious inclinations need to find a surrogate in dollar savings to be acted on? Why not give these kids the best we have because we are a wealthy nation and they’re children?” (p. 138). If we respond to Kozol’s rhetorical challenge, then words such as triage are eliminated from our vocabulary. Students such as Fernando, Alice, and Lizabeth, portrayed below, deserve the same kind of educational opportunities that their counterparts in America’s elite schools receive. We also all deserve to recognize that self-worth is more than simply economic function. When we reduce schooling to utility, we lose sight not only of the Fernandos, Alices, and Lizabeths of the world but also of ourselves. I offer these portraits, then, not only so that each youth’s voice might be heard but also so that each of us might reflect on our own stories and then consider how we might rethink our educational priorities as a nation.

FERNANDO I have been randomly assigned to a small group of students whose objective this weekend is to write a college essay. The writing program assumes that due to the likelihood of less-than-excellent SAT scores and lack of access to advanced placement classes at students’ high schools, they need a college essay that makes them stand out from the crowd. In addition, although in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods all across the United States, moms and dads labor with their sons and daughters on their college applications, the parents of first-generation college students may not be as versed in how to fill out the forms or how to answer questions in ways that admissions offices like to see. I am their writing coach for the weekend. We have done a variety of warmup exercises, and we have talked about what sets them apart from everyone else. “I want to be able to see you on paper,” I tell them. “Take a risk and let the


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story tell us about you. Paint a picture of your experiences.” They set to work, and I wander around the room moving from desk to desk. I sit down next to Fernando. He has a blank page in front of him and is inspecting his pen, as if willing it to write for him. Fernando is a good-looking 17-year-old. He moved here from Mexico with his parents and brothers about a decade ago. They drove up north in a car, he tells me, and had nowhere to live at first. His father is a house painter, and Fernando helps him during his school holidays. I will learn that he still does not have his green card and without it, receiving financial aid to go to college will be impossible. Although his family has filed for green cards, the process is cumbersome and confusing and they are yet to receive them. Fernando likes school, but his writing is weak. His teachers point out that he performs slightly above average in classes that do not concentrate on writing. Much of his day is spent speaking in Spanish, and although he has a decent grade point average, his essay is littered with spelling and grammatical errors more common of younger students than a high school senior. He is a friendly, personable young man who tries hard, but he has not received enough coaching to make a fluent transition from Spanish to English. Fernando has short black hair that he combs front to back, dark brown eyes, and just the hint of a moustache. He is wearing a white T-shirt and long, baggy shorts. He sits with his shoulders hunched over as if he is preparing for a struggle. Fernando has a passion for soccer. He tells me he knows he is not good enough to play professional soccer, but he is happiest when he is on the field with his friends. “We’re a team. We’re together,” he says. He is a quiet student of average abilities who everyone likes. The girls think he is adorable; his best friends are largely other Mexican immigrants with whom he plays soccer, but he is on a friendly basis with virtually everyone. “It must have been a little risky, a little scary, coming here as a little kid,” I say. “What was that like?” He looks straight ahead, his hands are lightly gripping the side of the desk and his left leg is tapping quietly. He nods his head up and down in a rocking motion. “Yes. A little scary. When I came here I was shot,” he says softly and looks at me. He motions with his left hand to the back of his neck. “It came in here,” and then he motions to the right side of his chin and says simply, “it went out there. That was scary.” I look at his neck and see a small scar; the mark on his chin is even harder to see. “How did it happen, Fernando?” We are whispering. My hand is on his shoulder and he looks as if he is going to cry. His back is damp and tense; he is blinking his eyes open and shut. We sit together quietly for a moment, and I survey the other students. No one notices us as they work on their own versions of risk. Fernando starts talking and his words come out quickly: It was summer. Summer vacation. I got up in the morning and my friend came over and asked me if I wanted to play. I said yes, but when I think about it now I



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think I knew something was going to happen, that I should have stayed home. But I got up and we started walking down an alley near my house and there was a noise, a loud noise. I felt my neck and then I saw blood. I ran to a neighbor’s house, and they got my mom and they took me to a hospital and eventually, the doctor told her it would be all right.

“Did you know who did it, Fernando?” He shakes his head back and forth. “No, I don’t know.” We sit again in silence. I finally exhale and say, “So what do you think? What do you think now?” He waits for a moment and looks ahead again, away from me. “I try not to think about it.” He pauses again. “I try not to think about it. I try to forget it. I don’t know what good it is when I think about it,” he says, shaking his head back and forth. He looks away from me. He lets his shoulders fall down as if all the air has gone out of him. I notice we are whispering again. He has put the pen down and his fingers have started tapping lightly on the desk, his left leg has not stopped moving. His back stiffens as he slowly shakes his head back and forth. He waits a moment. “I think,” he finally says, I think that if I tell people about this that they will think I’m bad, I’m a bad guy. That I’m in a gang, or that I go with bad people, or that I’m someone who creates trouble, that I’m bad and deserved it.

He slumps back into his seat, and his head falls to his chest. I notice that my mouth has dried up. I am not sure what to say to him or how to erase something that happened a decade ago that he cannot forget, will never forget. His guidance counselor later relates that the shooting has been the defining moment of Fernando’s young life. The guidance counselor comments, “Fernando needs to feel safe. Having that happen when he just moved here was very difficult for him. He needs to feel secure.” I have to go work with the other students; I encourage him to write about what happened. He nods and begins his paper, “Life is full of scary things and I’ve had a lot.” As I move toward Alice, I try to take in all that Fernando has just told me. How is it possible that a little boy could be shot and when he thinks about it, he does not ask why it happened to him, or who it was that did it, or what he would like to do if he found the shooter but instead, he worries that people will think he is a bad kid? True, we need to rid the streets of random acts of violence and ensure the physical safety of everyone, but what do we intend to do about the symbolic violence that affects Fernando and his friends? Why, after being shot for no reason, should he be concerned about what other people will think of him?


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ALICE When I slide into the chair next to Alice, she moves the first page of her essay over to me and continues writing. Alice is a tall, African American 18year-old who has tied her hair behind her head, accentuating her angular face. She is dressed in a white jumper and a nondescript skirt that stops well short of her knees. As opposed to the shy tension I felt at Fernando’s desk, Alice exudes a bubbly energy. She has a multicolored pen set laid out in front of her as she writes, and the papers are neatly aligned on the desk. She is bent over her paper but motions for me to read the first page. As I begin to read it, she eyes me for my reaction but continues to write. She begins, “Going to college is going to be a risk, but I want to be all that I can be! I’ve decided to go for it! I know that I need to reach for the stars and if I work hard, I’ll get there.” Although her sentence structure and grammar are good, what she has written is a jumble of platitudes. I ask her what she wants to do in college. “I love the theater,” she confides. “That’s what I really want to do. I like getting on stage and performing.” Young writers often have a problem making a distinction between “telling” someone something and “showing” by portrayal the meaning of their ideas. “You’re telling me that going to college will be a risk,” I say, “but can you describe an example when you’ve taken a risk?” She glances around to see if others are listening to her and admits, You know what? I’m a perfectionist. I want everything to be perfect, and if I’m not sure I can be perfect, then I won’t try. My friends think I’m smart but that’s because I only raise my hand when I know the answer. I’ve taken all the courses I’m supposed to and I’ve aced them; I’ve also got good SAT scores—1300s, but the thing that’s scary to me is stepping out on stage. I’m never sure I can do it, and I just take a gulp and walk out there. It’s so cool!

Alice is excited about moving away to college but is also scared. She feels well qualified to “hit the big time.” “This year [her senior year] is going to be fun,” she says. “I’m just going to slide. I’m just waiting. I can’t wait to go to college!” When I encourage her to take math and science courses during her senior year, she wrinkles up her nose. “I don’t want to! This is my senior year. I’ve done well, and I’m not going to study those things once I get to college.” Alice sits up straight and nods her head when I show her the difference between language that is imprecise and jargon laden versus writing that portrays her own strengths and weaknesses. “Don’t be afraid,” I mention, “to show us that you’re not perfect, that you make mistakes.” She looks around again and lowers her head. “You know what,” she says in a conspiratorial tone, When I was in junior high, because I was tall, everyone told me I should play basketball. I wouldn’t go out because I wasn’t any good. I don’t know how to do a



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lay-up from a jump shot! I’m just not any good, and I wouldn’t show people how bad I was. I could do the same with theater.

I get a puzzled look on my face, not completely understanding what she means. She continues, I could stay home. That would be safe. I know the routine. I could get my mom’s home-cooked meals and live at home. I could major in accounting or something and be a day student. I’m good with numbers. If I did that, I’d be the best in the class, and I’d never follow my dreams. I want to try, and if I’m going to try, then I may fail. I want to go away to school and probably live in New York and study acting. I may not be any good, I may not make it, but at least I’ll have tried. If I didn’t do that, I think I’d be really sad for the rest of my life. I might be secure living here, but I’d just never know. Wouldn’t it be terrible not to follow your dreams?

Alice’s smile and her manner of speaking in almost a breathless staccato shows her sense of excitement with what she has planned; she is scared, sure, but here is a kid who demonstrates the enthusiasm that we want to see in high school students when they graduate. Her drama teacher has taken an interest in her, and her mother has encouraged her. She needs these two people to help guide her along the way, and with a supporting cast, she has set to proving to herself that if she really wants to do something, she can do it. She turns back to her writing, starting on a new page, and implicitly telling me that I’m dismissed—she has work to do. I get up and see her writing, “I’m about to take the biggest risk of my life and I know if I don’t, I’ll be full of regret for the rest of my life.” I pat her left shoulder as I get up and she laughs, nodding her head. I look over to Fernando and see that he has written about a page, but he has slowed down. He is staring at the page, perhaps lost in a memory. Before returning to him, though, I see that Lizabeth has rested her head on her desk, using her arms as a pillow.

LIZABETH “Why don’t you let me see what you’ve got,” I say as I fall into the seat next to her. She sits up, crosses her arms, and looks away from me and out the window. I read the half page that she has written. The story begins I lost my parents when I was four years old. I have one brother and one sister and they split us up for a long time when we were kids. We live with my aunt now and I admire her because she has got a good education and she takes care of us, but we have moved around a lot. I think of my parents often.

When I say her name, she looks over at me quickly and then looks away. Tears fall slowly down her cheeks, and we sit there a moment listening to the sounds in the class. Except for her tears, Lizabeth’s face is impassive. She is a 17-year-old, lithe African American dressed in a blue tank top, light-green


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skirt, and white sneakers. I will learn that she likes sports and is popular. She is a good student, but not as exceptional as Alice. Her writing is full of sentence fragments, and she is not aware of the mistakes she repeats again and again. Moving so often—seven schools between 1st grade and 11th grade— has made her shy and tentative. Lizabeth is the kind of student who gets lost in a crowded classroom; she is never a problem, but she also is not a standout. She prefers to sit quietly with her friends and do the assignments to the best of her ability, on her own. She has grown up pretty much alone. During the next few days, I learn that losing her parents was not the only difficult part of her life. Lizabeth and her siblings went to live with their grandfather and his new wife after her parents died. Her grandfather’s wife did not like the children, so she made them live outside of the house in a spare room; they had to bathe outside. Her brother, in particular, was often beaten and after a few years, her grandfather was able to get other family members to take them in, but they were split up. “It was so hard,” she tells me, “We were support for one another, and then we were all alone.” She has enjoyed the past few years because she feels safe with her aunt, and her brother and sister have rejoined her. “I just wish I didn’t have to move again. I never get to know anyone,” she relates. Neither her teachers nor her counselors know her well. When I relate to them that she has lost her parents, they know that she has lived with a guardian and does reasonably well in school but not much more. Lizabeth and I watch one another intensely during our classroom sessions and mealtimes. She has beautiful brown eyes that follow me around the room, and I try to get her to smile by telling silly jokes. When she laughs, she does so hesitantly, quietly, unlike Alice who lets out a loud guffaw. Lizabeth and I do not speak much to one another, but I find myself nodding to her, trying to encourage her as she works her way through her essay. She is constantly on the verge of tears but does not want anyone to see her crying. She frequently stops writing and gazes out the window. Rather than someone who seems to be daydreaming, I see an adolescent who is thinking about her life, her past, and her future. “I think about my parents all the time,” she tells me. I wonder what they’d look like now; how much my sister, my brother, and I look like them. Sometimes I just try to think what my mom would look like today. What she’d be wearing. I wonder if my brother looks like my father.

She shakes her head to wipe away the sadness and talks about her future: I’ve never felt in control. People have always been making decisions for me, sometimes the wrong decisions. I know I was a kid and all, but I’m ready to make my own decisions now. I’m proud that I’m going to college, that I’ll get in somewhere. I want to study medicine, cure people.



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I do not know if Lizabeth has the grades, test scores, and recommendations that will enable her to be a premed student. I find myself wondering if she is getting any advice that will place her in a structured, safe environment where she can succeed. She has moved so much in her life that if she stays at the same college for 4 years, it will be the longest time she can ever remember having lived in the same place. At the end of our first day together, I return to her desk to see that she has completely rewritten the story. She begins, “Losing people is the hardest thing in the world and I’ve lost too many people in my life.” She goes on by talking about what the loss of her parents has meant to her and what she thinks they would be like if they were alive today. I nod to her and tell her how well she is doing. She is tentative and continues to look out the window for long periods. When the weekend’s classes conclude, each student has completed his or her essay. Fernando’s story focuses on growing up in a foreign country, learning the language, his respect for his father, and how the shooting changed his life. Alice writes about how being able to take risks means being able to fail sometimes, and how she wants to go away to college and study theater. Lizabeth speaks of the loss she has faced in her life and how that has made her strong.

DISCUSSION What might these stories say about the youth who participate in college preparation programs? Although one surely cannot generalize from portraits of students in one program, in what follows I offer three contextual issues to consider pertaining to analyzing college preparation programs. The social context of college preparation programs. There is currently little consensus on how college preparation programs might be most effectively organized to teach skills that will equip youth for college. Frequently, one hears that a focus on academic skills should be of paramount importance. The commentary of the three youth, but in particular Fernando and Lizabeth, points out how a focus on only academic skills is insufficient. Instead, those in charge of college preparation programs might consider how to embed their programs in a longitudinal support network that enables youth to reflect on their own lives and incorporate their own unique backgrounds into the framework for learning. In Fernando’s case, such a suggestion enables him to affirm his Latino background. He would think about violent acts against himself not as a reason to be looked on as “a bad kid” but for what it was—a criminal act in a violent society. He would be given the tools to contextualize the violent acts. In Lizabeth’s case, the importance of having college preparation programs that have a counseling component in which


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students are encouraged to focus on their past in ways that enable them to move forward seems clear. And as I suggest below, such a framework must occur over time. However culturally supportive this specific program was, many such programs ignore or overlook the situatedness of the students. My point here is that college preparation programs for adolescents such as Fernando, Lizabeth, and Alice need to do more than merely focus on academic skills or test taking. Although programs must enable students to improve their language and math skills, given the stories that these students have woven, it appears equally important that the manner in which these programs are developed also take into account the context of their young lives. The temporal nature of college preparation programs. The problems and fears that Alice, Lizabeth, and Fernando describe are not susceptible to “quick fixes” on 1 or 2 weekends in the summer. Fernando had been thinking about his shooting since he was 11. Alice recognized that her fears were something that she had ever since she was a child. Lizabeth thought about her parents “all the time.” The emotional lives of individuals are not, in general, susceptible to being resolved in a matter of days. Similarly, the academic problems that students face after years of substandard schooling most likely cannot be remedied in a short period. Alice was the best student in a weak school; I worry that simply by working on a college essay with the best students, the result will be that the students are able to get through a college door but not back out of it 4 years later. The academic and social aspects of the lives of students such as Fernando, Lizabeth, and Alice speak to a need for a longitudinal approach to learning. A one-shot program that provides them with a skill or two, and then moves them back to the classrooms that ostensibly caused the need to participate in college preparation programs in the first place, is at best a band-aid rather than a remedy. A systematic and structured approach to learning that incorporates the cultural backgrounds of youth seems to be better able to respond to the dynamics of learning than does a program aimed at one activity for a short period of time. The embedded and transitional nature of college preparation programs. Optimally, college preparation programs work with two other groups: the high schools where the students attend and the colleges and universities where the students will go. Given the problems that I have outlined above, it seems warranted to ask how well the three units—the programs, the schools, and the postsecondary institutions—work with one another. When one acknowledges the longitudinal nature of students’ challenges and problems, as well as the social contexts in which they live, then it seems warranted to suggest that a college preparation program operates most effectively when it has effective and systematic relationships with the schools in which the students reside and the colleges and universities the students attend. A relationship with the schools enables problems that surface in college preparation programs to be dealt with once the program is over. Alice’s con-



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cerns about not wanting to take difficult classes, for example, is an issue that her home high school is best able to deal with, not a temporary program whose goal is to work on a college essay. Fernando’s need for a green card cannot be resolved in a summer program but, rather, needs to be addressed during the course of an academic year. Students such as Alice who are willing to take a “risk” will most likely need some kind of support system once they are away from home. True, many college students need academic and emotional counseling, but with college preparation programs, there needs to be a more coordinated effort so that students are not merely admitted to an institution but instead, the institution also recognizes the unique talents, backgrounds, and challenges these students face. If the focus of an institution is on student learning geared toward success, then there needs to be a closer relationship across learning units of schools, universities, and college preparation programs so that they act as a seamless web. Right now, there is little coordination and minimal interaction and consequently, college preparation programs behave as stand-alone units.

CONCLUSION My purpose here has been to offer a portrayal of the experiences of three unique students so that readers might think about how to improve college preparation programs and in turn serve low-income, urban youth better. By way of portraiture, I have identified three problems that arise from the comments of Lizabeth, Alice, and Fernando. First, effective programs might consider how best to incorporate the cultural lives of the students in their learning activities so that students are able to embed themselves in culturally specific learning rather than instrumental ones. Second, because problems are longitudinal, programs should be designed to take place over time. They will be long-term rather than stopgap. Third, better coordination needs to take place across educational units to develop a comprehensive and systematic approach to learning. What I have offered here is not a panacea, but it is hoped that it moves us away from a concept of academic triage and toward one of educational holism.

NOTES 1. The data from this article derive from an ongoing study I am doing on college preparation programs for low-income, urban youth. The programs and the names of the individuals whom I have interviewed are anonymous. The quotes are taken from notes I made at the end of every day. 2. The first interviews I held with these students began in the summer of 2001 and the final interviews with these students ended in the fall of 2001; I continue to work with subsequent cohorts of students. The works that exemplify what I am trying to do are


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those of Mike Rose (1989) Lives on the Boundary, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (1983) The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis (1997) The Art and Science of Portraiture, and my own text with Daniel McLaughlin (1993), Naming Silenced Lives. Several of my recent works have also focused on how best to present data, including “Lost in Translation: Time and Voice in Qualitative Research” (1997) and “Get Real: Representing Reality in Educational Research” (2002).

REFERENCES Finn, C. (1991). We must take charge: Our schools and our future. New York: Free Press. Kozol, J. (2001). Ordinary resurrections. New York: Perennial. Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (1983). The good high school: Portraits of character and culture. New York: Basic Books. Lawrence-Lightfoot, S., & Hoffman Davis, J. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. McLaughlin, D., & Tierney, W. G. (1993). Naming silenced lives: Personal narratives and the process of educational change. New York: Routledge. Rose, M. (1989). Lives on the boundary: A moving account of the struggles and achievements of America’s educational underclass. New York: Penguin. Tierney, W. G. (1997). Lost in translation: Time and voice in qualitative research. In W. G. Tierney & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the text: Reframing the narrative voice (pp. 23-36). Albany: State University of New York Press. Tierney, W. G. (2002). Get real: Representing reality in educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(4), 385-398.

William G. Tierney is Wilbur Kieffer Professor of Higher Education and director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California. He is currently involved in a longitudinal study pertaining to access to college for low-income, urban youth.
