By Julia Freeland Fisher, The 74, December 9, 2019
All too often, America’s most disadvantaged high school and college students are left to their own devices to navigate a byzantine, confusing and, in many cases, unjust education system. How might we do better?
There’s a fair amount of consensus that low-income, minority students deserve more guidance resources and navigation supports. But the temptation to diagnose the problem as a shortage of resources alone masks the bigger picture. Two new books out this year offer compelling data suggesting that simply pumping more resources into current guidance and support systems will prove woefully insufficient. Instead, high schools and colleges need to fundamentally reimagine the relationships and support structures they put in place for students furthest from opportunity.
Persistently abysmal student-to-guidance-counselor ratios are often cited as the crux of high schools’ guidance shortcomings. University at Buffalo sociologist Megan Holland set out to explore the actual relationships, not just the ratios, between students and their counselors. Her book Divergent Paths to College chronicles her multiyear study at two racially and socioeconomically diverse high schools. At both, the vast majority of students, regardless of their background, declared that they had every intention of attending and graduating from college. But Holland identified troubling patterns in unequal social capital brokered through guidance offices. Specifically, she found that counselors offered vastly disparate advice and connections to students from different backgrounds.
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