Not Down for the Count

Not Down for the Count

Student Plots Comeback with Return to Classroom

By John L. Pulley

Lawrence McCutchen has been knocked down and knocked around, but he has never been down for the count. For years he wrestled with drug addiction, multiple incarcerations, a lack of formal education and a chronic aimlessness that greedily devoured his 20s and 30s. He continued to fight, however, and now he’s working on a comeback.

McCutchen has put together 13 years of clean time and he hasn’t been locked up since 1998. During the past decade, he delivered newspapers for the Baltimore Sun and performed menial jobs at a corner store, earning an honest if meager living.

Two years ago, McCutchen began taking classes at Baltimore City Community  College. “I wanted to better my life,” he says. He earned a certificate in addiction counseling and began volunteering at Next Passage, a substance-abuse treatment center run by the state of Maryland. He hopes to score a paid position when the center’s next round of grant funding comes through. A good student — McCutchen carries a 3.77 grade point average — he is six classes away from earning an associate degree.

Impeding his progress, however, is an old nemesis: math. For McCutchen, numeracy is a coolly calculating cipher, a bête noir of ruthless precision. When he attended Baltimore’s public schools in the 1960’s and early ‘70’s, the bafflement of numbers tripped him up and contributed to his fall from grace.

“Math doesn’t hold my attention. It bores me. My mind wanders,” says McCutchen, who dropped out of school in 1973 at 16. “When I went to math class in elementary school I was the class clown. In high school, I cut math altogether.”

Now, in order to earn a two-year degree and realize his ambition of pursuing a diploma at a four-year institution, McCutchen must pass a college-level math class. At least he gets to choose his poison: calculus or statistics. Solving the equation for that particular unknown variable is a snap. “I’m sure not going to take calculus,” he says.

That stats class will have to wait, too. Like all students at Baltimore City Community College, McCutchen took the Accuplacer assessment test to determine his readiness for college-level reading, writing and math. And like 98 percent of BCCC’s new students who place into one or more remedial courses, McCutchen’s level of scholastic readiness was found to be wanting. 

He aced the reading and writing portions of the test, but McCutchen’s adviser told him he would need to pass three remedial math classes — Sections 80, 81 and 82 — just to bring his skills up to sea level and qualify him to take college-level math. It doesn’t take a statistician to grasp McCutchen’s challenge. Of approximately 60 percent of new BCCC students who are required to take the full series of remedial math courses, about 8 percent complete it.

Detours and Hard Knocks

McCutchen dropped out of school in Baltimore 1973 and moved to Oakland with his brother, a member of the Black Panther Party. Encouraged by the Panthers to continue his education, McCutchen earned a general equivalency diploma in 1978. He was soon “back to the streets,” however, working on an advanced degree from the school of hard knocks.

Almost 30 years and numerous back-alley detours later, McCutchen returned to school in 2006, walked into an English class at BCCC and “felt like a fish out of water.” He walked away.

His educational odyssey might have ended there if not for a phone call from Jonathan White, coordinator of the First Step to College Bridge Learning Community. The BCCC pilot program seeks to pave the transition to college by providing students tutoring and mentoring to teach them skills such as how to study. Studies have shown that support programs of this type raise remedial students’ persistence rates. Invited by White to take part in First Steps, McCutchen accepted. His dogged determination has made him something of a poster boy for the program’s success.

With considerable effort, McCutchen survived the introductory level remedial math course. Subsequent attempts to master the rigors of Math 81 have failed, however, and now McCutchen, 51, is running out of time — to earn a degree, to realize his potential, to leave a positive mark on the world, to make a decent living. The era when good jobs in Baltimore’s steel mills and factories were plentiful is all but gone.

“The more credentials you’ve got, the more salary you can earn,” says McCutchen, acknowledging the fundamental mathematical relationship between education and earning power. “I have to find a way to get it done.”

The good news for McCutchen is that at Baltimore County Community College and other two-year colleges, students who complete required developmental courses are more likely to stay in college and earn a degree than students who begin college prepared to do academic work at the post-secondary level.

McCutchen says he simply wants to get past the roadblock of remedial math and get on with the only academic success he has ever known.

“These are the best grade of my life,” he says. “When I took my report card home as a kid, there were red, blue and green marks all over it.”  

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