Archive for August, 2006
Crater Lake, Oregon
Here are a few photos from Crater Lake, Oregon. I created a panoramic shot of the lake from a tripod-less series of shots. A printed version of the original panorama would be 12 ft. wide!
The Color Proof Fair
This is the final paper for my racial patterns of urbanization class. I was inspired to write this paper for a few reasons. 1) I used to live in Chicago so I was familiar with the geography/landscape. 2) I really enjoyed reading Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. 3) History needs to be more accurate and honest.
The Color Proof Fair
Introduction
The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair) was advertised as an event where “All the World is Here!” The Chicago World’s Fair was an “effort by America ’s leaders to define social reality” (Rydell, 1984, p. 39). “At the behest of several of Chicago’s well-heeled industrial entrepreneurs, and flush with congressional appropriations, the architect Daniel Burnham and the urban planner Frederick L. Olmsted collaborated to produce the White City, a dreamlike vision on the banks of Lake Michigan” (Ardis & Lewis, 2003, p. 189).” Dubbed “the White City ” due to the color of the Exposition facilities, the Chicago World’s Fair was indeed a mostly white event.
“Some twenty million Americans visited the 1893 fair, dividing their time between the main exhibition buildings, the so-called White City, and the Midway Plaisance” (Rydell, 1999, p. xii). According to Rydell (1999), “the World’s Columbian Exposition was held to commemorate the 400 th anniversary of Columbus’ landfall in the New World and was designed to advance the causes of American nationalism, imperialism, and consumerism” (p. xi).
Unfortunately, American nationalism at that time was formulated around a system of white supremacy. It is ironic that a cultural spectacle of this magnitude occurred twenty-eight years after the end of the Civil War. Slavery was abolished, however, racism was rampant in 19 th century Chicago . Rydell (1999) states that “African Americans were denied a voice in the fair’s creation and most African-American Exhibits had to be approved by all-white screening committee before they were accepted for display” (p. xiii).
The “ White City ” was constructed by whites for whites. “Theoretically open to all Americans, the Exposition practically is, literally and figuratively, a ‘White City,’ in the building of which the Colored American was allowed no helping hand, and in its glorious success he has no share” (Wells, Douglass, Penn, & Barnett, 1893, p. 79). According to Rydell (1984), the White City was looked at by many white middle-class contemporaries as “a manifestation of what was good in American life and as an ennobling vision Americans should strive to effectuate” (p. 40).
Fortunately, a decent amount of documentation exists which tells the story of the African-American experience (as well as other peoples of color) at the Chicago World’s Fair. Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett created a pamphlet entitled The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. According to Reed (2000), “the pamphlet represented a new level of rejection of [white] American racism” (p. xi).
In this paper I will provide a brief national context of race, a summary regarding the environment of the host city ( Chicago ), and a third section concerning the Columbian Exposition. I have been fortunate in that my literary searches have proven to be extremely fruitful. In fact, I was able to obtain a copy of the actual pamphlet from 1893!
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From AACRAO: American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers
U.S. Department of Education Issues PROPOSED Guidelines on Race and Ethnicity Reporting: Comments Due September 21, 2006
The U.S. Department is proposing to modify standards and aggregation categories for collecting information on race and ethnicity.
YOUR INPUT IS SOLICITED BY THE DEPARTMENT
By: Thursday, September 21, 2006
How: By Internet — At http://www.regulations.gov
By e-mail — At comments@ed.govNOTE: You must include the phrase “Guidance for Data on Race and Ethnicity” in the text of your e-mail or paper document.
By mail: Patrick J. Sherrill
U.S. Department of Education
200 Maryland Avenue, S.W.
Room 6C103
Washington, DC 20202-0600
SUMMARY OF PROPOSED NEW REPORTING REQUIREMENTS
For postsecondary institutions, including IPEDS reporting, the highlights are as follows:
1. Categories
Two-part format: First, the individual respondent will be asked to indicate whether he or she is Hispanic/Latino.Then, those respondents and all others will be asked to identify themselves under one of the five original racial categories, or under one new category, “Two or more races:”
- American Indian or Alaska Native
- Asian
- Black or African American
- Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
- White
- “Two or more races” — First time such a category is allowed.
NOTE: For IPEDS, the category of “nonresident alien” will remain as an alternative to collecting race/ethnicity information from non-resident aliens.
ALSO NOTE: “States will continue to have discretion in determining which racial and ethnic groups will be used for accountability and reporting purposes under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA),” as reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).
2. By When Implemented? How Long Must Data Be Kept?
Once this guidance is issued in final, institutions will be required to implement it by no later than the Fall of 2009, for data regarding the 2009-2010 school year.
Supporting data must be kept for at least three years, unless litigation is involved, in which case the data must be retained until the completion of the action.3. “Race Unknown” category
In IPEDS and in Rehabilitation Services Agency (RSA) data collections, institutions may use a “race unknown” category. In elementary and secondary settings, however, the “race unknown” category is not permitted.
4. Identification by personal observation (“observer identification”)
This is required in elementary and secondary settings, when a respondent refuses to self-identify by race or ethnicity. The practice is merely permitted at the postsecondary level, if the institution has made sure that the respondent has not merely overlooked the question.
5. History
a. 1997 OMB Standards — The changes as proposed above would implement the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s 1997 “Standards for Maintaining, Collecting and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity.” Those 1997 Standards had “strongly encouraged” an initial question as to Hispanic/Latino identity, followed by a choice of five racial categories. There had been no possibility, however, of indicating an identification with more than one race.
b. November 2005 EEOC implementation plan — The U.S. Department of Education has waited for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which collects race/ethnicity data on staff in elementary and secondary schools and districts, to announce its reporting scheme.
c. The categories proposed above are the same as those used in the U.S. Census of 2000.
Federal Registrar: August 7, 2006 (Volume 71, Number 151), pages 44865-44871
“Proposed Guidance on Maintaining, Collecting and Reporting Data on Race and Ethnicity to the U.S. Department of Education; Notice”
Are students IT savvy in the right way?
Technology should also be a competency within graduate programs…
Are students IT savvy in the right way?
by Florence Kizza
July 2006
Students can e-mail, surf the web and send instant messages. But university professors say students are lacking in graphics, database and e-commerce skills. According to a survey of 1,287 instructors who teach IT courses at two-year and four-year colleges and universities, those professors also told surveyor, Thomson Learning:
- Students should be required to take a course or prove IT proficiency in order to graduate (89% of responding instructors).
- Internet research (76%) and Microsoft Word (89%) are the two most important skills needed for academic success.
- Only 33 percent of students have advanced internet research capabilities, and 53 percent are skilled in Microsoft Word.
- 76 percent of students have advanced e-mail capabilities, and 71 percent can surf the web with skill. However, just 19 percent of students have significant database abilities; 12 percent with graphics programs; and 10 percent in e-commerce.
An End to Picking One Box
It will be interesting to see how colleges/universities adopt this… A lot of places will have to completely revise how they assess their retention efforts as well as their scholarship criteria.
An End to Picking One Box
More than 6.8 million people in the 2000 Census of the United States picked more than one racial or ethnic category in which to place themselves. And 40 percent of them were under the age of 18, suggesting that millions will be arriving on campuses where the standard “pick one box” approach to race and ethnicity may no longer work.
On Monday, the U.S. Education Department — following nearly nine years of study and planning — released draft guidance for colleges on how to change the way they collect and report information about students’ race and ethnicity. The system proposed by the department would for the first time allow students to pick multiple boxes, with colleges reporting all of those who checked multiple boxes in a new “two or more races” category. In addition, the new system changes the way data will be gathered about Latino students and divides the “Asian and Pacific Islander” category into two distinct groups.
Experts on education statistics generally praised the changes, saying that they reflect the reality that race and ethnicity in the United States do not fit into neat categories. Many predicted that the guidance — if formally adopted, as is expected — would encourage colleges to adopt a similar approach on admissions forms. And several warned that the changes could have important policy ramifications, as the enrollment levels of some groups may appear to decrease. The big question mark for many remains whether these changes will stop the growth in the number of students who refuse to answer questions on race and ethnicity.
The proposed change that has been most sought in the new guidance concerns those who identify themselves as being from more than one racial or ethnic group. Previously, colleges had to report single identities. Some colleges have changed their admissions and other forms to allow people to check multiple boxes for some college purposes, but such institutions still had to use a traditional system for reporting data to the government. As a result, many colleges have held off on making a general change until the Education Department released its guidance. The department’s policies are based on directives from the White House Office of Management and Budget in 1997, so the long waiting period has been frustrating to many college officials and advocates for students of multiple races.
“We’ve been waiting for this to happen. No student should be forced to pick a single identity,” said Amanda Erekson of the Mavin Foundation, which pushes for the rights of multi-ethnic people. (The name comes from a Yiddish word for one who is an expert on something, and was selected by Matt Kelley, who founded the group in 1998 as a freshman at Wesleyan University.)
Erekson said that people like herself — she has Japanese-American and white ancestors — must navigate issues that don’t fit neatly into racial politics. When she was a student at Colgate University a few years ago, she was involved with minority groups, but startled some because she looks white.
Only 27 percent of colleges have policies that allow students like Erekson to avoid picking a single box, according to a report, “One Box Isn’t Enough,” released last year by the foundation. Erekson said that many college officials said that they would change once the Education Department announced its plans for adopting the 1997 OMB approach.
Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, said it was “high time” for the Education Department to offer guidance, and predicted that most colleges would end up changing their systems to make them consistent.
Nassirian said that people need to be prepared that with the new system there will be a “discontinuity” with data previously collected. But he said that was an issue that would accompany any change and that the problems would be worked out over time.
Eugene Anderson, associate director of national initiatives at the American Council on Education, where he formerly was the lead researcher for reports on student demographics, predicted that several minority groups would see apparent slides in enrollment that might not reflect a real shift. While many students have complained about being forced to pick a single race, he said that many have done so anyway.
“The challenge is how this relates to historical data,” Anderson said. “The majority of people who are multiracial have connected to a primary ethnicity and in the past they were counted in that one ethnicity and now they would not.”
He predicted that there would be apparent drops in black, American Indian, and Asian enrollment, the latter drop accentuated by a splitting off of Pacific Islander from the Asian category. So a student with a Japanese-American father and a Pacific Islander mother would have shown up previously as Asian, but would now appear just in the “two or more” category. That category will not have breakouts so nationally, there will not be data indicating how many students there come from which combination of groups.
The data are important, Anderson said, because colleges examine such figures to look for gaps in their recruiting strategies or the success of their retention programs. Some government and foundation programs also are restricted to colleges with certain demographics.
Experts on Latino enrollment patterns predicted that changes proposed by the department would increase the participation of Latino students in surveys on race and ethnicity. The department has suggested that colleges use an approach similar to that used by the Census Bureau, but that differs from the past practice of many colleges, which have just included Latino or Hispanic as a racial category, or which have asked about Latino status after a racial category listing that did not include Latinos.
The system proposed by the department would have colleges ask students first if they are Latino or Hispanic, with just a yes/no answer. Then the second question would provide a choice of races: American Indian, Asian, African American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or white. Because Latino students identify with multiple racial groups (or none), their total numbers would be clear by the first question, but they would not be restricted in how they want to identify themselves.
Deborah A. Santiago, vice president for policy and research at Excelencia in Education, a group that focuses on Hispanic higher education issues, said that many Latino students have been discouraged by past configurations of these questions and so have not answered at all. By asking about Latino or Hispanic identity first, colleges should get more participation “and more clarity,” she said.
“By asking up front, and using the two-question approach, you are going to get the numbers,” she added.
Where experts are uncertain about the numbers are with students who are not providing information about their racial background at all. Between 1991 and 2001, the number of students in higher education for whom race is unknown increased by 100 percent, to 938,000 — and those numbers have increased further, to over 1 million, since then. The identities of these students and their motivations have become the subject of considerable interest — with some speculating that many of these students are white and others disagreeing.
Some believe that white students are refusing to answer the question, fearing that a non-minority answer may hurt their chances of admission or financial aid. But other researchers counter that the trend is not restricted to competitive institutions and turns up in open-admissions institutions as well. Advocates for students of multiple identities have argued that many of these students avoid racial choices that force them to select a single category, and that an approach like the one the Education Department is now suggesting would encourage more of them to answer the question.
But the most common answer to the question of how a new system might change those refusing to answer was: Only time will tell.
— Scott Jaschik
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/08/race.
