By Ben Riggleman

Southern Maine Community College cancelled all classes on the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 14, without much explanation. A mass email to students mentioned an “Achieving the Dream kickoff,” and clarified only that Achieving the Dream is “a network of more than 220 community colleges nationwide dedicated to improving student success.” Still, why were three hours of classes cancelled? Why was every staff member, including the custodians, required to come to the HUB Gym for this “kickoff”? And how would it all serve “student success”?

The event was kept hush-hush to staff as well as students. That morning, one staff member mused about it being a surprise game show: “I don’t know why,” she said. “Maybe it’s the name, ‘Achieving the Dream.’ Sounds like a game show.” Despite having visions of The Price Is Right, she admitted realistically, “I think we’re just going to walk into a boring lecture for three hours.”

In fact, both ideas were off the mark. While there were no cameras, no fantastic prizes or glamorous announcers, the kickoff was as much game as lecture.

As attendees marched into the HUB, they each received a name tag with an alphanumeric code and a single colored dot on it. They then found a place at the crowded folding tables that had been set up in the front half of the gym and waited for something to be “kicked off.” A bell was rung. President Ron Cantor, followed by several staff, took the podium to introduce Achieving the Dream and a key concept in its literature: the difference between equity and equality.

Equity, whose meaning overlaps with “fairness,” was defined as sensitivity to individuals’ diverse needs and disadvantages. It was contrasted with equality, defined as shallow equality of opportunity: offering everybody the same resources regardless of their needs.

Then the attendees — all several hundred of them — were split into two even groups to play games.

A live-action “game of life” took place in the back half of the gym. Tables had been set up around the perimeter: Housing, a Bank, a Shopping Center, Health Care, Education and Employment. These were crewed by staff volunteers.

Although participants didn’t know it, the game was rigged. Their name tags signified whether they were rich or poor, white or nonwhite, male or female, cisgender or transgender, a local or a recent immigrant. This information translated not into affirmative action but into bureaucratic roadblocks and discrimination. Immigrants, for instance, were given gibberish forms to fill out, simulating a foreign language. Most participants found themselves standing in endless, zigzagging lines waiting for the whims of bureaucracy to decide their fate.

Most seemed to take the game in stride, recognizing the greater point being made through these exercises in futility. Even those who felt they didn’t need to be taught its lesson saw benefit in it for some of their coworkers.

In the front of the gym, a similar situation was being played out in board-game format: Achieving the Dream’s proprietary Finish Line Game.

The “game of life” had been proposed and set up by Professor Rachel Guthrie and other faculty members on the Achieving the Dream core team. In an email, Professor Guthrie said that attendance and participation in both games were “excellent.” However, she said, “The only way to judge the success of these two endeavors will be in chatting with participants to see if these activities have deepened our understanding of the complex and difficult situations many of our students are facing.”

The rest of the afternoon was more subdued. Among others, Derek Langhauser, president of the Maine Community College System, spoke on Achieving the Dream; the whole System is now participating in it. Two Achieving the Dream “coaches” also gave speeches to try to answer the million-dollar question: What is Achieving the Dream?

They made one point emphatically: It’s not an initiative. (Having been fed initiative after initiative since No Child Left Behind, many educators reflexively gag at the word, and at the very concept).

Rather, they likened it more to a methodology. While an initiative could be expected to set goals for a school, this nonprofit “national reform network” apparently leaves that to the community colleges it partners with; goal setting at SMCC will be up to the core team and the administration. What the program will do is provide a lengthy survey, called the ICAT, that all faculty will take, and in other ways support the development of what it calls a “culture of evidence.” It will help systematize data gathering, and in so doing help SMCC find out which existing initiatives and programs are working to help students succeed, and which aren’t.

Some might question the need for “reform” at SMCC. But, in fact, the school has a problem with graduation rates and other measures of success. According to graphs it publishes on its Consumer Info web page, students are dropping out at startling rates. Less than 60 percent of students who began taking classes at SMCC in fall 2015 returned the following year. Fifty-eight percent of full-time students came back; only 47 percent of part-time students did.

Graduation and transfer rates are clearly much lower. More than 60 percent of full-time students who began classes at SMCC in 2013 did not graduate or transfer within 150 percent of their program’s normal time. Only 21 percent transferred to another school. Only 16 percent graduated.

And then there are the issues encapsulated by the word “equity”. In the 2013 cohort, for example, only 3 percent of Black students graduated and only 6 percent of Hispanic/Latino students did.

So what’s our problem? Achieving the Dream promises to help discover that. Unlike other “accountability” programs, it is open to qualitative data, such as that gathered through student and faculty focus groups. Transparency is also one of its values; hopefully this will mean that all data gathered on students will be made available to students.

You can read more about Achieving the Dream on its website, achievingthedream.org. Expect further coverage of this program, and its relevance to students, in coming issues of The Beacon.