I am sitting in my Art & Education class as  my professor lectures us on how it is the failure of  Professors and students alike that students at CCNY have “poor writing skills”. I was floored as she hammered away at this issue. According to her,  students such as us are destined to become the next crop of public school teachers, thus exposing a new generation of students to “poor speaking and writing”. I came into class as she was just warming up so I settled in, listened for a bit, and intervened to ask a simple question. “Why is it that students arrive @ CCNY with poor writing skills?” She paused for a moment and then aksed me why I thought this was the case.  I mentioned that I felt it was completely unrealistic to expect an English professor @ CCNY to be able to help a student develop college level writing skills  in a semester, especially when students are really not taught how to read at an appropriate grade level in High School.  One of the only white students actually spoke before me and railed about how professors are lazy and that at her previous SUNY (State University of New York- Better funded, suburban, more middle class, and mostly white) school the standards were much higher. She was shocked at how “lax” they were here. I asked why is it that high schools in urban areas of NYC are less funded than suburban schools? I also wondered out loud, “Is it a coincidence that these schools are predominantly filled with poor students of color and subject to racism? I argued that many of these “deficiencies” begin because of an overall educational institution that is failing its students. It’s not the students, the professors, or the parents that don’t care, but an institution that is not actually set up to teach students (especially poor and students of color) the basic academic skills that they need to survive in college and definitely not any typre of critical thinking skills. Overworked teachers, underfunded schools, and testing oriented curriculum all come together  to “leave behind” most students and deflect the blame everywhere but its most deserving recipients, those who control and run the institutions. Ugh, we really need a students movement along with a new civil rights movement to begin to challenge this stuff!