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抱有高期望

UNC Trustee Shashwata Prateek Dutta BS 08, EdLD, believes in the importance of education as a driver of social mobility — something he’s experienced in his own journey to 成功. 

It was 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina’s waters reshaped the city of New 奥尔良. Prateek Dutta had recently graduated from the 北科罗拉多大学 with a degree in Political Science, joined Teach for America, and was facing a classroom 六年级学生. He had arrived in that classroom after his own journey through the education system with a sense of understanding and wanting to make 不同. 

Teach for America focuses on educational equity with a cadre of leaders who commit 教了两年书.   

He and his colleagues worked hard to instill in students the importance of college but found that while many students went on to attend, many didn’t, and that was something 他想要改变.  

“I’m passionate about college as a means to the end goal of empowering people and making sure they have the tools to go up the economic ladder. 我觉得教育是 the best means to do that, or the fastest way to do that.” 

It’s a belief rooted in his life experiences.  

Dutta’s parents grew up in East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh. “那时， the United Nations called it the poorest place in the world,” Dutta 说. “我爸爸的 dream was to come to the United States to study, which is what happened. 他得到了一个 student visa and went to school in Boston.”  

His father brought his mother to Boston, and Dutta and his sister were born there. His father, who’d earned his PhD in Economics, was working as a professor, but language barriers became an obstacle to teaching. With no job, and unable to pay the bills, the family made the painful decision to leave the U.S. 搬到印度加尔各答 where they remained until Dutta was about eight years old.  

“那时， my parents decided they wanted to give the American dream one more 机会. So, they basically looked at a map of the United States and said, ‘Colorado 看起来是个可以重新开始的地方.’ They got two suitcases, changed their currency — the rupees changed to about $40 — and came to Denver,” Dutta 说. 

Because he didn’t speak English, Dutta was placed in an English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom where most students spoke Spanish. “Teachers had a hard time interacting with me 
for a bulk of my elementary and middle school,” 
he remembers.  

学习上的差距变成了鸿沟. By high school he was far behind academically, with grades that he knew would make entry into a four-year university impossible. 他开始 applying to community colleges, but 说 UNC was his dream school.  

“I met with (UNC’s) director of admissions and he told me my grades and test scores didn’t cut it, but they’d see what they could do.”  

Dutta applied, and was accepted on the condition he take summer classes.  

“UNC was the only university that took a 机会 on me, and so I am eternally grateful. It changed the trajectory of my life because without being accepted into UNC, I honestly don’t know what I would’ve done,” he 说. 

Getting to UNC was just part of the battle.  

“我远远落后了. Everything took so much longer for me. 这不是一个悲伤的故事 只是现实. My favorite place in the entire campus was Michener 图书馆. 我喜欢它. I used to go to Starbucks, get a massive cup of coffee, and from 
7 p.m. to midnight, I would stay in that library and study every night.” 

Dutta 说 UNC faculty trustee and Professor 
of History Fritz Fischer helped him 成功. 

“He was an incredible force for my life. He made teaching fun and engaging, and I think one of the reasons I applied to Teach for America was because of his class. I was in his class on the Vietnam War, and I remember thinking ‘how can he make something 如此复杂，如此迷人?’”  

At the time, Dutta wasn’t sure what he wanted his career to be, but based on his experience in school, he knew he wanted to help students who were overlooked or marginalized.  

“I applied to Teach for America and I got accepted, and then I was placed in New 奥尔良. 我就是这样开始教书的.” 

In New 奥尔良, Dutta began to feel his efforts were bringing change for the short term, but not for the long term, and as much as he loved working with the students there, he decided to take his own education a step further.  

“我意识到 no matter how much work I did in the classroom, there were some other powerful societal forces that kept putting students in a different trajectory. 我意识到 I needed more skills and a better understanding of policy and politics to really make 不同. 所以我才去读研究生.” 

He was accepted into a doctoral program at Harvard University focusing on Educational 领导.  

“I honestly struggled to graduate high school 10 years before I got accepted to Harvard. 和 so obviously there’s a lot of feeling of, ‘do I belong?“我在那里做得很好，但是 我不像博天堂官方那样喜欢它. I never felt that sense of home that UNC brings. I got my degree and I’m happy I got it, but to compare that to my UNC experience is 只是日夜兼程，”杜塔说. “I will put our UNC professors and our students against Harvard students and faculty any day of the week. 但毫无疑问，我有更好的 experience at UNC than I did at Harvard.” 

He completed his doctorate, and felt that instead of working within the system, he could do more outside the system, advocating for change. 他回到了丹佛 became the Colorado policy director for Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). 

“Democrats for Education Reform was created because the Democratic party has historically been pushing for equity on a whole host of issues, but when it comes to education, sometimes the party has defended the status quo. 我们的组织致力于推动两者的发展 politics and policy forward to ensure all students receive a high-quality education.”  

For Dutta, his years as a student, a teacher and an advocate have shown him the importance 有
高期望.  

“I know what it feels like when teachers and schools have low expectations for certain 学生群体. When you hold students to high standards, they’ll always meet 他们.” 

Low expectations, he asserts, are a veiled form of racism. 的积极影响 holding students to high expectations is something he saw first-hand as a teacher working with low-income students in New 奥尔良 as they coped with significant hardships in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. When taught with high expectations, they 成功ed.  
 The opportunity to 成功 in school did not come to Dutta until he became a student at UNC, and he brings that experience — coupled with teaching, graduate work, and his work for DFER — to a new role at UNC.  

In January 2020, Colorado Governor Jared Polis appointed Dutta to a three-year term 作为博天堂官方的受托人. He is attuned to concerns about inequity in higher education in addition to his focus on K-12 education. 

“Higher education is not absolved from inequity. We’ve done a really good job of decreasing high school dropout rates across the country. But what we have not done is decrease 大学辍学者. The majority of low-income students that go into college, drop out; the majority of Black students and Latino students that go to college drop out. 和 they have nothing but debt after they’ve dropped out. 这是不可接受的. 我们需要 做点什么. All higher education institutions, including UNC,” Dutta 说. 

As a trustee, he sees UNC facing multiple challenges — including student retention 毕业率. 和 while he has high expectations for students, he also has high expectations for his alma mater and its ability to address those challenges. 

“We must increase our enrollment and retention while closing the attainment equity 毕业和留校的差距. 我们的新战略计划—— 划船，不要漂流 —  creates a roadmap on how to overcome these challenges and make UNC stronger. 大多数 importantly, the strategic plan ensures our university is more student-centered and has a more coherent student support system,” he 说. “我认为我们有一个很好的机会 to take students that might come from underprivileged backgrounds and really propel 他们进入了中产阶级和上层阶级. UNC’s mission, I would say, is to be an engine 的股权. 和 to really be a driver of social mobility.”

——黛比·皮特纳·摩尔