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A Convenient Myopia: Seek, Shaughnessy, and the Rise of High-Stakes Testing at Cuny

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A Convenient Myopia: Seek, Shaughnessy, and the Rise of High-Stakes Testing at Cuny City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2016 A Convenient Myopia: SEEK, Shaughnessy, and the Rise of High- Stakes Testing at CUNY Sean Molloy The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1513 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] A CONVENIENT MYOPIA: SEEK, SHAUGHNESSY, AND THE RISE OF HIGH-STAKES TESTING AT CUNY by SEAN MOLLOY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 SEAN MOLLOY All Rights Reserved ii A Convenient Myopia: SEEK, Shaughnessy, and The Rise of High-Stakes Testing at CUNY by Sean Molloy This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. __________________ ________________________________________ Date Sondra Perl Chair of Examining Committee __________________ ________________________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Rebecca Mlynarczyk George Otte THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii A Convenient Myopia: SEEK, Shaughnessy, and The Rise of High-Stakes Testing at CUNY by Sean Molloy Advisor: Sondra Perl A great struggle for racial justice was fought at City College and CUNY from 1964 to 1978. In this archival history, supplemented with thirteen oral histories of students and teachers, and grounded in the larger context of racial segregation and exclusion within American public education and American higher education through 1970, I argue that this larger struggle for justice should be seen as two distinct but intertwined struggles that had very different results. Throughout this history, I focus on individual teachers and students who either played key roles or whose experiences illustrate aspects of the larger issues. Some of their voices are also included directly through their appended oral histories, including transcripts of eight video oral histories that are up on youtube. The first struggle was over unjust admissions standards that excluded almost all black and brown students. Within the fourteen years from 1964 to 1978, CUNY’s student body was fully integrated. The key to the successful racial integration of the four-year colleges was the 1965 launch and the 1966 to 1969 expansion of the City College Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) desegregation and supportive teaching program. SEEK, both in its practice and its theoretical rationale, directly challenged CUNY’s admissions criteria as biased and invalid. In SEEK, students demonstrated their true college potential by attempting actual college coursework within a supportive environment that ameliorated the pain and damage iv of the wounds they carried, respected and recognized them as individuals, believed in their abilities, built their strengths, and always expected them to succeed. Close to 40% of the first three City College SEEK classes graduated by 1972, although none held the normally required admissions credentials. The second struggle for racial justice at CUNY was over instructional and assessment standards. This struggle was harder for many to see because it turned on many large and small questions of administrative structures, institutional expectations, funding, teaching and assessments. But underneath those surface issues, the same old assumptions of superiority and inferiority guided this struggle too. A central site of this struggle was within writing instruction at City College as the SEEK program expanded from 1965 to 1969. Similar struggles over writing instruction and assessment developed across CUNY after 1970 when it began its Open Admissions program. Gradually, one City College SEEK writing teacher positioned herself at the heart of this pedagogical struggle for justice. Mina Shaughnessy joined City College SEEK in its third year and worked for several years as a caring and supportive teacher, but also a deeply conservative administrator. By 1975, she was a CUNY Dean in charge of both writing instruction and assessment, as well as the informal leader of CUNY’s writing administrators and teachers. Yet even as she urged her fellow writing teachers to “Dive In” and support students rather than guard the towers, Shaughnessy quietly promoted the implementation of new gateway writing tests across CUNY. In the end, Shaughnessy played a pivotal role in the conception, development, design, promotion, validation, and promulgation of CUNY’s massive, high-stakes testing system, a system that in remain in place 38 years after her death and has now inflicted devastating harm on close to a million incoming CUNY students. v Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to the many kind and generous people who have helped me with this study. Most important and powerful for me were those students and teachers who agreed to preserve and share their own oral histories about City College and City University from 1965 to 1978: Henry Arce, Allen Ballard, John Brereton, Francee Covington, Arlette Ford, Don Ford, Jane Tillman Irving, Janet Mayes, Donald McQuade, Sondra Perl, Richard Sterling, Marvina White, and Eugenia Wiltshire. Those thirteen stories are appended here; the eight video oral histories are also up on youtube, and curated at our CUNY composition student website at http://compcomm.commons.gc.cuny.edu/cuny-oral-histories/ Many others who taught or studied at CUNY in the 1960s and 1970s also took time to talk to me to share their memories. I’m especially grateful to Nancy Black, Alice Chandler, Albert De Leon, Marilyn Anne Doris, Fran Giteles, Theodore Gross, Ralph Kopperman, Marilyn Maiz, Rebecca Mlynarczyk, Ira Shor, Paul Simms and Harvey Weiner. Some disagree with the arguments I make here. I may even reopen some old wounds, especially for those who still grieve for Shaughnessy nearly forty years after her death and I apologize for causing any pain. I rely here on documents from seven public and five private archives. I have received kind assistance and guidance from archivists and staff at the Brooklyn College Archives, City College Archives and Special Collections, City University Central Archives, La Guardia and Wagner Archives, M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives at the University at Albany, Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In particular, I am grateful to Marianne LaBatto and Ted Hecktman at Brooklyn College and to Sydney Van Nort at City College. Sydney has allowed me to haunt her archive for four years. Three of these public archives or collections have only limited access. vi I am grateful to Pablo Conrad for giving me permission to photocopy some of his mother Adrienne Rich’s archives at Radcliffe, to Gerard McCarthy for somehow making time to afford me repeated trips to CUNY’s Central archives, and to Allen Ballard for approving my access to his unprocessed SUNY files, as well as digging up some additional personal files that we then added to the SUNY archive. I am especially grateful to those people who shared private archives with me. Mary Soliday shared the Fall 1970 City College basic writing teacher mid-term reports. Don McQuade shared his CUNY CAWS files. Adam Penale shared family archives about his great uncle Anthony Penale. Noelle Berger and Nicole Futterman preserved, dug out and shared with me the papers of their father, Leslie Berger. Mark Mcbeth shared his research files with me. (A dozen years ago, Mark also preserved critical files from Shaughnessy’s office at City College. Anything cited here as “Shaughnessy Box Two” was recovered and preserved by Mark.) Marilyn Maiz gave me access to the files of Shaughnessy’s Instructional Resource Center still held by CUNY’s Office of Institutional Resources. Jane Maher gave me four boxes of Shaughnessy’s original files that Jane preserved since she wrote her seminal biography of Shaughnessy twenty years ago. I will soon transfer these files to Sydney’s archives at City College. My research assistant and copy editor Danielle St. Ramy has provided me invaluable help. I am deeply grateful to my CUNY teachers, especially Mark McBeth and Jessica Yood, who supported and guided me to pursue this study. My dissertation committee members, the CUNY composition historians George Otte and Rebecca Mlynarczyk, have helped and guided me along this path. My amazingly supportive, generous and patient advisor, Sondra Perl has ceaselessly encouraged me. Lastly, my wife Jodi Magee has made this journey, and all journeys, possible. vii Table of Contents Chapter Page 1 Two Struggles For Racial Justice at CUNY (1964-1978) 1 (Introduction, Overview, Methods and Biases) 2 Kenneth and Mamie Clark: The American Dilemma of Racism (1920-1964) 15 3 Bowker, Gallagher and Davis: The Fight to Desegregate 37 City College (1964-1965) 4 Ballard and Berger: Launching and Leading SEEK (1965-1967) 60 5 Theorizing SEEK (1966 -1973) 90 6 The Success, Expansion and Replication of the SEEK Model (1966-2016) 113 7 Volpe and Kriegel: Rhetoric and Writing at City College (1848-1969) 126 8 Johnson and Volpe: Reshaping the English Department and Segregating 161
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