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B.L.: This is Bill Leslie from History of Science, and I'm talking this afternoon with Professor Karl Alexander, John Dewey Professor Emeritus. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: They gave my title back. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And I got my name, which is very cool. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I like that name. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: It's a great name. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: It's a great name, and you know if we had postdocs like that now, we’d be doing really well. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Absolutely. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: Who was in the Department of Social Relations, longtime professor in Sociology, Chair of Sociology for more than a few years, and also a research scientist in the Center for Social Organization ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: of Schools? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: That's right. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: In the early years. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: For some time, too. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: So as I said, maybe we can just say a little bit about undergrad at Temple and how you got into sociology, UNC and— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Sure, happy to go into that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I did my undergraduate work at Temple University in Philadelphia. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Actually, just to go back a step, I was born and bred in Philadelphia. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I grew up in Philadelphia in a working class family, and so I was the first in my family to go to college. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I have an older brother who joined the Navy after he finished high school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So we didn't have a lot of means. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: We weren't wealthy. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And the high school I attended, I would imagine a fourth to a third of the graduates went to college, so it was a solid working class kind of community and school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I seemed to have a strong enough academic background that college was the next step for me, but didn't have a lot of wherewithal, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: so I just went to Temple because that's what the kids I knew did. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And I was a commuter student. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I have to say, I didn't know a lot about what college involved, but Temple turned out to be a terrific launching pad for me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: It's located in Philadelphia. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: It's a serious university, but it's accessible to kids like me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Working class kids without a lot of means. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I was really introduced to an academic community at a stage in my life where I was looking for a sense of direction. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I wandered into the sociology department, took a course or two and also anthropology courses, and just found that was I was really drawn into that area. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I discovered I liked the social sciences, but in particular I found that I liked working with data, which was something of a revelation to me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I do remember vividly—you said you wanted short and sweet. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Anyway, as an undergraduate major I took a required year-long statistics and methods course and I loved it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And almost everyone else in the class hated it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So that sent a strong signal, and it was like baby stats. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: It wasn't anything fancy. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But the exercises, the work that we did entailed looking for patterns in data that would be of interest, and that's what I found that really drew me in. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I liked that kind of challenge, that kind of exercise to try to make sense out of what you're seeing in survey data. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I really got drawn into the department and into sociology. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: When it was time to think about next steps, I had very strong faculty mentorship and I was encouraged to go to graduate school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I was being a good boy. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I was doing what I was told. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: But this was the '60s, right? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: No, it was the '60s. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: It was a really heady time. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: I wonder, was there an element of activism? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: I think of Temple as a place that did have some fairly activist people. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: My recollection of it is that it was rather placid. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: There were town- gown issues that had nothing to do with what was going on in the wider world, but the expansion of the university into poor neighborhoods, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: and we see that today with Hopkins, too. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Especially over in the East Baltimore campus. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But blue collar kids weren't into that stuff, at least that's my sense of it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: We were just trying to get along and do our—and get through. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Now when I went to graduate school, maybe it's a little different. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I was changing and the world was still in turmoil, but – ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: Why'd you pick Carolina? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Well, basically because everybody said I should go to Carolina. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: All the faculty in the sociology department at Temple. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I had applied to a half-dozen schools, but I didn't know about going to graduate school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I knew nothing about going to graduate school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But I knew to try to get good advice, and I felt like I was in good hands by working with the people there. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And so actually it was quite remarkable. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I got accepted by every school that I applied to, there might have been eight or so, and they almost all offered me money. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And the idea of somebody paying me to go to school was just—so I went from door to door and I said, "Here are my options. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: What do you think I should do?" And everybody said you should go to Chapel Hill, which at that time was a very distinguished department of sociology. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Still is today. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And so that's what I did. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I went to Chapel Hill. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I didn't visit the campus. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I was really naïve. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I knew nothing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I accepted the offer, packed up my '65 Volkswagen Beetle, which I think everyone had—it was either '64 or '65. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Everybody had one. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Mine was '65. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And headed off. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I drove down and got settled into Chapel Hill. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Had a wonderful experience there. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: Who was your mentor and what was your subject? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Well, my dissertation was very much like what I wound up doing professionally when I arrived at Hopkins and I'm still doing it— until I retired. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I'm still doing it now, in fact. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So in some sense my intellectual or academic development, which was very linear once I got into the dissertation stage. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But what was paying the bills for me at the time was I was recruited into a social psychology training program that was funded by the federal government. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I was there to become a social psychologist. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And the director of that program was a very peculiar kind of social psychologist by sociology standards. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: He was very much interested in principles of operant conditioning or classical conditioning, Pavlovian type stuff and B. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: F. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Skinner as it applied to the human condition. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So rewards and punishments. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I learned a lot about that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I was trained in experimental social psychology. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I had a dissertation idea that they wouldn't let me do because it wouldn't pass, even back in that day, the ethical standards. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Experimental social psychologists, they shock people. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Mine didn't entail shocking people. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I thought it was a very clever idea. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I was interested in frustration- aggression, that link, and I had read everything about the frustration-aggression hypothesis. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And so I had this idea that as a TA I would assign grades that were just made up because that was my intervention. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So a kid got a low grade and was expecting a high grade. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But it would involve peer ratings. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I'd still like to do this project some day. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So the students in the class would be evaluating each other's written work. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: They wouldn't really be doing that, but that's what they think they'd be doing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And then they have to type up comments about how they thought the process worked. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And so I would rig up the typewriter so that I can measure the pressure on the keys. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: That's a very cool idea, isn't it? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I remember it vividly. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: When they said you can't do that, I was crushed. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I thought I had a really good idea. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: I can imagine trying it at Hopkins today. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: There would be a rebellion. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So anyway, that's the kind of training I was receiving. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I actually never took a course in sociology of education, which is where I made my mark professionally, and I moved on. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And I had courses in stratification and mobility, but they were kind of macro—kind of like what Beverly Silver does. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Not what I wound up doing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So how I got to where I was, was I took a course in criminology from one of the faculty and enjoyed that and developed a relationship with him. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: His name was Bruce Ecklund. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Not one of the more eminent members of the sociology faculty, but very strong. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But Bruce had gone off to do a sabbatical year at the Educational Testing Service in New Jersey and he came back with a data set. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: It was a survey of high school sophomores, a national survey of high school sophomores. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And he had the idea that he would want to see where they were 15 years after finishing high school, so it turned out to be a panel study of the same ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: kind. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But the baseline, he discovered when he was up at ETS, they were just warehoused data and the forms, the interview forms, the testing forms, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: he brought all that back with him for processing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: These were raw forms. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: Boxes of forms. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Yeah, that's exactly what it was. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So he reached out and he came back from his sabbatical year and he had all these data and he wanted someone to help him work with them. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And so he reached out to me because I knew him from our course and he said, "Are you interested in doing this?" And I said, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: "Yeah, it sounds like an interesting project and a good opportunity." And that's how I got into the area that I wound up doing my dissertation research, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: which is intergenerational mobility, origins of destinations with a focus on where the educational experiences fit into the picture for how children, young high school students, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: use education as a springboard for either moving up from where they started in life or for preserving their advantages across generations. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I did my dissertation on the data that Bruce brought back, including the panel. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: He extended it by resurveying, reinterviewing a couple thousand of the original sample. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So that was my dissertation project and it was actually an entirely different kind of work than what I had been doing as a graduate student. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But it was a great opportunity and I developed a fire in the belly. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I became interested in these issues and I stayed with them forever. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And the beginning school study is really—that’s what the beginning school study is about. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I never really moved away from it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: In terms of my professional development personally, where I was, once I got well into graduate school it was a very linear path. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I just kind of kept doing what I was doing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: To keep it fresh, there were all these new wrinkles on it and different ways of posing the questions and approaching the issues, but it was the same. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I never moved away from what my dissertation research interests were. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: So how did you get to Hopkins? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: They offered me a job. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Actually it was a great opportunity for me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So I went on the job market. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: This was in '71? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: '71, yeah. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So when I was down in Chapel Hill, you mentioned the wider world intruding, and so there there was a lot of agitation and activism on campus and everything—I was there from ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: '68 to '72. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I don't want to take you off on a tangent, so you tell me if this—but actually they eliminated draft student deference, so I was reclassified 1A and I didn't want to ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: particularly interrupt my education and so I enrolled in the Army Reserve. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I enlisted in the Army Reserve. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: You don't enroll, you enlist. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: And so I never missed any school, but I was involved in a very serious accident along the way. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I'm a disabled veteran. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I don't know if you know, I'm a disabled veteran. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: No, I didn't know that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I am a disabled veteran. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I get my monthly check and I get cost of living increases. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: You can't do any better than that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: That was an important time of my life but it didn't take me off the trajectory I was on professionally, thankfully. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I thought it could have, but it didn't. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: So how I came to Hopkins—I was on the job market. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: One of the senior faculty in sociology, I think he was probably responsible for helping place graduate students, that was one of his jobs, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:12:42.220 - 00:12:43.560

K.A.: but I'm not maybe sure about that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Richard Simpson. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: He reached out to me one time. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: He said, "We've gotten this inquiry from Hopkins, they've got an opening and would you be interested?" “Sure.” But it wasn't in the department. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Well, it was sort of in the department. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Back in the day, at the time I was recruited to be the sociology liaison for something called the MD PHD program in the social sciences. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I don’t know if that rings a bell? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: No, no. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: Well, that was located administratively in the Phipps Clinic down in the School of Medicine and there were two tracks. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: One was in psychology and one was in sociology and so they hired me as the sociology bridge person between—so that was my primary appointment when I first arrived. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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B.L.: So you were actually in East Baltimore. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I was a Phipps psychiatrist, where I discovered they make a clear distinction between doctors and professors. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: But that's what brought me to Hopkins. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:13:44.020 - 00:13:49.220

K.A.: So there was this opportunity that came up and I said I would be happy to apply for it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

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K.A.: I applied around—I had an interview at Stanford, and I had a couple of other interviews. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:13:57.500 - 00:14:03.320

K.A.: It was a booming job market at the time and I think I was well regarded as a graduate student. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:03.420 - 00:14:07.680

K.A.: I won the department award for the outstanding graduate student, that sort of thing at the time. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:09.960 - 00:14:19.540

K.A.: But because the Stanford and the Hopkins interviews seemed so promising, I actually withdrew my application from three or four other places, which was a crazy thing to do. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:20.160 - 00:14:21.160

K.A.: But it worked out okay. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:21.400 - 00:14:22.420

K.A.: All's well that ends well. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:22.420 - 00:14:24.780

K.A.: Anyway, so they offered me the job at Hopkins. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:25.500 - 00:14:29.160

B.L.: Did you interview with the sociologists when you came here? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:29.620 - 00:14:30.260

K.A.: Well, I did, yeah. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:30.440 - 00:14:33.200

K.A.: I did my job talk in the sociology department. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:33.300 - 00:14:33.680

B.L.: I was just wondering— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:34.800 - 00:14:38.660

K.A.: I met one-on-one with some people down in East Baltimore. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:39.260 - 00:14:41.700

K.A.: They weren't interested in hearing about my dissertation research. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:43.180 - 00:14:47.380

K.A.: So it was a sociology department interview for all practical purposes. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:47.400 - 00:14:48.680

B.L.: What was Hopkins' reputation? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:49.260 - 00:14:50.360

B.L.: Coleman was still there— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:50.360 - 00:14:51.360

K.A.: Coleman and Pete Rossi. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:51.980 - 00:14:53.320

K.A.: So that's the thing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:14:53.500 - 00:15:06.080

K.A.: So as a graduate student who was interested in education, and to some extent the connections between education and school reform and policy, Hopkins was just the place to be. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:07.700 - 00:15:11.120

K.A.: So when I arrived, Jim Coleman and Pete Rossi were both on the faculty. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:11.580 - 00:15:15.760

K.A.: Pete in urban poverty and Jim on education. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:15.760 - 00:15:21.500

K.A.: So that was pretty heady stuff for a kid right out of graduate school to be coming into a department with those two luminaries. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:21.640 - 00:15:28.500

K.A.: They were the big, big names and then as I discovered, well, they didn’t stay long actually. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:28.760 - 00:15:29.840

K.A.: They left in successive years. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:32.720 - 00:15:38.100

K.A.: I’ve told it any number of times that Coleman couldn’t stand the heat. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:38.600 - 00:15:42.020

K.A.: A young hotshot comes from graduate school, so he— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:42.020 - 00:15:44.120

B.L.: [laughs] Fled to Chicago. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:44.500 - 00:15:45.660

K.A.: Exactly, fled to Chicago. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:49.080 - 00:15:50.740

K.A.: Coleman and Rossi were the luminaries. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:50.900 - 00:15:54.760

K.A.: But the two pillars of this department that I came to realize were Doris Entwisle and Ed MacDill. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:54.760 - 00:15:55.500

K.A.: Ed was chair. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:55.500 - 00:15:57.060

K.A.: Mac was chair when I arrived. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:15:59.300 - 00:16:10.780

K.A.: And at the time it was the Department of Social Relations and we had on the faculty a group of junior anthropologists, a bunch of PhD anthropologists, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:11.660 - 00:16:12.540

K.A.: and one senior person of anthropology. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:15.700 - 00:16:23.720

K.A.: But what I was interested in was the sociology side of things and the department was exceedingly strong in sociology of education, my specialization. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:24.160 - 00:16:36.420

K.A.: And that’s always been true since Jim Coleman came from Chicago to found the department, and he was the preeminent sociology of education researcher in the world until he passed away. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:36.420 - 00:16:37.560

K.A.: So— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:37.560 - 00:16:39.540

B.L.: Can you give me a sense of his personality? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:39.860 - 00:16:40.600

B.L.: I’ve never met him. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:40.760 - 00:16:43.700

K.A.: Oh my goodness, he was nothing at all like you might imagine. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:43.980 - 00:16:48.920

K.A.: He was not the least bit—his persona—he wasn’t self-important. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:50.920 - 00:16:53.960

K.A.: He was really just a terrific guy to relate to. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:54.300 - 00:16:55.540

K.A.: Easy conversationalist. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:55.980 - 00:16:57.820

K.A.: He was not a dynamic speaker. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:16:59.980 - 00:17:04.640

K.A.: If you wanted to attend a lecture, he would do a lot of umming, um—that kind of thing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:05.480 - 00:17:09.920

K.A.: But what he had to say was always worth listening to. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:10.440 - 00:17:13.900

K.A.: [crosstalk] He was a high school athlete. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:15.000 - 00:17:19.080

K.A.: There were stories about he and Ed MacDill would get down on the floor and arm wrestle and stuff like that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:19.320 - 00:17:27.780

K.A.: He was really a very easy—like a normal guy, except he wasn’t a normal guy. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:27.980 - 00:17:31.420

K.A.: He was so eminent but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:31.640 - 00:17:33.020

K.A.: He didn’t come across as being self-important. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:33.620 - 00:17:35.780

K.A.: So he’s really a delightful person to get to know. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:35.920 - 00:17:36.660

K.A.: I did get to know him. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:37.200 - 00:17:44.600

K.A.: Not intimately, but well enough that we would say hi when we would pass. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:46.460 - 00:17:59.540

B.L.: I wonder if because he’d been the founding member of the department and brought from, I guess Chicago, whether it kind of bore his stamp or Rossi’s stamp in some way. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:17:59.740 - 00:18:01.340

K.A.: I think more so Jim than Pete. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:02.060 - 00:18:06.820

K.A.: For one thing, one of the things I discovered is neither of them was, when I was here, we only overlapped for a couple of years. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:07.780 - 00:18:10.620

K.A.: I think I left in ’73 and ’74 so it was kind of a brief revolving door. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:13.940 - 00:18:16.360

K.A.: But Pete had his little domain at the Metro Center. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:16.660 - 00:18:19.960

K.A.: That’s where you’d find him, and Center for Urban Planning. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:19.960 - 00:18:22.260

K.A.: It evolved. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:22.260 - 00:18:23.800

K.A.: And Jim had his at CSOS. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:24.360 - 00:18:28.820

K.A.: So neither of them was really much of a day-to-day presence in the department. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:28.820 - 00:18:30.580

B.L.: Where was the department? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:31.400 - 00:18:33.600

K.A.: When I arrived it was in Gilman. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:34.220 - 00:18:38.160

K.A.: It was right under—when I was chair I had the clock tower office over there, which was very cool. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:38.900 - 00:18:39.840

K.A.: So that’s where it was. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:42.000 - 00:18:48.380

K.A.: And we shared the fourth floor, so the Department of Political Economy was our neighbor. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:48.720 - 00:18:50.040

K.A.: We shared the fourth floor. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:53.040 - 00:18:58.640

B.L.: And what was Hopkins’ reputation in the world at large as a department, even though it was called Social Relations? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:18:59.000 - 00:19:00.580

K.A.: It was a very strong department. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:00.820 - 00:19:05.460

K.A.: I don’t remember offhand the national rankings or even if they were doing them back in the day. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:05.680 - 00:19:06.260

K.A.: They must have been. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:06.740 - 00:19:08.700

K.A.: But it was a very strong department indeed. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:09.600 - 00:19:16.140

K.A.: And in terms of the sociology side of it, it really did—my impression is that it very much bore Coleman’s imprint. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:16.140 - 00:19:18.340

K.A.: So sociology— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:18.340 - 00:19:19.580

B.L.: Would you characterize that— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:19.640 - 00:19:20.540

K.A.: Well, there’s two sides to it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:20.700 - 00:19:26.980

K.A.: Sociology of education as an area of focus, researching schools and how schools work. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:27.420 - 00:19:34.980

K.A.: But also doing it in a methodologically rigorous way bringing to bear advanced quantitative methods, because he wrote the book on mathematical sociology, too. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:35.680 - 00:19:40.080

B.L.: Say a little bit about that, because I haven’t read his mathematical sociology— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:40.300 - 00:19:44.000

K.A.: Well, he was just so remarkably versatile. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:44.280 - 00:19:52.800

K.A.: He wrote the big book on theories, you’ve seen that, and he wrote the, in the day, authoritative book on mathematical sociology, which wasn’t statistical analysis. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:52.800 - 00:19:57.880

K.A.: It was applying mathematical modeling to social processes. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:19:59.120 - 00:20:02.000

K.A.: So he did all that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:02.720 - 00:20:17.900

K.A.: And then he applied his personal talents as a researcher to understand schools and kids in schools in innovative ways. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:18.100 - 00:20:21.080

K.A.: His first big book was The Adolescent Society. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:25.340 - 00:20:26.460

K.A.: It’s a very interesting read. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:26.720 - 00:20:35.740

K.A.: It’s almost like you can imagine a qualitative researcher doing that, because it was in ten schools in the surrounding Chicago area, so it could have been a qualitative case study, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:35.760 - 00:20:36.280

K.A.: but it wasn’t. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:36.920 - 00:20:37.920

K.A.: It was highly quantitative. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:38.440 - 00:20:44.160

K.A.: He has survey data, and then he did—he had very innovative ways to deploy his methods. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:44.400 - 00:20:46.840

K.A.: He used Markov modeling to develop these diagrams— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:47.300 - 00:20:48.840

B.L.: I had to take a course in that once. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:49.540 - 00:20:50.420

K.A.: Well, he did all that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:51.140 - 00:20:53.280

K.A.: So it was applied methods. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:55.020 - 00:20:55.880

K.A.: So that’s what I think. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:20:55.980 - 00:21:06.360

K.A.: When I came to the department as an outsider just coming in, my sense of it was, this is a great place if you’re interested in sociology of education, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:06.480 - 00:21:10.100

K.A.: if you’re interested in urban poverty, and if you’re interested in quantitative research methods. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:10.980 - 00:21:14.940

K.A.: All that was here, as well as the anthropology. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:14.940 - 00:21:20.620

K.A.: But anthropology always was kind of like the poor stepchild. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:21.140 - 00:21:23.940

K.A.: It was there, but it wasn’t really very prominent. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:25.320 - 00:21:26.400

K.A.: Day and day, the people were fine. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:26.560 - 00:21:30.880

K.A.: They got along well, but it just wasn’t a strong anthropology presence in the department. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:31.260 - 00:21:36.180

B.L.: I think people recognize that because they were going to found a— [crosstalk] ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:37.120 - 00:21:37.680

K.A.: —and it spun off, right? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:39.920 - 00:21:41.500

K.A.: I was still a junior person when that happened. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:41.820 - 00:21:48.040

K.A.: So I don’t really have any of the insight—I don’t have any insider insights about it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:48.180 - 00:21:49.020

K.A.: But it just happened. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:49.860 - 00:21:52.640

K.A.: And I think of [it] as a congenial parting of the ways. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:52.920 - 00:21:53.180

K.A.: It wasn’t breast beating. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:54.620 - 00:21:57.240

B.L.: I’m going to see Rich Price up in Cambridge in a couple of weeks. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:57.240 - 00:21:59.380

K.A.: Ah, okay, you’ll get a better sense of that— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:21:59.500 - 00:22:00.500

B.L.: He was the founder. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:00.660 - 00:22:02.260

B.L.: I always thought it was Mintz, but it wasn’t. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:02.260 - 00:22:02.560

B.L.: It wasn’t at all. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:02.560 - 00:22:12.200

K.A.: But they started from scratch—the junior people—the junior anthropologists would go on and the one senior person hung on for a little while—what was his name? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:13.820 - 00:22:14.280

K.A.: Canadian. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:16.780 - 00:22:17.280

K.A.: Oh, geez. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:17.280 - 00:22:17.520

K.A.: That’s embarrassing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:21.800 - 00:22:24.300

K.A.: But, what was the image of the department, was what you asked. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:24.300 - 00:22:27.140

K.A.: [crosstalk] ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:27.140 - 00:22:30.740

B.L.: And I know you’re working on the 50th anniversary of the Coleman Report— [crosstalk] ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:30.800 - 00:22:31.000

K.A.: Yeah, we are. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:31.000 - 00:22:33.140

K.A.: We just had a meeting earlier today, a planning meeting of that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:33.780 - 00:22:35.960

K.A.: He also helped cofound the CSOS. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:36.960 - 00:22:50.160

K.A.: Another thing that set, in terms of Coleman’s influence, that set our department apart from a lot of the other academic departments that were doing educational studies is that there always was ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:50.900 - 00:22:53.780

K.A.: a healthy appreciation for applications of your work. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:54.600 - 00:22:58.460

K.A.: Applied sociology, policy and practice, because Coleman did that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:22:59.340 - 00:23:10.680

K.A.: So one of the ways that I think [it] actually was beneficial to a lot of our graduate students [was] in practical terms, because a lot of them went on to careers ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:10.680 - 00:23:16.460

K.A.: in research settings and in government, on the education side of things. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:16.880 - 00:23:22.280

K.A.: So the non-academic career paths were always well respected here. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:22.640 - 00:23:25.460

K.A.: And that wasn’t true in a lot of other places at the time. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:25.960 - 00:23:26.480

K.A.: And that’s Coleman-esque. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:27.640 - 00:23:32.860

K.A.: So he launched the department in ’59 and I didn’t appear on the scene until ’72. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:34.040 - 00:23:40.020

K.A.: But my sense of it is even though Coleman was not a daily presence in the department, it was still very much his department. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:41.020 - 00:23:45.240

B.L.: And what does that mean when he and Rossi both leave within a year of each other? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:45.620 - 00:23:51.480

B.L.: I can imagine a relatively young, relatively small department. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:51.980 - 00:23:54.260

B.L.: They could have decided to terminate it, I suppose. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:54.820 - 00:23:56.660

K.A.: And they didn’t, but I don’t know why not. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:57.000 - 00:23:57.800

K.A.: That’s beyond me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:23:58.060 - 00:24:12.000

K.A.: And the principals, there’s nobody who’s going to be able to tell that story because Doris is gone, Mac is gone—but what happened was there was a lot of worry about what ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:12.000 - 00:24:12.920

K.A.: the future held. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:13.880 - 00:24:26.360

K.A.: And pretty clearly in the way that the academic departments are evaluated, we were limping a lot because we lost our two most senior team—our two most prominent people. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:26.880 - 00:24:37.700

K.A.: But I think I said, I discovered that Doris and Mac were really the backbone of the department, because they had seniority and they were both very well regarded in their areas ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:37.700 - 00:24:38.320

K.A.: of scholarship. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:39.440 - 00:24:47.040

K.A.: Not at the level of Coleman and Rossi, internationally eminent, but very strong and very well regarded and terrific scholars. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:47.900 - 00:24:50.880

K.A.: But they also were inward looking. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:50.940 - 00:24:54.960

K.A.: So they worked hard to keep the department together and to be encouraging. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:56.160 - 00:24:58.040

K.A.: And we weathered that time. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:24:58.960 - 00:25:08.100

K.A.: Along the way I become—moved into a tenured track position so I was really altogether a member of the faculty by that time. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:08.800 - 00:25:11.060

B.L.: Were you working on CSOS at that time? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:11.060 - 00:25:14.860

K.A.: I headed a program of research that was located over there. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:14.860 - 00:25:18.440

K.A.: Yeah, on careers and post-secondary education. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:19.340 - 00:25:28.680

B.L.: Give me some sense of it as a—its research agenda and—because I’ve seen some of its reports, but I don’t have a good feel for it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:28.920 - 00:25:30.600

B.L.: Because it’s part of Arts and Sciences. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:31.180 - 00:25:33.700

B.L.: It’s not a free-standing center in that sense. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:34.560 - 00:25:34.960

K.A.: That’s right. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:35.000 - 00:25:36.360

B.L.: It was part of Arts and Sciences. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:36.840 - 00:25:39.620

K.A.: Until a couple, several years ago— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:39.620 - 00:25:42.060

B.L.: Well, yeah, and Education. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:42.060 - 00:25:42.260

B.L.: Yeah. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:42.260 - 00:25:44.080

K.A.: Since it was the School of Education to take it on. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:45.220 - 00:25:53.840

K.A.: Well, it had a very diverse portfolio of themes, topics to be worked on. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:25:56.540 - 00:26:00.040

K.A.: But the center carved out a mission for itself. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:00.600 - 00:26:08.700

K.A.: It was a sensible mission and they did it at a high level to focus on what they referred to as alterable variables. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:08.920 - 00:26:10.720

K.A.: I don’t know if Jim used that expression. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:10.720 - 00:26:17.200

K.A.: So they weren’t just—but they didn’t want to just do ivy tower research just for the sake of understanding. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:17.820 - 00:26:23.500

K.A.: They wanted to develop programs of research that could help inform school improvement. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:24.560 - 00:26:25.260

K.A.: Change. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:27.600 - 00:26:36.400

K.A.: And so the research agendas at the center were all intended to focus in on things that could be done to make schools a better place, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:36.800 - 00:26:40.360

K.A.: because that’s where the alterable conditions come into play. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:41.540 - 00:26:43.440

K.A.: And so they did that kind of work. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:45.460 - 00:26:52.400

K.A.: Before Bob Slavin, there were several research scientists that were working there on principles of cooperative education. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:26:53.300 - 00:27:01.600

K.A.: Small group work at the classroom level that would get—where the makeup of the groups would be diverse in terms of skill sets, academic preparation, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:02.040 - 00:27:14.620

K.A.: but it could also be diverse in terms of racial, ethnic and family income background so you get complementary skills and the kids that might be somewhat challenged would benefit from the ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:14.620 - 00:27:18.260

K.A.: opportunities to work with the kids that are closer to being on grade level. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:18.820 - 00:27:28.180

K.A.: So that really took hold and it was a very important program of research and it evolved into Bob’s Success For All framework. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:28.180 - 00:27:34.460

K.A.: He took that on and built it and made it something his own. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:34.920 - 00:27:36.340

K.A.: But it didn’t start out that way. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:36.440 - 00:27:43.260

B.L.: It was interesting to read the first site visit reports from I guess the predecessor of the Department of Education, but they came and they visited— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:43.340 - 00:27:44.320

K.A.: National Institute of Education is probably what it was. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:45.020 - 00:27:46.000

B.L.: Yes, which was funny. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:46.420 - 00:27:54.420

B.L.: And their conclusion was along the lines of “There's a lot of great things going on here, but we can't see the way they're connected.” And I don't know if that was ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:54.540 - 00:27:59.080

B.L.: the fault of the people visiting or whether in fact things weren't that good. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:27:59.320 - 00:28:00.880

K.A.: They probably weren't that connected. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:01.060 - 00:28:04.940

K.A.: There were programs of research and everybody was doing their own thing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:05.840 - 00:28:14.780

K.A.: But if there was a unifying thread, it would be this commitment to school improvement and trying to understand mechanisms where you can tweak it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:14.960 - 00:28:18.340

K.A.: Where you can do something and see change happen. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:19.780 - 00:28:23.880

K.A.: But substantively, it was very diverse. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:24.680 - 00:28:27.680

K.A.: And Joyce Epstein would probably be your best source for that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:27.840 - 00:28:29.340

K.A.: I don't know if she's on your to do list, but— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:30.060 - 00:28:31.120

B.L.: She’s on my done it list. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:31.520 - 00:28:33.300

B.L.: She was very helpful. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:34.040 - 00:28:44.820

K.A.: So one of the things that I know was something of a concern back in the day was that it might be too inbred because a lot of the key people— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:44.820 - 00:28:45.380

B.L.: These were the Coleman students. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:45.420 - 00:28:47.600

K.A.: Coleman students getting all into the work at the center. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:49.340 - 00:28:59.540

K.A.: But the ones that were very good at it and successful pretty clearly established their own separate identity and followed their own path. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:28:59.740 - 00:29:03.360

K.A.: So these were not Coleman clones by any stretch. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:04.780 - 00:29:05.860

K.A.: But they were well trained. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:06.860 - 00:29:08.620

B.L.: Could you tell me a little about its methods? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:09.240 - 00:29:19.300

B.L.: The reason in part is I had an office in 3505 looking out at the carriage house and I was going through the archive and there was an IBM brochure talking about ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:19.300 - 00:29:25.000

B.L.: this wonderful computer being used by CSOS that was apparently in that carriage house – ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:25.260 - 00:29:25.860

K.A.: The carriage house—that was their own computer facility. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:26.020 - 00:29:29.740

K.A.: For the day, it was really state of the art. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:32.540 - 00:29:39.720

K.A.: The computer technology and the statistics to use that technology were all under development. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:40.000 - 00:29:44.080

K.A.: It was very primitive by our standards, but very advanced by the standards of the day. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:44.080 - 00:29:46.320

K.A.: And so they did a lot of survey research. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:29:46.980 - 00:29:55.330

K.A.: They did a lot of quantitative analysis of administrative data, things you can get from schools like test scores and things like that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:00.380 - 00:30:05.040

K.A.: Nancy Cartwright kind of ran that facility for a number of years. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:05.040 - 00:30:06.100

B.L.: These are punch cards and – ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:06.840 - 00:30:08.380

K.A.: They would have been punch cards early on. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:09.880 - 00:30:15.560

K.A.: Then the data became magnetic—put it on the magnetic tapes and so you would mount these big—they were big tapes and tape drives. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:16.000 - 00:30:16.900

K.A.: Yeah, it was all that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:18.140 - 00:30:20.340

B.L.: Was any of your work done with that computer? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:20.940 - 00:30:21.840

K.A.: Not with that one, no. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:22.080 - 00:30:25.060

K.A.: I used the mainframe computer that was in the basement of Garland Hall. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:29.080 - 00:30:29.520

K.A.: So that was interesting. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:29.780 - 00:30:34.840

K.A.: So I came out of graduate school and I brought my dissertation data with me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:36.840 - 00:30:43.600

K.A.: I was working then as I got myself a little farther along, I wanted to work with some additional data sets. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:43.880 - 00:30:48.440

K.A.: Not like the beginning school study, but kind of national data—secondary analysis and national data. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:48.560 - 00:30:54.480

K.A.: Somebody else had done the interviewing or put the data together and I was able to get it and pose questions to the data. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:55.980 - 00:30:56.860

K.A.: So I arrived here. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:56.960 - 00:30:57.980

K.A.: I was right out of graduate school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:30:58.140 - 00:31:00.440

K.A.: I was young, I was energetic, I guess I was ambitious. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:02.200 - 00:31:05.460

K.A.: And I was coming to the world class research university, right? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:05.460 - 00:31:14.560

K.A.: There was no statistical software available in Garland Hall, at the Garland Hall computing facility for me to do my research. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:15.320 - 00:31:16.880

K.A.: I couldn't believe it at the time. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:19.140 - 00:31:26.720

K.A.: So I was never, and I'm still not, a computer geek type person where I can do my own programming. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:27.040 - 00:31:32.220

K.A.: So I had to rely on commercial software off the shelf. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:36.040 - 00:31:40.140

K.A.: The software package that I used for my dissertation analysis was called SPSS. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:40.340 - 00:31:44.160

K.A.: It's Statistical Package of the Social Sciences, which is still around and very popular. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:45.140 - 00:31:45.900

K.A.: It didn't exist. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:46.220 - 00:31:47.880

K.A.: But nothing like it existed here. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:48.080 - 00:31:48.660

K.A.: It wasn't installed. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:49.400 - 00:31:52.640

K.A.: So there was the mainframe computer in the basement of Garland Hall. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:52.840 - 00:31:59.320

K.A.: One of their technical support people was Kay Smith and I went and I talked to her and said “This is going to destroy my career. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:31:59.500 - 00:32:00.300

K.A.: I can't get my work done. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:00.840 - 00:32:02.280

K.A.: You don’t know what's going to happen.” It was that kind of conversation. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:02.520 - 00:32:03.500

K.A.: I don't know exactly what I said. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:03.980 - 00:32:09.520

K.A.: She was terrific and she got SPSS for me and she had it installed. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:10.180 - 00:32:12.420

K.A.: And so I could come and get some work done. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:13.960 - 00:32:15.520

K.A.: But I remember I was shocked. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:16.440 - 00:32:21.040

K.A.: I would come here, never occurred to me at a serious research university. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:21.460 - 00:32:34.240

K.A.: And it was a serious research university, but it wasn't very much into—it didn't have a strong history of empirical social science research outside of Jim and 3505. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:34.520 - 00:32:38.520

K.A.: So it wasn't at the central facility. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:38.700 - 00:32:40.400

K.A.: There was nothing for people like me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:41.540 - 00:32:45.180

B.L.: Let's go to the beginning of the beginning school study. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:46.800 - 00:32:47.000

K.A.: Yeah, I got a 3:30. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:48.080 - 00:32:48.800

K.A.: I'll go faster. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:50.080 - 00:32:51.360

B.L.: We're going perfectly fine. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:32:52.180 - 00:33:04.400

B.L.: I know something about it from your discussions, but the origins of it, it seems like from an outsider that would be a natural thing for a department where Coleman had been ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:04.400 - 00:33:11.600

B.L.: looking at higher grades and looking at schools and you would look at the summer program. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:12.420 - 00:33:14.240

K.A.: Well, it would have been natural. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:14.380 - 00:33:25.400

K.A.: Although back in the day, when we got started on this, Doris and I, there was very little interest among sociologists in the early years of schooling. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:26.060 - 00:33:30.940

K.A.: That was more the domain of developmental psychologists and social psychologists. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:31.900 - 00:33:34.480

B.L.: That start was not pushed by people from sociology. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:35.740 - 00:33:37.600

K.A.: No, it wasn’t. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:38.480 - 00:33:45.620

K.A.: Now Doris herself, who was interested in early childhood development and family life, so that was her area. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:46.140 - 00:33:50.800

K.A.: She did one of the strands of her work was on developmental sociolinguistics. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:33:51.220 - 00:33:58.520

K.A.: She was very accomplished in that so she did research on ethnic groups and their different language development patterns—children in those ethnic groups. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:01.620 - 00:34:07.780

K.A.: My dissertation work was high school and beyond, so older kids moving on into college or into the workplace. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:10.060 - 00:34:16.500

K.A.: But how the beginning school study came about was that Doris and I were looking for an excuse to collaborate. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:18.000 - 00:34:25.600

K.A.: In the '70s, she was editor of the Journal of Sociology of Education, which is a publication of the American Sociological Association, and it passes hands. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:25.760 - 00:34:27.040

K.A.: It moves every three or four years. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:27.760 - 00:34:34.300

K.A.: So she was invited to be the editor of the journal and she reached out to me to see if I wanted to work with her as her deputy editor. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:36.920 - 00:34:45.040

K.A.: And I saw a good opportunity, just like I saw a good opportunity to work with Bruce Ecklund on a dissertation project, which was far removed from anything I'd been trained to ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:45.040 - 00:34:46.360

K.A.: do, but it turned out to be a good opportunity. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:46.840 - 00:34:57.020

K.A.: Actually, in the sociology of human development they talk about pivotal points and life course or turning points in life course, and those are kind of examples of if I had not ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:57.020 - 00:34:59.540

K.A.: taken that path I would have been on some other path. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:34:59.600 - 00:35:00.660

K.A.: And it's absolutely true. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:02.120 - 00:35:04.420

K.A.: So Doris and I worked together well on the journal. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:04.740 - 00:35:05.400

K.A.: We enjoyed one another's company. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:07.700 - 00:35:20.860

K.A.: So when the journal moved on and left Hopkins, left the department, we were trying to rethink about “Let's see if we can figure out a way to keep working together,” is ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:20.860 - 00:35:21.540

K.A.: what it came down to. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:21.700 - 00:35:22.740

K.A.: She was my senior mentor. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:23.040 - 00:35:24.440

K.A.: She was the senior person when I arrived. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:26.060 - 00:35:32.180

K.A.: Very interesting background, Doris, because she was not altogether in the department, either, because she was in electrical engineering. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:32.180 - 00:35:32.800

K.A.: Did you know that? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:32.800 - 00:35:33.640

B.L.: I did know she had an appointment— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:34.060 - 00:35:36.480

K.A.: She wrote the primer on Fortran programming. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:37.940 - 00:35:39.240

K.A.: Can you believe it? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:39.800 - 00:35:40.580

K.A.: She was amazing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:41.920 - 00:35:52.100

K.A.: Anyway, so I was interested in educational issues and what happens to kids—the upper grades and moving on into whatever follows after high school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:52.380 - 00:35:56.640

K.A.: She was interested primarily in family issues and early childhood development. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:35:57.760 - 00:36:06.960

K.A.: And I was actually getting, because of my own research, I was getting more and more interested in moving my work to the earlier stages of schooling. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:07.920 - 00:36:11.580

K.A.: It's kind of like one of these “duh” things once it occurs to you. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:11.720 - 00:36:17.980

K.A.: But the obvious consideration there is I'm studying high school kids, but kids don't start [in] high school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:18.060 - 00:36:18.840

K.A.: It's not a blank slate. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:19.140 - 00:36:20.340

K.A.: They've got all this built up history. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:22.800 - 00:36:27.440

K.A.: If you know what their test scores are in tenth grade, you can pretty well forecast lots of things around there. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:27.980 - 00:36:31.620

K.A.: Not just the test scores, but other things like their career aspirations. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:31.920 - 00:36:41.600

K.A.: You look at all that stuff—but their academic trajectories and their interest in their future, those are developmental and they don't just start in high school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:41.960 - 00:36:44.280

K.A.: So I'm getting interested in wanting to go back. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:44.960 - 00:36:47.700

K.A.: And she was already there in terms of her focus and her work. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:51.020 - 00:36:57.460

K.A.: So after any number of conversations, we thought, well, let's see if we can launch this project together here in Baltimore, keep it manageable, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:36:58.080 - 00:37:01.660

K.A.: that would focus on the experiences with children at the start of their education. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:01.660 - 00:37:04.640

K.A.: Not at their end, but at the launch. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:05.220 - 00:37:08.280

K.A.: Now we call it from the beginning school study because that's what that was supposed to connote. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:09.220 - 00:37:14.000

K.A.: For us, we wanted to look on carefully at the first grade experience. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:14.000 - 00:37:15.800

K.A.: That's the beginning of formal schooling. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:16.660 - 00:37:22.040

K.A.: In some of our writing we would talk about the transition from home child to school child. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:23.060 - 00:37:31.400

K.A.: These life course transitions, another kind of phrasing, but you often think of them as involving older folks, like getting married or retiring. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:32.100 - 00:37:37.320

K.A.: Changes in who you are that fundamentally alter your configuration of your life. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:38.000 - 00:37:39.640

K.A.: But for little kids it happens, too. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:40.880 - 00:37:53.580

K.A.: Moving from being around your family, your parents all the time and in your home and moving into a place like school, which is a very formal institutional organization with different kinds ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:53.580 - 00:37:56.840

K.A.: of expectations of how you're going to present yourself, conduct yourself. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:37:57.400 - 00:38:01.640

K.A.: That's a big deal for kids and for lots of kids it's not an easy or smooth transition. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:02.500 - 00:38:12.780

K.A.: So we decided we wanted to look carefully at what the first grade experience was and differences across social lines, because we're sociologists and interested in issues of social stratification. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:13.540 - 00:38:15.680

K.A.: So poor kids, not poor kids. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:15.780 - 00:38:17.540

K.A.: How do they get off to a different start? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:18.760 - 00:38:21.340

K.A.: African Americans and whites, boys and girls. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:21.840 - 00:38:22.840

K.A.: There's those considerations. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:23.640 - 00:38:33.060

K.A.: So the original idea for the beginning school study, and we managed to secure funding for it, was that we would interview the kids individually. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:33.500 - 00:38:34.800

K.A.: The original plan— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:34.800 - 00:38:36.400

B.L.: Interview five-year-olds? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:36.400 - 00:38:36.820

K.A.: Well, they were six. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:36.820 - 00:38:37.020

B.L.: Six. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:38.200 - 00:38:47.520

K.A.: So we talked to the kids individually and actually we had to prove that we could do that and get good, reliable data because it was very unusual to do school based ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:47.520 - 00:38:47.980

K.A.: interviews – ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:48.280 - 00:38:50.120

B.L.: Didn't they require the school to sign off and the parents – ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:52.300 - 00:38:58.020

K.A.: Laying the foundation for it was quite challenging because you had to start in the superintendent's office, the principals, the teachers, and the parents. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:38:58.320 - 00:38:59.640

K.A.: You get everybody to sign on. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:01.100 - 00:39:03.700

K.A.: And then we had to figure out how to do what we wanted to do. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:05.960 - 00:39:07.180

K.A.: And it was all very new. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:07.380 - 00:39:13.480

K.A.: It was new to us, but it was new in general because [there] wasn't much precedent for doing this kind of research. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:13.620 - 00:39:21.220

K.A.: It was one of those things that makes this project so special because not only did we do it, but I think it's fair to say we did it at a pretty ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:21.220 - 00:39:21.680

K.A.: high level. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:21.680 - 00:39:24.780

K.A.: So almost 800 kids, 20 schools initially. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:27.100 - 00:39:32.580

K.A.: We field tested our very first pupil interview in my daughter's preschool class the year before. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:32.780 - 00:39:36.620

K.A.: It was that kind of homespun kind of thing, which was quite nice, actually. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:36.860 - 00:39:37.360

K.A.: It was very cool. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:39.340 - 00:39:40.820

K.A.: But the original idea was to— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:40.820 - 00:39:42.460

B.L.: Were your kids going to Baltimore schools? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:43.100 - 00:39:44.380

K.A.: Well, this was before they were in school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:44.620 - 00:39:53.780

K.A.: My daughter was in preschool right across the street at that Episcopal Church there, which shut down after she attended because of some nasty incident. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:55.980 - 00:39:58.540

K.A.: Not involving my daughter, but it was such a shame. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:39:59.640 - 00:40:06.960

K.A.: At any event, so the idea was that we'd look on carefully as these kids went through first grade, talk to the teachers, talk to their parents, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:07.180 - 00:40:09.380

K.A.: talk to them, get access to their school records. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:09.380 - 00:40:10.160

K.A.: We'd do that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:10.160 - 00:40:16.900

K.A.: And then we would look into their second grade experience to see the repercussions and whatever had happened in first grade. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:16.900 - 00:40:20.860

K.A.: So if the kids who got off to a smooth start in first grade, did they do better in second grade? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:21.020 - 00:40:27.560

K.A.: If they got off to a shaky start in first grade, was it a tailspin? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:27.760 - 00:40:30.640

K.A.: Did they kind of just spiral down starting in second grade? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:30.880 - 00:40:32.120

K.A.: And that was the original idea. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:32.340 - 00:40:35.260

K.A.: That was really the plan for the beginning school study. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:35.340 - 00:40:44.040

K.A.: It would be two years in the field and then a year to take stock of what we had seen and write up some papers and then we would move on to ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:44.040 - 00:40:44.640

K.A.: something else. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:45.340 - 00:40:53.780

K.A.: But it turned out to be 25 years in the field, which was completely unanticipated [at] the outset, and it really wasn't planned. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:40:56.160 - 00:41:01.300

K.A.: But the beginning school study got up a head of steam and it proved to have impressive staying power. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:02.740 - 00:41:12.620

K.A.: What happened there was at some point in the first year, Doris and I, we looked around and we had these discussions and we realized we had done all the heavy lifting. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:12.620 - 00:41:16.040

K.A.: We had our permissions all in place, which is not an easy thing to do. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:17.260 - 00:41:25.320

K.A.: We got parental permissions signed from 97 percent of the randomly selected children, and it was a representative random sample, which is very uncommon. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:26.000 - 00:41:28.540

K.A.: That's the sociological survey research side of it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:29.140 - 00:41:36.380

K.A.: Child developmental psychologists by and large are happy to do catch as catch can sampling, but we wanted it to be strong— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:36.600 - 00:41:38.420

B.L.: The schools were also selected at random? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:38.520 - 00:41:38.980

K.A.: Yes, they were. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:39.460 - 00:41:41.920

B.L.: Even though you were looking for different kinds of kids. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:42.380 - 00:41:44.280

K.A.: Well, we did, it was called stratified random sampling. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:44.880 - 00:41:52.860

K.A.: So what we had was a grid of all, I think it was 115 elementary schools in Baltimore City, and we classified them—it was a two by three grid. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:41:53.080 - 00:42:01.480

K.A.: So it was schools in middle class neighborhoods, schools in working class or low income neighborhoods, so that's a socioeconomic dimension, and then schools that were predominantly white, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:01.720 - 00:42:03.860

K.A.: predominantly African American, and racially integrated. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:04.520 - 00:42:15.500

K.A.: And then from each of those six cells, we selected schools at random so we could actually paint the picture citywide and capture the diversity that was there at the time. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:16.480 - 00:42:25.440

K.A.: And then having sampled schools randomly, then we sampled children from kindergarten rosters from the previous school year so that we could get started in the summer before first grade getting parental ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:25.440 - 00:42:29.960

K.A.: consents, and we actually also started interviewing parents before the start. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:30.020 - 00:42:32.600

B.L.: And you literally had to interview 800 kids? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:33.180 - 00:42:34.400

K.A.: Yeah, 790. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:34.860 - 00:42:38.100

K.A.: Well, actually 838 if you really want to know the number. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:39.460 - 00:42:40.620

B.L.: I had no idea. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:40.840 - 00:42:42.340

B.L.: I thought there was some kind of a survey that they would be— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:42.820 - 00:42:43.080

K.A.: Oh, no. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:43.320 - 00:42:44.460

K.A.: We were sitting there one on one. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:44.760 - 00:42:51.240

K.A.: We go in the schools— and for me it was challenging with the little chairs and the little tables and we would set up wherever they would let us. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:51.580 - 00:42:53.600

K.A.: We interviewed the children individually. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:55.180 - 00:42:58.860

B.L.: What sort of question—I don't know if you have any of the old questionnaires or if they're printed in the report. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:42:59.120 - 00:42:59.700

B.L.: Maybe they are. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:02.840 - 00:43:04.100

K.A.: I have them. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:04.540 - 00:43:07.080

K.A.: Maybe I'll scan a couple and send them off to you. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:07.080 - 00:43:07.280

B.L.: It would be very interesting to see. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:07.280 - 00:43:10.540

K.A.: But it was very basic stuff from the kids because you couldn't overreach. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:11.680 - 00:43:15.780

K.A.: But we asked them how well they liked school—a lot, a little, not so much, that sort of thing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:17.480 - 00:43:20.160

K.A.: We asked them how did they like their teachers. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:20.480 - 00:43:23.540

K.A.: We asked them what they thought they'd like to be when they grow up. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:24.620 - 00:43:31.300

K.A.: We asked them what marks they thought they would get on the upcoming report cards. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:32.100 - 00:43:39.100

K.A.: And actually we interviewed them twice during the kindergarten year, fall and spring, before the first marking period and then before the end of the school year. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:39.480 - 00:43:43.160

K.A.: But we had to figure out how to do this in a way—because they had never received a report card. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:43.620 - 00:43:49.880

K.A.: So we actually put together these prompts where we had to mark up a report card and you had little tokens and the grading system was excellent, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:49.880 - 00:43:52.200

K.A.: good, satisfactory, unsatisfactory. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:52.300 - 00:43:56.700

K.A.: So you kind of walk through all that so that they can actually respond to the questions. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:43:58.520 - 00:44:11.680

K.A.: We asked them what kind of work they thought they'd like to do when they grew up, and we had a local artist do some sketches of characteristic jobs to make it ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:44:11.680 - 00:44:12.220

K.A.: more tangible. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:44:12.960 - 00:44:22.160

K.A.: So we had a nurse—these were cartoony-type things and they tended to be drawn in a way that would be androgynous because we were interested in sex typing them among other things. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:44:22.960 - 00:44:32.100

K.A.: So we had a sketch of a nurse, we had a taxi driver, we had a librarian, we had—so it was higher level to lower level jobs, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:44:32.400 - 00:44:41.120

K.A.: and then sex— male—ones that are characteristically populated by men and by women, so we could do that and see where these kids saw themselves fitting in. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:44:42.320 - 00:44:47.520

K.A.: So I thought we did some pretty ingenious things to make this work, and it did seem to work very well. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:44:48.820 - 00:44:50.720

K.A.: So we had our procedures down. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:44:50.820 - 00:44:58.520

K.A.: We had our permissions, we had established good relationships with everybody that you needed to be on good terms with. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:00.980 - 00:45:08.780

K.A.: We convinced ourselves that we were able to interview these kids and get good information out of them, as well as their parents and teachers. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:09.120 - 00:45:10.720

K.A.: The parents and teachers were less problematic because they're adults. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:12.020 - 00:45:16.560

K.A.: So along the way we thought, well geez, we made this big investment in getting this thing launched. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:18.260 - 00:45:25.380

K.A.: Maybe we should keep it going for a little while longer because there’s always more you can— Why stop at the end of second grade if we can take it through the ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:25.380 - 00:45:26.360

K.A.: end of elementary school? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:26.760 - 00:45:27.300

K.A.: That would be nice. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:28.280 - 00:45:33.280

K.A.: And then when we got closer to that, we thought, well, you know, it’s still moving along okay, maybe we can go through the middle grades. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:33.560 - 00:45:34.900

K.A.: And then it was, maybe we can go through high school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:35.180 - 00:45:41.900

K.A.: And then it was, they're getting along in their lives—if you can do it a few years after high school, all the better still. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:43.860 - 00:45:49.280

K.A.: So we kept working at it and we kept raising the money to do this, which is not an easy thing and it was not inexpensive. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:49.640 - 00:45:50.360

K.A.: It was very expensive. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:50.360 - 00:45:52.940

K.A.: But we managed to get it done. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:45:53.860 - 00:46:00.800

K.A.: And all along the way we kept together a small core staff, because we did all this work ourselves. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:01.700 - 00:46:11.520

K.A.: And so as it turns out, the beginning school study for almost a quarter century had—it was kind of a mom and pop survey operation. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:12.060 - 00:46:21.040

K.A.: So we had a small core staff and then we had to go do other things, we would expand by hiring people to help with interviewing and data processing and things like ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:21.040 - 00:46:21.320

K.A.: that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:21.320 - 00:46:28.440

K.A.: But for a quarter century we did and it was quite an experience. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:28.980 - 00:46:37.740

K.A.: So for me personally, and I’ve thought about this a lot, I was at Hopkins for 42 years before I retired, on the faculty. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:38.220 - 00:46:41.900

K.A.: What comes around goes around. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:42.220 - 00:46:48.440

K.A.: The beginning school study allowed me to go back to the very same kinds of questions that I was doing in my dissertation research, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:48.440 - 00:46:59.200

K.A.: but in a very different way and in a deeper way in terms of seeing how these kids kind of how their lives unfolded from first grade into young adulthood. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:46:59.500 - 00:47:02.960

K.A.: When we ended, they were 28, 29 years old. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:03.100 - 00:47:09.340

K.A.: So six years old, the threshold of the third decade of their lives—well into the third decade of their lives. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:09.560 - 00:47:19.020

B.L.: Now when you began it, was the intent not only to discover it—it has a lot of interesting things that you learn through the course of it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:19.940 - 00:47:28.860

B.L.: I'm no expert on it, but the importance of the summer, the importance of people who start behind, they're fairly close in the beginning and then they begin to fall. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:29.240 - 00:47:34.200

B.L.: A lot of interesting revelations in terms of the research. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:34.560 - 00:47:37.760

B.L.: But did you expect also to intervene in the school system? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:37.980 - 00:47:38.720

K.A.: No, we never did. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:39.100 - 00:47:39.880

B.L.: So it wasn't the Coleman-esque— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:40.960 - 00:47:41.600

K.A.: No, that's right. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:42.020 - 00:47:45.740

K.A.: I once wrote a paper—I can't speak for Doris, but I feel like we were simpatico on this. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:46.840 - 00:47:52.400

K.A.: I once wrote a paper that was entitled "In Defense of Ivory Towerism." ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:54.360 - 00:47:55.960

B.L.: Is it—I can find it online or something? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:56.000 - 00:47:56.580

K.A.: Probably someplace. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:47:56.840 - 00:48:02.500

K.A.: It was for a conference that I was invited to in upstate New York. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:05.920 - 00:48:08.160

K.A.: It wasn't at a college or a university. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:08.160 - 00:48:08.620

K.A.: It was someplace. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:09.600 - 00:48:15.780

K.A.: At any rate, so I tried to make the case there that you don't have to be worried about fixing things to be doing good research and important research. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:16.040 - 00:48:19.040

K.A.: Just the importance of knowing, for knowing’s sake—it's the standard thing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:22.100 - 00:48:30.080

K.A.: So me personally, I always respected my colleagues at CSOS for getting down in the trenches and trying to make the world a better place. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:30.200 - 00:48:34.080

K.A.: But I never felt an obligation to do that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:34.200 - 00:48:35.860

K.A.: I never thought I would be doing that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:38.040 - 00:48:42.600

K.A.: But then, it takes a curious turn sometimes. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:42.860 - 00:48:43.860

K.A.: Not for everyone. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:44.420 - 00:48:47.840

K.A.: But especially the work on summer learning and summer learning loss. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:48:49.220 - 00:49:00.480

K.A.: That we did as academic researchers, to try to see if we could distinguish the influence of school and the experience of schooling [on] children's academic trajectories from the experiences of home ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:00.480 - 00:49:01.820

K.A.: and the resources of home. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:01.820 - 00:49:09.960

K.A.: In the standard survey research way of doing that, it's very hard to disentangle those two things—home and school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:10.380 - 00:49:15.300

K.A.: Poor kids go to poor—high poverty schools and not poor kids go to not high poverty schools. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:15.480 - 00:49:21.340

K.A.: And so how do you achieve a separation so that you can get clarity on which is the driver. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:21.580 - 00:49:23.340

K.A.: Is it family resources or school resources? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:24.160 - 00:49:28.440

K.A.: So without what's called observational data, non-experimental data, it's very hard to do that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:28.600 - 00:49:38.500

K.A.: We try to do it through statistical means by making adjustments for—it turns out, and this is a revelation in a book called Summer Learning, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:38.500 - 00:49:49.860

K.A.: by Barbara Heyns, that the school year calendar approximates a natural experiment because kids are in school during the school year, but they're not in school during the summer. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:50.280 - 00:49:52.840

K.A.: And yet they're in the families and neighborhoods all year round. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:49:53.380 - 00:49:58.120

K.A.: So if there's something going on different during the summer than during the school year, then you get some leverage. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:00.280 - 00:50:02.560

K.A.: What's happening during the summer isn't school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:03.100 - 00:50:05.740

K.A.: It's family influence and neighborhood influence. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:06.140 - 00:50:20.400

K.A.: So that's where our interest in the seasonal comparisons of children's learning comes into play, as an academic inquiry to try to separate, in a reasonably rigorous way, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:20.400 - 00:50:22.840

K.A.: family influence from school influence so we can parse that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:24.480 - 00:50:28.480

K.A.: But it has practical relevance, as it turns out. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:29.300 - 00:50:40.920

K.A.: And so because of the practical relevance, I've gotten drawn into that and now I've come to realize that for those of us that have something to contribute, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:41.140 - 00:50:42.540

K.A.: I think it's really important to do that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:42.700 - 00:50:51.520

K.A.: I think I was kind of late in coming to that, but it's pleasing to me that our work on summer learning and summer learning loss has been impactful in a practical ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:51.520 - 00:50:51.880

K.A.: way. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:52.980 - 00:50:56.920

K.A.: We coined the expression “summer slide” and now everybody uses that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:50:57.480 - 00:51:04.520

K.A.: Everybody's into this—the president and the secretary of education talk about summer slide and they're talking our talk. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:04.520 - 00:51:06.540

B.L.: That's nice. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:06.540 - 00:51:15.560

K.A.: And I'm on the board of the National Summer Learning Association, whose mission it is to increase the availability of high quality summer programming for disadvantaged children. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:16.860 - 00:51:18.140

K.A.: It is making a difference. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:18.800 - 00:51:25.880

K.A.: It started out to be pure academic research and kind of has filtered through, and so I feel good about that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:26.000 - 00:51:31.580

K.A.: I feel like that's one of the larger contributions I've been able to make through my work. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:32.400 - 00:51:35.200

B.L.: Only a couple more, because I know you've got your appointment coming up. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:35.520 - 00:51:39.620

K.A.: Can I show you—where's my book bag? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:44.580 - 00:51:46.900

K.A.: This isn’t all about me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:47.120 - 00:51:49.500

K.A.: You don't have to do anything with any of this if you don't want. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:49.680 - 00:51:51.440

K.A.: But I'm going to give you, if I have it here. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:51.500 - 00:51:52.380

K.A.: I think I have it here. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:55.980 - 00:51:56.300

K.A.: Here it is. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:51:57.580 - 00:52:04.860

K.A.: In my retirement I'm trying to launch a school improvement initiative, and here it is. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:06.960 - 00:52:09.480

K.A.: This makes it look like there's more there than there really is. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:09.880 - 00:52:11.060

K.A.: You’re welcome to keep that. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:11.900 - 00:52:13.040

K.A.: The Thurgood Marshall Alliance. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:14.420 - 00:52:17.800

B.L.: So you see, you eventually got around to intervening. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:18.140 - 00:52:20.880

K.A.: Yeah, I'm trying to jump right into it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:21.440 - 00:52:23.880

B.L.: Somewhat less controversially, maybe, than Coleman. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:24.240 - 00:52:24.960

K.A.: Well, I don't know. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:25.020 - 00:52:25.360

K.A.: This is very Coleman-esque. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:27.980 - 00:52:31.420

K.A.: It supports schools that are committed to diversity and enrollments, and that's what Coleman is about. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:37.740 - 00:52:49.260

B.L.: One is sort of oddball question because of what I've been reading, which is Julian Stanley appears in some of the early CSOS, and I've always wondered about how the relationship—I guess ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:49.260 - 00:52:51.200

B.L.: he was in education and then psychology. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:53.220 - 00:52:57.280

B.L.: How CTY and CSOS got along, or didn't. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:52:57.560 - 00:53:04.240

B.L.: Because I was shocked to see that some of his early work was actually on disadvantaged very early children. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:04.620 - 00:53:08.760

B.L.: He was editing and doing these conferences in 1972, 1973. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:08.760 - 00:53:11.540

K.A.: I was privileged to get to know Julian. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:12.660 - 00:53:18.660

K.A.: Not intimately, but cordially, and he was a really remarkable individual. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:20.540 - 00:53:31.760

K.A.: I think once his interests turned to precocious youth and try to help foster their uncommon abilities, that didn't fit in particularly well. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:31.860 - 00:53:34.360

K.A.: There's nothing wrong with that, but it wasn't the CSOS thing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:34.900 - 00:53:37.820

K.A.: And so my sense is that he went his own way. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:37.820 - 00:53:47.900

K.A.: I actually published an article with a graduate student that reacted to a paper that he and Camilla Benbow published way back when. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:48.140 - 00:53:52.260

K.A.: We thought they had overstated the case, so we were being critical of their work. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:53.820 - 00:53:56.220

K.A.: But we stayed on good terms. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:56.420 - 00:53:59.240

K.A.: I stayed on good terms with everybody I fought with, which is unusual. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:53:59.380 - 00:54:02.920

K.A.: I actually published some critical work of Jim Coleman and we stayed on good terms. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:04.620 - 00:54:11.120

K.A.: But the CTY was a very different kind of strand from what CSOS was doing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:12.200 - 00:54:14.160

K.A.: And then it became his passion. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:14.660 - 00:54:18.680

K.A.: Once he took that turn, he just went with it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:18.780 - 00:54:23.460

B.L.: If I can say so, it's become a kind of cult if you talk to the people who work there now. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:23.460 - 00:54:25.860

B.L.: It really is. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:25.860 - 00:54:27.160

K.A.: Well, there's a real commitment to it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:28.260 - 00:54:30.800

B.L.: There's a commitment, and also to his memory and legacy. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:30.800 - 00:54:34.200

B.L.: It makes it a little harder for a researcher. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:34.940 - 00:54:39.440

K.A.: I've never seen the inside of it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:40.640 - 00:54:54.200

K.A.: I can well imagine, because in some sense their commitment—their convictions run counter to the larger, I think, dynamic of ____ how poor kids— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:54:54.780 - 00:55:01.500

B.L.: Well, that was McPartland's idea, too, that—no disrespect to Stanley from his part. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:02.760 - 00:55:03.640

K.A.: Oh, absolutely not. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:04.420 - 00:55:07.660

B.L.: It was just a different approach. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:09.560 - 00:55:13.840

K.A.: It’s a different agenda to doing—trying to make things better for kids in school. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:14.080 - 00:55:17.260

K.A.: But his was focused on a particular segment of the school age population. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:18.020 - 00:55:21.980

K.A.: The rest of us were looking at different kinds of kids. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:21.980 - 00:55:26.120

K.A.: But I’m feeling the same kind of—it’s within me. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:26.680 - 00:55:35.000

K.A.: Because if this Marshall Alliance—if you look at it, it’s to try to encourage schools with different diverse enrollments and so these won’t be high poverty schools, ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:35.400 - 00:55:37.280

K.A.: but kids in high poverty schools need help. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:37.740 - 00:55:42.760

K.A.: So it’s the same kind of—I’m interested in helping poor kids by helping them get out of high poverty schools. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:43.920 - 00:55:49.060

K.A.: But the vast majority of poor kids are going to remain locked into high poverty schools. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:49.060 - 00:55:51.060

K.A.: There’s that kind of— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:51.060 - 00:55:52.240

B.L.: Here’s the last thing— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:52.240 - 00:55:53.260

K.A.: Okay, I’m sorry. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:53.260 - 00:55:53.680

B.L.: No, no, no. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:53.920 - 00:55:55.220

B.L.: I want to keep on your schedule. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:55:55.440 - 00:56:01.340

B.L.: But I found this letter from Ross Jones, and it was back in 1969, so it’s just a little before you got here. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:01.780 - 00:56:04.500

B.L.: But it could have been written by Daniels yesterday, I think. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:05.900 - 00:56:15.640

B.L.: He’s very concerned about education in Baltimore and he says “A crucial element in improving the stability of this community is directly related to the quality of the school system. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:15.640 - 00:56:24.360

B.L.: The good stable families who are needed to undergird the community will simply not remain here or move into it if the school system is poor. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:24.840 - 00:56:28.640

B.L.: We must seek as many ways as possible to strengthen the local public schools.” ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:29.080 - 00:56:29.280

K.A.: Wow. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:29.660 - 00:56:30.000

K.A.: I’m impressed. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:31.860 - 00:56:40.060

B.L.: Am I right in thinking that idea really is still driving much of what we’d like to do with the— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:40.180 - 00:56:41.920

K.A.: Oh, I think it is. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:41.920 - 00:56:50.560

K.A.: At the highest levels of the university in terms of Daniels’ commitment, but I think that’s spot on—the sense of it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:56:52.040 - 00:57:01.020

K.A.: So when I was on the teaching faculty, and I taught courses in sociology and education, one of the things that I always harped on is that my sense—because I think it’s ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:01.020 - 00:57:10.940

K.A.: a research-based sense, it’s not just what I think—is that one of the biggest challenges of achieving educational excellence citywide in places like Baltimore is the absence of a middle class core. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:12.320 - 00:57:20.800

K.A.: As families of means and everything that goes along with that— it’s not just that they have money, but they also have an understanding of what it takes to have a good ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:20.800 - 00:57:23.460

K.A.: school and a good school system and how to get there. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:24.160 - 00:57:27.820

K.A.: As those families abandon the city, it becomes more and more challenging. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:28.440 - 00:57:37.560

K.A.: So the vast majority of schools in Baltimore, public schools in Baltimore, have poverty concentrations and low income concentrations of 80-85, 90-95 percent. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:38.180 - 00:57:39.460

K.A.: And that is a really challenging— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:39.780 - 00:57:41.960

B.L.: Much higher even than when you began your study. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:43.500 - 00:57:43.820

K.A.: Oh, yeah. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:43.820 - 00:57:50.320

K.A.: So that’s exactly what the Marshall Alliance is about, to try to encourage more families of means. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:50.640 - 00:57:58.440

K.A.: Not just white families, but families of color, middle class families, to feel like they deserve a good educational options for their children in the city. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:57:59.200 - 00:58:04.200

K.A.: And if we can encourage more of them to commit to the city and to its schools, it has the potential to be transforming. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:06.860 - 00:58:22.260

K.A.: So middle class flight, white and African American, has had a devastating impact on the city, and in particular on the city schools and the ability of the city schools to do ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:22.260 - 00:58:24.140

K.A.: whatever it wants to do for our kids. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:24.800 - 00:58:25.300

K.A.: It’s the same. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:25.700 - 00:58:28.360

K.A.: But that’s really quite something to see, it’s prescient. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:28.760 - 00:58:30.840

K.A.: But I guess that was the concern of the day. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:30.940 - 00:58:32.760

K.A.: It wasn’t just looking ahead. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:33.180 - 00:58:35.440

B.L.: Well that was in the aftermath of the riots and— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:36.160 - 00:58:36.420

K.A.: Exactly. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:37.180 - 00:58:38.380

B.L.: But I thought that was pretty good. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:38.380 - 00:58:41.380

B.L.: That’s a pretty good take on it. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:41.380 - 00:58:41.740

K.A.: Absolutely. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:41.740 - 00:58:49.300

K.A.: So those same concerns are still out there and if anything they’ve been more severe and the problems have become more pressing. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:58:50.360 - 00:59:04.280

K.A.: And the university at the highest level does seem to have a sincere, genuine kind of commitment to being—making itself a more meaningful partner to the city. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:59:04.640 - 00:59:06.840

B.L.: Would you say more so than when you began your study? ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:59:07.320 - 00:59:07.520

K.A.: Oh, yeah. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:59:07.960 - 00:59:08.160

K.A.: Absolutely. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:59:09.860 - 00:59:10.400

B.L.: Excellent. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:59:11.240 - 00:59:11.980

B.L.: Thank you very much. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠

00:59:12.640 - 00:59:13.700

B.L.: That was really— ⁠ ⁠ ⁠