I traveled to the Green Mountain State last weekend for the NEOA conference. I had never been to Vermont, but it was another beautiful rural area. The overall experience of being surrounded by the most passionate, humble, hard working professionals is really tremendous. It is so nice to get their input and feedback. I gave them a lot of practical ideas around fostering resilience in their students and build social capital. Because my classroom at Upward Bound is very theory based, I was able to share many of the activities I use.
A feeling of frustration was prevalent at the confernece though. The DOE has decided to do an empirical study of Upward Bound and its impact on child outcomes. The idea is good, but the implementation has put many UB staff in a comprimising and unethical situation. Any child who gets accepted is put into a lottery system and is either put into the treatment group (UB) or the control (no UB). A stipulation of being in the controlm group (which they are randomly assigned to) is that the participant must agree to never received services from UB in the future. The problem is, the directors are the people who have to tell the kids that they were accepted, but didn't get into the treatment group, and then tell them that they can never reapply or receive any services. This seems unethical.
My presentation seemed to fit into this energy nicely. In my explanation of phenomenology I always emphasize some basic ideas. First, phenomenonlogy is grounded in existential philosophy and the belief is that there is no one truth, in fact there are many. And there are also multiple realities, unique unto each individual. This refute the positivist view point that there is just one truth and one reality for everyone. I do not try to present myself as being biased toward qualitative research (even though I clearly am), but merely emphasize that your method really depends on the questions you are asking. BUT I think they questions we are asking about rural poverty and Upward Bound are best answered from a qualitative perspective.
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I agree that the framework of the UB program, as it has been described here, is unethical. It seems that after a few years of research and analysis of results of the program, that if it seemed to be a huge benefit, that the control group should be abandoned and have all youth be full participants in the program. They do that in clinical trials of medications. If a particular medication is proving extremely effective and beneficial to the test group, the trial is suspended and the control group is started on the meds as well. It would be unethical to withhold an obviously beneficial treatment from participants.
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