How to Help More College Students Graduate

The New York Times 

By: SUSAN DYNARSKI FEB. 19, 2016

The United States has a dropout crisis. Sixty percent of people go to college these days, but just half of the college students graduate with a bachelor’s degree. Some people earn a shorter, two-year associate’s degree. But more than a quarter of those who start college drop out with no credential.

Despite the rising cost of education, a college degree is one of the best investments that a young person can make. In 2015, median earnings among workers aged 22 to 27 with a bachelor’s degree were $43,000, compared with $25,000 for those with just a high school diploma. Over a lifetime, a person with a bachelor’s degree typically earns $800,000 more than someone who has completed only high school, even after netting out tuition costs.

The financial prospects for college dropouts are poor, for two reasons. First, dropouts earn little more than people with no college education. Second, many dropouts have taken on student loans, and with their low wages, they have difficulty paying off even small balances. Dropouts account for much of the increase in financial distress among student borrowers since the Great Recession.

The dropout problem is particularly acute for students whose parents did not attend college. First-generation students beat enormous odds by even enrolling in a four-year degree program. Yet 30 percent of first-generation freshmen drop out of school within three years. That is three times the dropout rate of students whose parents graduated from college.

Why is the dropout rate so high, particularly among first-generation students? The consensus among researchers is that there is no single culprit — and, therefore, no silver bullet. First-generation students tend to have less money, have weaker academic preparation and attend colleges with fewer instructional resources. All of these have been shown to increase the likelihood of dropping out.

Critically, first-generation students also miss out on the advice, support and voice of experience provided by parents with firsthand experience of higher education. There is only so much information that overburdened guidance counselors can cram into students during a few short meetings.

In families with college-educated parents, important information is delivered every day, often in small, casual conversations, during the car pool ride to school, while running errands or during meals. College-educated family members can steer students toward institutions that match their interests and majors that suit their strengths. They can provide advice on which courses to take and when to take them, cautioning that a tough chemistry course should be balanced with a less-demanding class. They can suggest that work hours be scaled back during finals week. It may not be obvious at the time, but these informal conversations can play a surprisingly important role in a student’s success.

First-generation students, who don’t have a de facto college adviser at home, would benefit from some extra support. Researchers are uncovering promising interventions that help get these students to graduation.

Details matter. In one counseling program, professional advisers periodically called students who were in academic difficulty. The counselors worked with students on the “soft skills” that college requires, like time management and organization. The discussions were personalized and concrete: “Don’t you need some extra time to study for midterms? Perhaps you should you cut back on your work hours this week.” Coached students were more likely to stay in college and graduate.

For students who are the first in their family to tackle the bureaucratic hurdles of applying for financial aid and enrolling in college, missed paperwork can lead to lost opportunities and an increased risk of dropping out. Small things add up. Parents who have never registered for a college course may not realize, for example, that being at the top of the waiting list for an oversubscribed class is often the way to gain entrance to it.

Benjamin L. Castleman of the University of Virginia and Lindsay C. Page of the University of Pittsburgh devised a program that nudges students to complete the administrative paperwork required to stay in college. They sent texts reminding students to complete their re-enrollment forms and financial aid applications. Among freshmen who received the texts, 68 percent completed their sophomore year, compared with 54 percent of those who did not receive reminders.

A new program at the City University of New York offers many of the supports that college-educated parents typically provide: intensive advising, a subway pass, textbooks and money to cover any shortfall between costs and financial aid. The CUNY program doubled the three-year graduation rate and also increased the proportion of students who went on from a two-year community college to a four-year institution. The program is now being replicated at colleges in Ohio.

At the federal level, the Obama administration last month introduced two new initiatives to encourage students to move quickly toward their degrees. It takes six years for the typical student to finish a bachelor’s degree, and those two extra years of college lead to higher tuition costs and more student debt. Part of the problem is that the federal aid system defines as “full time” a level of effort (12 credits a semester) that can’t possibly get a student out the door in four years.

A new “On-track Pell bonus” will increase the grants of low-income students who enroll in 15 credits a semester. The bonus is intended to signal that 15 credits is the right level of course work if students want to graduate on time. They will also now be eligible for federal aid for three semesters each year should they want to shorten their time to graduation by taking courses year-round.

Helping students to enter college isn’t enough. For higher education to fulfill its promise as an engine of economic mobility, we need to get students across the finish line to graduation.

Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise - NY Times

Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise

By: Claire Cain Miller - NY Times 

December 17, 2015

The lives of children from rich and poor American families look more different than they have in decades.

Well-off families are ruled by calendars, with children enrolled in ballet, soccer and after-school programs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. There are usually two parents, who spend a lot of time reading to children and worrying about their anxiety levels and hectic schedules

In poor families, however, children tend to spend their time at home or with extended family, the survey found. They are more likely to grow up in neighborhoods that their parents say aren’t great for raising children, and their parents worry about them getting shot, beaten up or in trouble with the law.

The class differences in child rearing are growing, researchers say — a symptom of widening inequality with far-reaching consequences. Different upbringings set children on different paths and can deepen socioeconomic divisions, especially because education is strongly linked to earnings. Children grow up learning the skills to succeed in their socioeconomic stratum, but not necessarily others.

“Early childhood experiences can be very consequential for children’s long-term social, emotional and cognitive development,” said Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University. “And because those influence educational success and later earnings, early childhood experiences cast a lifelong shadow.”

The cycle continues: Poorer parents have less time and fewer resources to invest in their children, which can leave children less prepared for school and work, which leads to lower earnings.

American parents want similar things for their children, the Pew report and past research have found: for them to be healthy and happy, honest and ethical, caring and compassionate. There is no best parenting style or philosophy, researchers say, and across income groups, 92 percent of parents say they are doing a good job at raising their children. Yet they are doing it quite differently.

Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation, says Annette Lareau, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist whose groundbreaking research on the topic was published in her book “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.” They try to develop their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite institutions.

Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play. They are taught to be compliant and deferential to adults.

There are benefits to both approaches. Working-class children are happier, more independent, whine less and are closer with family members, Ms. Lareau found. Higher-income children are more likely to declare boredom and expect their parents to solve their problems.

Yet later on, the more affluent children end up in college and en route to the middle class, while working-class children tend to struggle. Children from higher-income families are likely to have the skills to navigate bureaucracies and succeed in schools and workplaces, Ms. Lareau said.

“Do all parents want the most success for their children? Absolutely,” she said. “Do some strategies give children more advantages than others in institutions? Probably they do. Will parents be damaging children if they have one fewer organized activity? No, I really doubt it.”

Social scientists say the differences arise in part because low-income parents have less money to spend on music class or preschool, and less flexible schedules to take children to museums or attend school events.

Extracurricular activities epitomize the differences in child rearing in the Pew survey, which was of a nationally representative sample of 1,807 parents. Of families earning more than $75,000 a year, 84 percent say their children have participated in organized sports over the past year, 64 percent have done volunteer work and 62 percent have taken lessons in music, dance or art. Of families earning less than $30,000, 59 percent of children have done sports, 37 percent have volunteered and 41 percent have taken arts classes.

Especially in affluent families, children start young. Nearly half of high-earning, college-graduate parents enrolled their children in arts classes before they were 5, compared with one-fifth of low-income, less-educated parents.

Nonetheless, 20 percent of well-off parents say their children’s schedules are too hectic, compared with 8 percent of poorer parents.

Another example is reading aloud, which studies have shown gives children bigger vocabularies and better reading comprehension in school. Seventy-one percent of parents with a college degree say they do it every day, compared with 33 percent of those with a high school diploma or less, Pew found. White parents are more likely than others to read to their children daily, as are married parents.

Most affluent parents enroll their children in preschool or day care, while low-income parents are more likely to depend on family members.

Discipline techniques vary by education level: 8 percent of those with a postgraduate degree say they often spank their children, compared with 22 percent of those with a high school degree or less.

The survey also probed attitudes and anxieties. Interestingly, parents’ attitudes toward education do not seem to reflect their own educational background as much as a belief in the importance of education for upward mobility.

Most American parents say they are not concerned about their children’s grades as long as they work hard. But 50 percent of poor parents say it is extremely important to them that their children earn a college degree, compared with 39 percent of wealthier parents.

Less-educated parents, and poorer and black and Latino parents are more likely to believe that there is no such thing as too much involvement in a child’s education. Parents who are white, wealthy or college-educated say too much involvement can be bad.

Parental anxieties reflect their circumstances. High-earning parents are much more likely to say they live in a good neighborhood for raising children. While bullying is parents’ greatest concern over all, nearly half of low-income parents worry their child will get shot, compared with one-fifth of high-income parents. They are more worried about their children being depressed or anxious.

In the Pew survey, middle-class families earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year fell right between working-class and high-earning parents on issues like the quality of their neighborhood for raising children, participation in extracurricular activities and involvement in their children’s education.

Children were not always raised so differently. The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is 30 percent to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than those born 25 years earlier, according to Mr. Reardon’s research.

People used to live near people of different income levels; neighborhoods are now more segregated by income. More than a quarter of children live in single-parent households — a historic high, according to Pew – and these children are three times as likely to live in poverty as those who live with married parents. Meanwhile, growing income inequality has coincided with the increasing importance of a college degree for earning a middle-class wage.

Yet there are recent signs that the gap could be starting to shrink. In the past decade, even as income inequality has grown, some of the socioeconomic differences in parenting, like reading to children and going to libraries, have narrowed, Mr. Reardon and others have found.

Public policies aimed at young children have helped, he said, including public preschool programs and reading initiatives. Addressing disparities in the earliest years, it seems, could reduce inequality in the next generation.

Who Is the Happiest at the "Happiest College in America"?

By: Lisette Espinosa - The Student Life

"Many people report a sense of appreciation and pride to be affiliated with CMC, but there are also those who feel disenfranchised." –Claremont McKenna College’s 2011-2012 Campus Climate Task Force Report

"Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to so much so that you don't want to be around each other? No... Before you come asking Mr. Muhammad does he teach hate, you should ask yourself who taught you to hate being what God made you." – Malcolm X, May 22, 1962, Los Angeles

In elementary school, I remember being proud that my father was a waiter. For Halloween one year I happily dressed up in a white dress shirt, bow tie and my father's waist apron. When my fifth grade teacher asked the class to write about our career of choice, I, of course, wrote "waiter." He politely asked if I could choose something else.

In high school, I wanted to distance myself from my background. I envisioned having a family like my first boyfriend's mother's side of the family, who were mostly white and middle class. This is what a "normal" American family looks like. Since families like mine were not well represented in the media I consumed, I considered my family "abnormal."

Not until college did I realize I had been taught to be ashamed of being from a working class, immigrant Mexican family, despite growing up around many families like my own. Anywhere from the media to the Claremont Colleges, I am constantly receiving the message that we aren't worth anything. To this day, I am still trying to unlearn these twisted concepts of "success" and "normality" that made me want to turn my back on my hometown and community.

One of the many things I've learned from queer activists is that assimilation does not equal liberation. Achieving the "American Dream" for myself does not mean that people like my parents, relatives or hometown community will stop being dehumanized or that they will be given the respect they deserve. You only need to look at the news to list the stereotypes often projected onto working class people of color. These myths and misrepresentations are often internalized.

Maybe most of us have felt out of place at Claremont McKenna College for one reason or another, but my feelings of not belonging cut deep across economic and racial lines. It was uncomfortable coming to CMC and seeing my home being better represented in the poorly paid, working-class staff rather than those more central to managing the school's trajectory and curriculum. Over the years, I have seen many people with similar backgrounds to mine build relationships with the workers at the 5Cs. Referring to the Colleges, a student in my Latina Activism class, Neftali Dominguez HM '17, said in class the first week, "How can they say they care about students of color when they treat their brown workers like shit?" At the Claremont Colleges, it is not unusual for workers to get fired or harassed for organizing for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.

Within the first weeks of school, I told an upperclassman Latino that I felt like I was admitted to fill a racial quota. Why would they want me here? Impostor syndrome is prevalent among first-generation students. These feelings caught me by surprise as I had never known what it felt like to be the "minority" in my predominantly immigrant, low-income Latinx hometown. The week after classes started, I cried at the Chicanx/Latinx New Student Retreat, where I felt comfortable enough to voice my concerns about the school. Feelings of inadequacy have haunted me throughout my time at CMC, and my struggles with anxiety and depression first arose at the end of my second year.

Students of color often report feeling unwelcome at predominantly-white institutions, and CMC is far from an exception. Our campus climate and institutional culture are primarily grounded in western, white, cisheteronormative upper to upper-middle class values. Last school year, approximately 60 percent of undergraduate students did not qualify for financial aid based on ability to pay. And it was homophobia and transphobia on campus that encouraged me to complete a gender studies sequence. My second year on campus, the LGBTQ-related posters in the Stark elevator were consistently being ripped, written on, and literally clawed at.

The CMC administration knows the college needs a lot of work. As mentioned in their most recent Campus Climate Task Force (CCTF) report: "By some, CMC is perceived as an institution that fails to prioritize diversity and lacks sensitivity to diversity issues." In a formal report released by CMC in 2013, the Climate Task Force, which was composed of students, faculty, and staff, agreed that the college needs to do considerably more to support its students of marginalized identities and backgrounds. In fact, the report outlines CMC's long history of resisting this type of change.

The report states that while CMC's national reputation grew in the 1980s, some members of the CCTF remember that period as "marked by overt misogyny" and "hostility toward gays and lesbians." In 1989, a prominent CMC faculty member "attacked the gay liberation movement" in a campus speech and a publication. Many CMC faculty and administrators resisted pursuing affirmative action and creating ethnic and women's studies departments, unlike other liberal arts colleges at the time. This contributed to CMC's image as a college unwelcoming to those of "diverse backgrounds" and those interested in teaching or learning about these topics. Though praising its reputation as a "leading liberal arts college," CMC’s accrediting body, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, criticized the school’s lack of “recruitment of talented women and persons of color” and “attention to diversity and campus climate issues for minorities” in reports in the 1990’s, 2000, and 2009.

Mirroring its continual neglect of "diversity issues," CMC also reproduces indifference to social inequalities and oppression in its own student body.  

Although 90% of students surveyed in 2011 reported feeling treated well by the CMC student body, Black and Latinx students were less likely to agree that CMC is "free of tension related to ethnicity/race." Furthermore, the college was described by the report as having a "pervasive, 'hyper-masculine' and heteronormative ethos...that generally discourages the expression of nonconforming gender identities and sexual orientations."

In the report, women reported feeling valued as intellectuals and friends by day and sexually objectified by night. My second year, I was sexually assaulted by an intoxicated student who followed me into the elevator and tried to forcefully pull me to his room. Many people have had similar experiences across college campuses.

When Carlos Ballesteros, another CMC student, wrote an op-ed for TSLon how issues regarding the party scene receive a disproportionate amount of outrage compared to issues of diversity on campus, multiple online commenters suggested that he transfer. They had a hard time understanding why Carlos cared so much about having more professors of color and more students from low-income backgrounds. It pained me they could not put themselves in our shoes. I was not surprised The Onion wrote this satire about an "Orange County native" and "Claremont McKenna graduate" who believes those not as well-off must somehow deserve their circumstances: "I look around and see a lot of people who don’t have what I have, which leads me to conclude our social institutions have these built-in disparities for a purpose—one that I trust makes perfect sense."

I have been told by staff that one reason hiring more diverse faculty is difficult is because the hiring process is biased. Those who have connections on campus are more likely to be hired. In addition, the CCTF reported that the problem is in part due to "unwelcoming attitudes" of people currently employed at the college. Letters to CMC administrators and colleagues reveal "instances in which members of the professional community have felt devalued, or have been harassed because of their gender or sexual identity," leaving some faculty "afraid that researching or teaching in gender or ethnic studies would diminish their chances of achieving tenure."

The Climate Task Force offered a long list of recommendations in "community composition," "facilities and space," "policies and practices," "academics: curriculum and advising," "co-curricular activities and student services," and "institutional commitment and celebrated success." Last semester, a group of students interested in organizing those who have felt isolated by the campus climate and institutional culture because of their racial or ethnic identities met to discuss their experiences at CMC. The group, CMCers of Color, sent both CMC President Chodosh and ASCMC a petition of proposed actions that echo many of the same concerns the college's own Climate Task Force Report outlined. Disability issues, socioeconomic issues, and Islamophobia were some of the additional issues underscored.

These problems are not new to those who see disparities and experience these tensions on campus.

I frequently use resources and attend events at Pomona College, Scripps College, and Pitzer College. I would visit Scripps Communities of Resources and Empowerment so often that someone had wondered if I had transferred schools.

At the beginning of this semester, a friend invited me to attend a dinner for Scripps students of color. A tent covered a large portion of Jaqua Quad and a dozen tables were filled with students, faculty, staff and alumni. But the event frustrated me. I could not imagine this type of event being held at CMC. Back during speaker Devanie Dóñez' '94 time as a Scripps student, the welcome reception for students of color was held in a dorm living room, and she noted the event's growth in size. I wondered how many CMC students would have appreciated hearing from their own school what I heard from the alumna Trustee's speech:

"Diversity and inclusion are not themes that we talk about for a month or a year. We will never stop talking about this or these issues... We will never reach a point where the work is done... Tonight, I want to remind you again, you are welcome here. You belong here. You are needed here to be known, to…be visible leaders of the call for the most inclusive Scripps possible. And all the rest of us here tonight...as trustees, as administrators, as educators, we will support you and be accountable to you as we strive to do better...So often assumptions are made about students of color, what it means to be a student of color, who we are, where we are from...One faulty assumption I think we may all face at some point is the idea that diversity and excellence are mutually exclusive. I hear that implied in conversation..."

She also spoke about the time she was mistaken as a dining hall worker because she was Latina. Last semester, a Latina CMC alumna disclosed that she had been confused with housekeeping: "We're out of paper towels."

Not once in my four years have I invited my parents to CMC's Parents Weekend. It feels strange having my parents to “experience CMC culture” when that culture doesn't value their work or experiences.

Whether we believe the Colleges are committed to "diversity and inclusion" or just playing a part key to their image, something is wrong here.

Some will think I am overreacting. Some will say I do not belong at CMC and should have transferred (which I cannot afford). Some will believe I am "biting the hand that feeds me." Others will say I am focusing too much on the negative aspects of CMC's campus (those that I frequently hear in private but hardly in public) and not enough on the positive. I see these types of comments often on Carlos' articles online.

These types of reactions discourages students from speaking up, fearing possible repercussions.

My friend Denys Reyes once wrote, "I understand that it is intuitive to defend our school, but someone's first reaction to injustice should not be, 'Not all of CMC!', but 'What can we do to make sure CMC is not this way again?'"

Luckily, my experiences at CMC resulted in immense personal growth, a re-evaluation of my values and identities, and improved relations with my family and community at home. I am a proud Chicana. My background is not a deficit, but a strength.

Whose voices are the loudest on campus? Whose voices are kept at the margins? Who do we look to for knowledge, and whose knowledge is valued? Are our "success" and "leadership" measured in dollar signs? What role do the colleges play in replicating inequality while touting "responsible leadership"? Who is respected, and who is not given a living wage? Whose life is given priority, and whose lives are criminalized, jailed, detained and disposable? What stereotypes and ideologies do we allow in our lives that contribute to the normalization of structural inequality and social suffering?

This is why I want to ask, who is our Claremont education for?

At P.S. 172 in Brooklyn, a Principal Rewrites the Book

October 23, 2015 - NYT article by Ginia Bellafante

In 1970, Jack Spatola, born Giacomo, a young immigrant from the small town of Paceco on the western tip of Sicily, who had come to the United States at the age of 14 with his parents to live in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was called to service in the Vietnam War. His father was a shoemaker, his mother a seamstress, and neither wanted him to go; Mr. Spatola managed to avoid the draft on the grounds that he was the only person in his family who spoke English. Instead, he went to college — to Pace University — and got into educationFrom the outset he knew he liked challenges, which was fortunate, given that the New York City school system in the ’70s and ’80s provided a caldron full of them. He taught children with special needs, children who didn’t know English (he is trilingual; Spanish is his third language), children coming up in especially rough neighborhoods, like Bushwick. In 1984, he became principal of Public School 172 in Sunset Park, an elementary school, where he has remained for 31 years. In the beginning, his student body was predominantly Puerto Rican; today it is predominantly Mexican and Latin American, with more than 85 percent of those attending eligible for free lunch.

Demographic realities have not hindered achievement. Last year, 98 percent of third, fourth and fifth graders, those required to take state exams toward the end of the year, passed the math test. Seventy-six percent passed the language test. Those figures far exceed citywide averages, which sit in the 30s for both disciplines, and they match or surpass scores at many affluent schools. On the tests administered this past spring, students at P.S. 172 did better than students at P.S. 234, a celebrated school in TriBeCa, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

Even among those students requiring special education, a subset that makes up 25 percent of the population at P.S. 172, the results were impressive — 69 percent received the highest possible score in math. On a recent visit, I watched a small group of fifth graders in a hallway, working through an exercise calling for an estimate of the value of two large numbers when multiplied together. The teacher was about to guide them through an elaborate written formula for rounding off, but before she could proceed, one little boy blurted out the answer, 174,000, correctly calculated in his head within seconds. Students are grouped by their ability for these exercises, and this particular section, I later found out, was the remedial one.

Students at P.S. 172 have performed well for many years. Although scores dipped slightly after the introduction of Common Core standards, they quickly bounced back, and as a result of Mr. Spatola’s long-running success he receives many observers who want to know how he does it. Next month he is expecting a visit from the business guru Jim Collins, who studies what makes certain companies great and some leaders especially adept. Mr. Spatola has a way of speaking in chief executive patois — potential is unknowable and presumably limitless, success breeds joy and so on — but the platitudes belie a rigorous system of self-assessment that is at the center of the school’s philosophy.

Teachers, students and administrators are engaged in a constant process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t; why, for example, one student might be quickly gaining an understanding of symbolism in reading while another isn’t. Professional development is an experience that is not relegated to occasional seminars but is lived daily. Strikingly, members of the school’s senior staff have an extended shared history of knowing what is effective and what isn’t — Mr. Spatola’s assistant principal, Erika Gundersen, has been with him for more than 20 years; the math and literacy coaches on hand to work with teachers to enhance practices have been with him on average more than 12 years.

Mr. Spatola’s most notable innovation, though, may be the manner in which he comes up with the money to finance all the additional academic supports his school deploys in the absence of enormous Wall Street donations, which are available to many charter schools. Mr. Spatola doesn’t use textbooks, which are notoriously expensive (and a major factor in the low graduation rates at community colleges, where students often drop out because they can’t afford them). In the past fiscal year, the city and state spent $100 million on textbooks in New York City schools. At P.S. 172, the allocated money is used to buy primary texts, works of fiction and nonfiction selected by teachers and administrators. Students will, for instance, use the Internet to research how the branches of government work. The many dollars left over are spent on other services.

For Mr. Spatola the commitment is driven by ideology as much as anything else, the theory being that textbooks dilute and essentially cheapen the experience of learning. In fact, textbooks are much rarer in elite private schools than in public ones. Following a similar logic, P.S. 172 creates its own curriculums, grade by grade. It does not use budget money to purchase the expensive curriculum the Education Department recommends for meeting the Common Core standards, which at a school the size of P.S. 172, with its roughly 600 students, could cost close to $50,000.

“It is absolutely crazy to me that a company out west would really have any idea what my children need,” Mr. Spatola said. “If you are a professional, you take ownership of the curriculum.” Otherwise, he continued, “you’re taking away the respect that an educator needs and deserves.”

The question of whether the P.S. 172 model can be made scalable is dependent on the widespread availability of educators who are impassioned and focused and hardworking enough to take on the challenges demanded by the kind of culture the school has established. Devising curriculums and maintaining notebooks on every single child, which are updated constantly — another feature at the school — amount to very labor-intensive efforts. Mr. Spatola still lives in Bensonhurst, but like many chief executives, on Saturday you’ll find him in his office.

Listening While White by David Brooks

July 17, 2015 - NYT by DAVID Brooks

      Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White

Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates,

The last year has been an education for white people. There has been a depth, power and richness to the African-American conversation about Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings that has been humbling and instructive.

Your new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a great and searing contribution to this public education. It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience. Every conscientious American should read it.

There is a pervasive physicality to your memoir — the elemental vulnerability of living in a black body in America. Outside African-American nightclubs, you write, “black people controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their bodies, which could be commandeered by the police; which could be erased by the guns, which were so profligate; which could be raped, beaten, jailed.”

Written as a letter to your son, you talk about the effects of pervasive fear. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.”

But the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise.

Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape.

You write to your son, “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below.

If there were no black bodies to oppress, the affluent Dreamers “would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.”

Your definition of “white” is complicated. But you write “ ‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).” In what is bound to be the most quoted passage from the book, you write that you watched the smoldering towers of 9/11 with a cold heart. At the time you felt the police and firefighters who died “were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

You obviously do not mean that literally today (sometimes in your phrasing you seem determined to be misunderstood). You are illustrating the perspective born of the rage “that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.”

I read this all like a slap and a revelation. I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in. But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?

If I do have standing, I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

Maybe you will find my reactions irksome. Maybe the right white response is just silence for a change. In any case, you’ve filled my ears unforgettably.

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