From Congress to Comiskey
IPR faculty fellow delivers research and recommendations on education

Summer 2003, Volume 25, Number 1

IPR Faculty Fellow James Rosenbaum

Sociologist and IPR Faculty Fellow James Rosenbaum had a busy agenda in March, with briefings on special education and Gautreaux families before Congress and debunking the myth of college for all before an audience of Chicago public school educators.

The first briefing on “Special Education and Neighborhoods: Does Social Context Affect Placement?” took place in Washington, D.C. on March 7 with Stefanie DeLuca, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins and a former IPR graduate student.

For 20 years, Professor Rosenbaum has been following residents in the Gautreaux Program, a program that is helping African-American families relocate from public housing to low- to middle- income neighborhoods in the city and the suburbs. In this study, he and DeLuca found strong evidence that racial composition and neighborhood resources can have a significant impact on whether children will be placed in their school’s special education programs. Essentially, the two have uncovered that students with similar problems are being treated differently according to where they are.

The two researchers hypothesized that this discrepancy might result from 1) relativity, for example, these students are lagging academically behind their white counterparts in their new school environment, so they are placed in special education classes, and 2) cultural factors, where different schools have different cultural values, and black children are evaluated on different criteria in white schools than in black schools.

Rosenbaum advised the lawmakers against using standardized assessments, which he sees as being both a liberal and conservative response to correcting such inequities, to address the problem. Because more than 91 percent of all special education students in the U.S. have diagnoses that can be considered subjective and teachers are judging such students relative to the performance of their classmates, it would be difficult to completely standardize assessments, he pointed out.

In fact, placements may be contested and manipulated by how parents, teachers, and administrators perceive these contextual influences. The highly decentralized nature of school administrations also implies that issues will vary from location to location. A move across town to a different school might not seem like much, but in some cases it could seem like a world apart from the student’s perspective.

Rosenbaum suggested that policymakers should take up this consideration of a wide range of specific local and contextual factors inside and outside of the school versus trying to fix special education with general reforms aimed at only teachers and their students.

Rosenbaum also hit a home run—figuratively speaking—in Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, on March 20. The park, which was renamed US Cellular Field in January, was the venue for his briefing to more than 300 Chicago public school educators on why college for all is a dangerous myth. Among the public school administrators were also representatives from the City Colleges of Chicago and the Chamber of Commerce. Rosenbaum said his talk scored runs with the attendees on how these communities could better connect on the issue of employment prospects for high school students.

Rosenbaum pitched them with his research that showed many high school students are not getting realistic information about what colleges require and whether they have what it takes to be successful in college. On top of that, many of these students are bypassing lucrative job opportunities that require only solid high school skills. Rosenbaum pointed out that a staggering 95 percent of high school seniors plan to go to college, but less than 50 percent of them will graduate with a degree. Schools, he said, need to do a better job of informing students about their realistic options.

Many employers complain of well-paying positions that go unfilled because they cannot find qualified applicants to fill them, he continued. These jobs do not require a college degree—or even college-level skills—just solid skills that can be taught and learned in high school. “The college-diploma mentality is distracting them from these jobs,” Rosenbaum remarked. Many of these jobs are in high-demand fields like mechanics and electronics, where the students have to work as apprentices for years at low pay, but once they are out on their own, they can make more than decent salaries. He cited the example of one such student who—at the tender age of 26—was earning $66,000 per year, not including overtime.

He noted that it was refreshing to have employers as well as educators and administrators in the audience, especially because the employers do not always see eye-to-eye with the schools and the city on educational policies and reforms. “These are the people who can make things happen,” he said.

For more information on Professor Rosenbaum’s research, please visit www.northwestern.edu/ipr/people/rosenbaum.html.