Budget compromises seem to be chugging along—assuming they can pass some mighty controversial fiscal matters measures.
by Abby Rapoport | Texas Observer
Friday, May 20, 2011
It's looking more and more likely that the Legislature may yet reach an agreement on the budget—in the regular session. Most of this week, House and Senate lawmakers have struggled to see if they could come to a compromise on education funding, the most contentious fiscal battleground. By Thursday night, R.G. Ratcliffe and others reported the biggest sticking point is now almost a million dollars in funding for higher education. The Senate appears to have prevailed on public education, where there will likely be a $4 billion cut to funding, rather than the House's proposal of a $7.8 billion cut.
Meanwhile, credit-taking is already beginning. Speaker of the House Joe Straus sent out a press release last night arguing that the House had done its share of negotiating already by allowing the use of an extra of $3 billion in the budget, thanks to "additional revenue from the Comptroller and the improving economy." He was referring to the extra $500 million that the Comptroller added to her tax revenue projections and the $2.5 billion coming from savings and accounting tricks in the "fiscal matters" bills. The new money "allowed House budget negotiators to find an additional $2 billion to fund public schools," he said. It's quite a statement, given that the lionshare of the "fiscal matters" bills come from deferring $2 billion in payments to public schools.
And there's no guarantee that the key "fiscal matters" bill is going to pass—without which all of the compromising is for naught. The fiscal matters bills implement accounting tricks, like deferred payments, to provide extra money for budget writers to use. And there's no guarantee that the key measure, Senate Bill 1811, is going to get through easily.
Last night, after the House passed one of fiscal matters bills dealing with Medicaid savings, members braced themselves for a long debate on Senate Bill 1581, another necessary fiscal matters bill primarily about education funding. But Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, wasted no time marching up to the podium and calling a point of order on the bill.
His issue, he said, was with a last minute Senate amendment from Sen. Jeff Wentworth that would have allowed concealed handguns on college campuses. "The vast majority of students and their parents oppose guns on campus," he said. "So do our chancellors and presidents of universities." Plus, he said, it wasn't germane to a bill about money and funding. The speaker sustained the point of order, and sent the bill back to the Senate to strip out the measure.
But while tweets soon broke out accusing Villarreal of effectively killing the budget and prompting a special session this summer, Villarreal says there's no reason to panic. If the Senate cannot turn the bill around fast enough for the House to pass it by Tuesday's deadline, the key components of the bill he killed can simply be added onto the other fiscal matters bill, SB 1811.
That leaves a whole lot riding on one measure. The House is scheduled to debate the SB 1811 Friday at 2 p.m. If they can't pass it, it's hard to see how they'll pass the budget.
For his part, Villarreal is hoping for a special session, although he maintains the Democrats have no impact on the matter. "I don't think it can get any worse if we go into special session," he says. "The Senate budget is harmful to the quality of our kids' education. The House budget is a disaster."
Monday, May 23, 2011
Analysis finds small number of UT faculty teach most students
By Eric Dexheimer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, May 23, 2011
Twenty percent of University of Texas at Austin professors instruct most of the school's students, while the least-productive fifth of the faculty carry only 2 percent of the university's teaching load, according to an analysis of recently released data by a researcher with ties to an Austin organization promoting controversial changes in how the state runs its higher education system. Meanwhile, 10 percent of the faculty bring in 90 percent of its research grants.
The UT System's flagship school could save taxpayers millions of dollars by increasing professors' teaching loads and jettisoning under-performing instructors without jeopardizing the school's commitment to research, said Richard Vedder, an economics professor and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
The center, "dedicated to researching the rising costs and stagnant efficiency in higher education," released the report late Friday. UT faculty members quickly took issue with its conclusions.
Vedder, who said the analysis was intended to address soaring costs that have turned a college degree into a financial burden, stressed that his results were preliminary. UT System administrators also cautioned that the underlying data were "raw" and "incomplete" when they released the 821-page spreadsheet of faculty salaries, course loads, research grants and student evaluation results two weeks ago.
But even beyond that, the analysis, "Faculty Productivity and Costs at the University of Texas at Austin," comes with sufficient caveats and political baggage to give opponents ample ammunition to fire back at its conclusions.
Vedder is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based think tank. The foundation has close ties to Gov. Rick Perry and is at the center of an ongoing debate about research, teaching, faculty productivity, the rising price of tuition and other issues in higher education.
It helped organize a May 2008 summit where Perry urged public university regents to pursue the foundation's so-called breakthrough solutions, including bonus pay for teachers based solely on student evaluations and separation of research and teaching budgets. The same month, Vedder authored a report for the foundation concluding that the state's public universities were failing to deliver results for their cost. In the 17-page paper, Vedder analyzed faculty productivity based strictly on the number of student credit hours each professor taught. He calculated the most-productive fifth of UT 's faculty, about 840 instructors, taught an average of 318 students, and 896 credit hours, per year. That comes out to 57 percent of the campus's total student credit hours taught.
The remaining 80 percent of the faculty, by comparison, each taught an average of 63 students over the year, or 167 student credit hours, the analysis found. It also calculated that "77 percent of all faculty at the Austin campus receive no external research grants."
"You could enormously reduce the number of people needed to fulfill the teaching obligation of the university" without reducing research, Vedder concluded.
University faculty were quick to point to omissions or weaknesses in the report. The UT System's original spreadsheet of salaries and course loads released in early May, for example, used a weighted system to count credit hours that assumed upper- and graduate-level courses required more teacher time per student.
"Usually a graduate course is considered more intense, more of a load than an undergrad course," said John Curtis, director of research for the American Association of University Professors.
The college affordability center's analysis, by comparison, counts credit hours in a introductory survey course the same as a graduate seminar. By that standard, faculty members who teach courses with a small number of students receiving intensive instruction would be penalized, said Alan Friedman, a professor of English since 1964.
He said his students write a steady stream of papers that have to be read and critiqued. "It's incredibly labor-intensive," he said. "But I look very bad by these measures."
Vedder's study also does not account for faculty's administrative responsibilities or service, which can range from chairing a department to serving on committees or running programs outside their teaching duties. For example, Friedman said that in addition to his teaching, he serves on a half-dozen committees and manages a drama residency program at the university. "I spend about 30 hours a week on service," he said.
Faculty also questioned the value of using the dollar total of grants as a measure of research productivity. Such a calculation would overwhelmingly favor science professors who run labs that need specialized and expensive equipment over humanities instructors, who often require much less grant funding to, say, travel to a library, Curtis said.
"Many faculty are involved in research that doesn't bring in money," said Janet Staiger, a communications professor and past chairwoman of the UT faculty council. "Or I might get money for a research project that takes five or six years, but get the money in a lump sum one year," further skewing the measurement.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Twenty percent of University of Texas at Austin professors instruct most of the school's students, while the least-productive fifth of the faculty carry only 2 percent of the university's teaching load, according to an analysis of recently released data by a researcher with ties to an Austin organization promoting controversial changes in how the state runs its higher education system. Meanwhile, 10 percent of the faculty bring in 90 percent of its research grants.
The UT System's flagship school could save taxpayers millions of dollars by increasing professors' teaching loads and jettisoning under-performing instructors without jeopardizing the school's commitment to research, said Richard Vedder, an economics professor and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
The center, "dedicated to researching the rising costs and stagnant efficiency in higher education," released the report late Friday. UT faculty members quickly took issue with its conclusions.
Vedder, who said the analysis was intended to address soaring costs that have turned a college degree into a financial burden, stressed that his results were preliminary. UT System administrators also cautioned that the underlying data were "raw" and "incomplete" when they released the 821-page spreadsheet of faculty salaries, course loads, research grants and student evaluation results two weeks ago.
But even beyond that, the analysis, "Faculty Productivity and Costs at the University of Texas at Austin," comes with sufficient caveats and political baggage to give opponents ample ammunition to fire back at its conclusions.
Vedder is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based think tank. The foundation has close ties to Gov. Rick Perry and is at the center of an ongoing debate about research, teaching, faculty productivity, the rising price of tuition and other issues in higher education.
It helped organize a May 2008 summit where Perry urged public university regents to pursue the foundation's so-called breakthrough solutions, including bonus pay for teachers based solely on student evaluations and separation of research and teaching budgets. The same month, Vedder authored a report for the foundation concluding that the state's public universities were failing to deliver results for their cost. In the 17-page paper, Vedder analyzed faculty productivity based strictly on the number of student credit hours each professor taught. He calculated the most-productive fifth of UT 's faculty, about 840 instructors, taught an average of 318 students, and 896 credit hours, per year. That comes out to 57 percent of the campus's total student credit hours taught.
The remaining 80 percent of the faculty, by comparison, each taught an average of 63 students over the year, or 167 student credit hours, the analysis found. It also calculated that "77 percent of all faculty at the Austin campus receive no external research grants."
"You could enormously reduce the number of people needed to fulfill the teaching obligation of the university" without reducing research, Vedder concluded.
University faculty were quick to point to omissions or weaknesses in the report. The UT System's original spreadsheet of salaries and course loads released in early May, for example, used a weighted system to count credit hours that assumed upper- and graduate-level courses required more teacher time per student.
"Usually a graduate course is considered more intense, more of a load than an undergrad course," said John Curtis, director of research for the American Association of University Professors.
The college affordability center's analysis, by comparison, counts credit hours in a introductory survey course the same as a graduate seminar. By that standard, faculty members who teach courses with a small number of students receiving intensive instruction would be penalized, said Alan Friedman, a professor of English since 1964.
He said his students write a steady stream of papers that have to be read and critiqued. "It's incredibly labor-intensive," he said. "But I look very bad by these measures."
Vedder's study also does not account for faculty's administrative responsibilities or service, which can range from chairing a department to serving on committees or running programs outside their teaching duties. For example, Friedman said that in addition to his teaching, he serves on a half-dozen committees and manages a drama residency program at the university. "I spend about 30 hours a week on service," he said.
Faculty also questioned the value of using the dollar total of grants as a measure of research productivity. Such a calculation would overwhelmingly favor science professors who run labs that need specialized and expensive equipment over humanities instructors, who often require much less grant funding to, say, travel to a library, Curtis said.
"Many faculty are involved in research that doesn't bring in money," said Janet Staiger, a communications professor and past chairwoman of the UT faculty council. "Or I might get money for a research project that takes five or six years, but get the money in a lump sum one year," further skewing the measurement.
The Other Big Fight: School Finance Tug-of-War
by Abby Rapoport | Texas Observer
Saturday, May 21, 2011
When word came out Friday afternoon that House and Senate budget negotiators had reached a compromise, you might have thought the Capitol could relax. After all, for weeks, insiders have speculated that finding middle ground on a budget with a $23 billion shortfall would be tough—especially when the Senate only wanted to make drastic cuts to health care and education while the House seemed intent on making the cuts draconian. So when the House and Senate worked out a deal on the budget, with $4 billion slashed from school funding, it might have seemed like a time for the non-teacher, non-parent and non-student crowds to celebrate.
Instead it prompted a realization: the state is actually going to have to pass a new school finance plan—one that distributes the budget cuts to school districts. Without a school finance plan, the lawmakers will likely have to come back for a special session. But coming up with some agreement on just what that plan should look like is hardly easy. Lawmakers face two distinct problems. First they must introduce unprecedented cuts into a system that's built to be automatically financed. Secondly, they must decide whether to tackle the structural problems with the current system, created in 2006. Right now, most school districts get funded based on a "target revenue system" that's based on, among other things, on past property tax collections. The poorest districts subsist on formulas that are woefully underfunded. Vast inequalities between districts leave the system in desperate need of reform.
Then of course, there's the fact that the school finance bill will ultimately encapsulate the losses facing each district. Despite the widespread Republican support for budgets that slash public education, no one actually wants to see their school districts go without. So Friday afternoon, the entire Capitol swung into school finance mode. The Senate approved one plan—which House Republicans have already vowed won't make it to the floor. Meanwhile, some Democratic representatives were certain that a plan by House Public Education Committee Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, was the plan budget negotiators had agreed to. But that plan—which never had a hearing and was unfamiliar to most—remains at odds with another plan by Democratic Rep. Scott Hochberg, the House's school finance guru. A budget deal may be in the clear, but nothing's certain when it comes to school finance.
The senators returned to the floor around 4 p.m. to reconsider Senate Bill 1581, a fiscal matters bill essential to the budget. The bill provides $2 billion to spend by deferring state payments to school districts by one month in 2013. The Senate had the bill because the previous night, while it was getting debated on the House floor, Rep. Mike Villarreal called a point of order. The Senate had to strip out an amendment that allowed concealed handguns on college campuses. But while they were at it, the senators decided it would be a good time to tack on a school finance plan.
The plan is hardly new. Senate Education Committee Chair Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, presented it to the Senate Finance Committee a month ago, where it was favorably voted out. As I reported then: "Every district in the state gets cut somewhat in the plan, but those with more money get cut more. Of the $4 billion in cuts, the first $1 billion comes from about a 1.5 percent cut to all school districts. The other $3 billion comes from districts on target revenue." Critics of the plan argue that by cutting from all districts, including the poorest of the poor, Shapiro isn't doing enough to increase funding equity. Furthermore, while the plan sets 2017 as the date to end the target revenue system, many want to see more actions to actually transition to new longterm funding mechanisms.
On the floor, her Republican colleague Sen. Bob Deuell did not mince words. He criticized the body for the $4 billion cut to education—a cut another senator had called a "heroic effort." Deuell told the senators they should be using more of the state's $9.4 billion Rainy Day fund instead of cutting schools at all. Then he started lambasting the enormous funding differences between districts, which he said Shapiro's plan fails to adequately address.
"We knew there were inequities and we were supposed to fix them," he said. "But we haven't." He read a list of highest and lowest funded school districts that each senator represented, highlighting how some districts get almost triple the amount per student that others receive. "Members," he said, "that's why we need to get rid of target revenue." But while he had an amendment to take more school districts off of target revenue, he pulled it down as requested by Senate leadership.
Shapiro said her bill "set in motion a pathway to a better school finance system with a decrease in target revenue." But it was hard to think that was her primary goal—earlier she'd told a Democrat that "this was never a budget for public education that was based on equity." Ultimately, the plan was successfully tacked on to the fiscal matters bill, before the Senate voted the bill back to the House.
But all that effort may well have been for naught. Later, at a midnight meeting of the House Public Education Committee, members were all dismissive of Shapiro's plan.
"I'm not for the Senate's school finance bill," pronounced Democratic Rep. Scott Hochberg, whose word on school finance often carries weight despite his party affiliation.
"I'm not either," Eissler, the committee's chairman, agreed. "Wanna take it out?" he asked Hochberg, "or wanna just do it on the floor?"
Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, R-Killeen, who will carry the Senate bill when it reaches the House floor, told members his "intention is to heavily change" the bill. In other words, don't expect the Shapiro plan to have much support in the House.
But what will take its place?
There are two primary alternatives in the House—one from Eissler and one from Hochberg. Hochberg's plan deals directly with the systemic problems of school finance and target revenue. It puts almost all districts onto the same formula for funding, drastically decreasing inequality. But that equity relies on cutting the richest districts down, and while there's a 10 percent cap on the amount a district can lose in funding, the plan isn't exactly popular with wealthy districts like Austin.
But Hochberg was disheartened throughout Friday's session. At the Public Education Committee meeting, he openly said that the budget deal was based on Eissler's school finance plan.
"I was told the Senate was agreed to Mr. Eissler's plan," he said. "We were told the deal was pro-ration."
By Saturday, however, Eissler was hardly sure of that, saying he had no idea whether his plan was "the" plan. Of course, most of his colleagues had only just learned about his school finance measure.
Eissler's plan is perhaps the most straightforward of all—simply cut around six percent of funding for every district in the state. But on Friday, he was still reworking language and adjusting the projections of just what impact the measure would have on districts. The first set of projections he sent out to members wasn't accurate; instead of cutting districts by the same percentage, it cut each district by around $300 per student. As members finally got accurate projections, they began to flood his desk with questions, even as he was still trying to make sure the language in the measure was correct.
Eissler initially planned to debate the across the board cut Friday night, as an amendment to a different fiscal matters bill. But the devil's in the details, and he couldn't finess the language in time. It wasn't until late in the evening that he gave up on passing school finance Friday night.
Senate Bill 1581 remains the bill to watch for school finance. It's expected to hit the House floor Monday, where Eissler and Hochberg may well wind up going toe-to-toe. The Eissler plan is popular with wealthy school districts because it cuts them the least. But it does nothing to deal with the long term problems of school finance; inequalities remain largely the same as each district takes the same percent cut. Hochberg's plan brings equity to the system, but it cuts wealthy districts by large percentages while leaving the poorest districts to keep more of what they have.
With the clock ticking down, this will be a key battle for members hoping to avoid a special session. Few members actually understand the school finance system, and most will vote based simply on which plan cuts the least from the school districts they represent.
As members spent much of Saturday trying to understand the differences between the plans, a diverse group of protestors, white, black and Latino, young and old, stood outside the chamber. "Teachers Don't Forget," read one sign. "Cuts Hurt Kids," proclaimed another. Many of the attendees had gathered two months earlier for the giant "Save Texas Schools" rally. The protestors kept up one loud chant: "Use the Rainy Day Fund!"
"We're making a difference," organizer Allen Weeks told the crowd.
But at this point, a $4 billion cut to public schools looks like a foregone conclusion. The only thing left to decide is which districts will be hurt the most.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
When word came out Friday afternoon that House and Senate budget negotiators had reached a compromise, you might have thought the Capitol could relax. After all, for weeks, insiders have speculated that finding middle ground on a budget with a $23 billion shortfall would be tough—especially when the Senate only wanted to make drastic cuts to health care and education while the House seemed intent on making the cuts draconian. So when the House and Senate worked out a deal on the budget, with $4 billion slashed from school funding, it might have seemed like a time for the non-teacher, non-parent and non-student crowds to celebrate.
Instead it prompted a realization: the state is actually going to have to pass a new school finance plan—one that distributes the budget cuts to school districts. Without a school finance plan, the lawmakers will likely have to come back for a special session. But coming up with some agreement on just what that plan should look like is hardly easy. Lawmakers face two distinct problems. First they must introduce unprecedented cuts into a system that's built to be automatically financed. Secondly, they must decide whether to tackle the structural problems with the current system, created in 2006. Right now, most school districts get funded based on a "target revenue system" that's based on, among other things, on past property tax collections. The poorest districts subsist on formulas that are woefully underfunded. Vast inequalities between districts leave the system in desperate need of reform.
Then of course, there's the fact that the school finance bill will ultimately encapsulate the losses facing each district. Despite the widespread Republican support for budgets that slash public education, no one actually wants to see their school districts go without. So Friday afternoon, the entire Capitol swung into school finance mode. The Senate approved one plan—which House Republicans have already vowed won't make it to the floor. Meanwhile, some Democratic representatives were certain that a plan by House Public Education Committee Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, was the plan budget negotiators had agreed to. But that plan—which never had a hearing and was unfamiliar to most—remains at odds with another plan by Democratic Rep. Scott Hochberg, the House's school finance guru. A budget deal may be in the clear, but nothing's certain when it comes to school finance.
The senators returned to the floor around 4 p.m. to reconsider Senate Bill 1581, a fiscal matters bill essential to the budget. The bill provides $2 billion to spend by deferring state payments to school districts by one month in 2013. The Senate had the bill because the previous night, while it was getting debated on the House floor, Rep. Mike Villarreal called a point of order. The Senate had to strip out an amendment that allowed concealed handguns on college campuses. But while they were at it, the senators decided it would be a good time to tack on a school finance plan.
The plan is hardly new. Senate Education Committee Chair Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, presented it to the Senate Finance Committee a month ago, where it was favorably voted out. As I reported then: "Every district in the state gets cut somewhat in the plan, but those with more money get cut more. Of the $4 billion in cuts, the first $1 billion comes from about a 1.5 percent cut to all school districts. The other $3 billion comes from districts on target revenue." Critics of the plan argue that by cutting from all districts, including the poorest of the poor, Shapiro isn't doing enough to increase funding equity. Furthermore, while the plan sets 2017 as the date to end the target revenue system, many want to see more actions to actually transition to new longterm funding mechanisms.
On the floor, her Republican colleague Sen. Bob Deuell did not mince words. He criticized the body for the $4 billion cut to education—a cut another senator had called a "heroic effort." Deuell told the senators they should be using more of the state's $9.4 billion Rainy Day fund instead of cutting schools at all. Then he started lambasting the enormous funding differences between districts, which he said Shapiro's plan fails to adequately address.
"We knew there were inequities and we were supposed to fix them," he said. "But we haven't." He read a list of highest and lowest funded school districts that each senator represented, highlighting how some districts get almost triple the amount per student that others receive. "Members," he said, "that's why we need to get rid of target revenue." But while he had an amendment to take more school districts off of target revenue, he pulled it down as requested by Senate leadership.
Shapiro said her bill "set in motion a pathway to a better school finance system with a decrease in target revenue." But it was hard to think that was her primary goal—earlier she'd told a Democrat that "this was never a budget for public education that was based on equity." Ultimately, the plan was successfully tacked on to the fiscal matters bill, before the Senate voted the bill back to the House.
But all that effort may well have been for naught. Later, at a midnight meeting of the House Public Education Committee, members were all dismissive of Shapiro's plan.
"I'm not for the Senate's school finance bill," pronounced Democratic Rep. Scott Hochberg, whose word on school finance often carries weight despite his party affiliation.
"I'm not either," Eissler, the committee's chairman, agreed. "Wanna take it out?" he asked Hochberg, "or wanna just do it on the floor?"
Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, R-Killeen, who will carry the Senate bill when it reaches the House floor, told members his "intention is to heavily change" the bill. In other words, don't expect the Shapiro plan to have much support in the House.
But what will take its place?
There are two primary alternatives in the House—one from Eissler and one from Hochberg. Hochberg's plan deals directly with the systemic problems of school finance and target revenue. It puts almost all districts onto the same formula for funding, drastically decreasing inequality. But that equity relies on cutting the richest districts down, and while there's a 10 percent cap on the amount a district can lose in funding, the plan isn't exactly popular with wealthy districts like Austin.
But Hochberg was disheartened throughout Friday's session. At the Public Education Committee meeting, he openly said that the budget deal was based on Eissler's school finance plan.
"I was told the Senate was agreed to Mr. Eissler's plan," he said. "We were told the deal was pro-ration."
By Saturday, however, Eissler was hardly sure of that, saying he had no idea whether his plan was "the" plan. Of course, most of his colleagues had only just learned about his school finance measure.
Eissler's plan is perhaps the most straightforward of all—simply cut around six percent of funding for every district in the state. But on Friday, he was still reworking language and adjusting the projections of just what impact the measure would have on districts. The first set of projections he sent out to members wasn't accurate; instead of cutting districts by the same percentage, it cut each district by around $300 per student. As members finally got accurate projections, they began to flood his desk with questions, even as he was still trying to make sure the language in the measure was correct.
Eissler initially planned to debate the across the board cut Friday night, as an amendment to a different fiscal matters bill. But the devil's in the details, and he couldn't finess the language in time. It wasn't until late in the evening that he gave up on passing school finance Friday night.
Senate Bill 1581 remains the bill to watch for school finance. It's expected to hit the House floor Monday, where Eissler and Hochberg may well wind up going toe-to-toe. The Eissler plan is popular with wealthy school districts because it cuts them the least. But it does nothing to deal with the long term problems of school finance; inequalities remain largely the same as each district takes the same percent cut. Hochberg's plan brings equity to the system, but it cuts wealthy districts by large percentages while leaving the poorest districts to keep more of what they have.
With the clock ticking down, this will be a key battle for members hoping to avoid a special session. Few members actually understand the school finance system, and most will vote based simply on which plan cuts the least from the school districts they represent.
As members spent much of Saturday trying to understand the differences between the plans, a diverse group of protestors, white, black and Latino, young and old, stood outside the chamber. "Teachers Don't Forget," read one sign. "Cuts Hurt Kids," proclaimed another. Many of the attendees had gathered two months earlier for the giant "Save Texas Schools" rally. The protestors kept up one loud chant: "Use the Rainy Day Fund!"
"We're making a difference," organizer Allen Weeks told the crowd.
But at this point, a $4 billion cut to public schools looks like a foregone conclusion. The only thing left to decide is which districts will be hurt the most.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Texas Students Wait for Word on College Grants
by Thanh Tan | Texas Tribune
May 22, 2011
The Texas Legislature made a promise to the state’s most financially needy high school seniors in 1999: Money will not be a barrier to your higher education at a public college or university if you stay out of trouble, complete certain courses and graduate from high school.
The goal was to bridge the gap between wealthier students and those students who are motivated but poor. But as lawmakers in the current legislative session grapple with a huge state budget shortfall, they are threatening to renege on that pledge. Thousands of Texas students have been forced to put their college plans on hold, and inevitably, some will learn their dreams of attending college are financially out of reach.
Since the inception of TEXAS Grants, the financial aid program has helped more than 300,000 students. The grants go to students who are determined to have an estimated family contribution of $4,000 or less. In fiscal year 2011, 74,900 students received awards totaling $340.8 million. Over the next two years, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board estimates an additional 53,000 new high school graduates would be eligible for the award. But while demand for the grant has risen, the money to finance the program has not.
The Texas Legislature has yet to finalize a budget for the coming two years, but the proposals under consideration would slash the grant program. The House’s current plan would cover only about 44,200 renewal students — and would provide no grants for incoming college students. The Senate’s proposal, more likely to be in the final budget, would finance about 77,300 students, including those who already receive aid and some new high school graduates.
(The Tribune has created an interactive to show how much TEXAS Grants funding has been allocated to the state's 94 colleges and universities between 2006 and 2010.)
For students who are eligible to receive a TEXAS Grant this fall, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, those attending a public university or health-related institution are qualified to receive $7,100 per year. Awards for public technical colleges will be $3,540 per year, and $1,890 per year for those attending community colleges..
At Austin High School, in the heart of the capital city, a small group of 18 students have spent four years focusing on getting into college. Now seniors, they were selected as eighth graders to be part of the Advancement Via Individual Determination program, or AVID, which helps impoverished students learn study skills and also navigate the college application process. Nearly every participant in the course is a minority — some come from single-parent households, and others entered the country illegally as young children with their parents. All of them could be the first in their family to receive a four-year college education.
Jose Perez, 18, one of the AVID program members, is feeling firsthand the effects of the possible budget cuts. Teachers describe him as an enthusiastic and brilliant student. Jose was elated this spring when he was accepted to both Texas State University in San Marcos and the University of Texas at San Antonio. But the financial aid packages and scholarships offered to him would not cover the tuition and board at those schools. Then, he learned the Legislature might not fund TEXAS Grants for incoming freshmen.
“I wanted to feel proud that I went to a four-year university,” he said. Now he’s holding out hope that he can cobble together enough financial aid to attend Austin Community College. With his father’s work hours at his tailoring job recently cut and his mother laid off from her job as a seamstress, Jose gives his paycheck from his part-time job at a thrift store to his family instead of saving it for college.
The teenager said he would put his plans to become an aerospace or mechanical engineer on hold — for now. “I want to do something to change the world, because I live under one philosophy: you must give back what you receive,” he said.
Each year, financial aid offices at the state’s 94 public institutions of higher learning determine how they will distribute their allotted TEXAS Grant money. Most students decide by May 1 where they will go in the fall. This year, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board took the unprecedented step of instructing schools to use “cautionary language” in their financial aid offers to students until legislators have set the state budget, or offer state aid “at its own risk.”
In the months since, schools have taken different approaches to deal with the uncertainty. The University of Texas at Austin has opted to not include any TEXAS Grants in offers to freshmen.
Tom Melecki, the director of the Office of Student Financial Services at the University of Texas at Austin, said that for the 2010-2011 school year, more than 1,500 freshmen relied on TEXAS Grants to attend the state’s flagship university. To make matters worse, Melecki said, unless the Legislature changes the program’s rules, students who do not receive a TEXAS Grant in their freshman year cannot receive one thereafter.
“We could easily see the number of low-income freshman that would be trying to come here really diminish,” he said.
Debra Windham, the teacher who recruited Perez to be part of the AVID program at Austin High, said she cried when she learned the TEXAS Grants may not be available for her students. For years, she has promised them that if they made the commitment to work hard, she would help them find a way to pay for college.
“It just never crossed my mind that that money might not be there,” she said. “They’ve done their part and I can’t do mine. The fact is, these kids lives are going to be different.”
But there is hope. Znobea Williams, 18, is so far one of the few students in the class who has found enough financing to move on to a university in the fall. The youngest of four children raised by a single mother, she will be the first to attend college. She was accepted to every school she applied to.
“Every single one of us are here for a reason, because we want to accomplish our goals to go to college,” she said. “But not having that money is a big challenge for our lives because we can’t live our dreams like everyone else can.”
May 22, 2011
The Texas Legislature made a promise to the state’s most financially needy high school seniors in 1999: Money will not be a barrier to your higher education at a public college or university if you stay out of trouble, complete certain courses and graduate from high school.
The goal was to bridge the gap between wealthier students and those students who are motivated but poor. But as lawmakers in the current legislative session grapple with a huge state budget shortfall, they are threatening to renege on that pledge. Thousands of Texas students have been forced to put their college plans on hold, and inevitably, some will learn their dreams of attending college are financially out of reach.
Since the inception of TEXAS Grants, the financial aid program has helped more than 300,000 students. The grants go to students who are determined to have an estimated family contribution of $4,000 or less. In fiscal year 2011, 74,900 students received awards totaling $340.8 million. Over the next two years, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board estimates an additional 53,000 new high school graduates would be eligible for the award. But while demand for the grant has risen, the money to finance the program has not.
The Texas Legislature has yet to finalize a budget for the coming two years, but the proposals under consideration would slash the grant program. The House’s current plan would cover only about 44,200 renewal students — and would provide no grants for incoming college students. The Senate’s proposal, more likely to be in the final budget, would finance about 77,300 students, including those who already receive aid and some new high school graduates.
(The Tribune has created an interactive to show how much TEXAS Grants funding has been allocated to the state's 94 colleges and universities between 2006 and 2010.)
For students who are eligible to receive a TEXAS Grant this fall, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, those attending a public university or health-related institution are qualified to receive $7,100 per year. Awards for public technical colleges will be $3,540 per year, and $1,890 per year for those attending community colleges..
At Austin High School, in the heart of the capital city, a small group of 18 students have spent four years focusing on getting into college. Now seniors, they were selected as eighth graders to be part of the Advancement Via Individual Determination program, or AVID, which helps impoverished students learn study skills and also navigate the college application process. Nearly every participant in the course is a minority — some come from single-parent households, and others entered the country illegally as young children with their parents. All of them could be the first in their family to receive a four-year college education.
Jose Perez, 18, one of the AVID program members, is feeling firsthand the effects of the possible budget cuts. Teachers describe him as an enthusiastic and brilliant student. Jose was elated this spring when he was accepted to both Texas State University in San Marcos and the University of Texas at San Antonio. But the financial aid packages and scholarships offered to him would not cover the tuition and board at those schools. Then, he learned the Legislature might not fund TEXAS Grants for incoming freshmen.
“I wanted to feel proud that I went to a four-year university,” he said. Now he’s holding out hope that he can cobble together enough financial aid to attend Austin Community College. With his father’s work hours at his tailoring job recently cut and his mother laid off from her job as a seamstress, Jose gives his paycheck from his part-time job at a thrift store to his family instead of saving it for college.
The teenager said he would put his plans to become an aerospace or mechanical engineer on hold — for now. “I want to do something to change the world, because I live under one philosophy: you must give back what you receive,” he said.
Each year, financial aid offices at the state’s 94 public institutions of higher learning determine how they will distribute their allotted TEXAS Grant money. Most students decide by May 1 where they will go in the fall. This year, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board took the unprecedented step of instructing schools to use “cautionary language” in their financial aid offers to students until legislators have set the state budget, or offer state aid “at its own risk.”
In the months since, schools have taken different approaches to deal with the uncertainty. The University of Texas at Austin has opted to not include any TEXAS Grants in offers to freshmen.
Tom Melecki, the director of the Office of Student Financial Services at the University of Texas at Austin, said that for the 2010-2011 school year, more than 1,500 freshmen relied on TEXAS Grants to attend the state’s flagship university. To make matters worse, Melecki said, unless the Legislature changes the program’s rules, students who do not receive a TEXAS Grant in their freshman year cannot receive one thereafter.
“We could easily see the number of low-income freshman that would be trying to come here really diminish,” he said.
Debra Windham, the teacher who recruited Perez to be part of the AVID program at Austin High, said she cried when she learned the TEXAS Grants may not be available for her students. For years, she has promised them that if they made the commitment to work hard, she would help them find a way to pay for college.
“It just never crossed my mind that that money might not be there,” she said. “They’ve done their part and I can’t do mine. The fact is, these kids lives are going to be different.”
But there is hope. Znobea Williams, 18, is so far one of the few students in the class who has found enough financing to move on to a university in the fall. The youngest of four children raised by a single mother, she will be the first to attend college. She was accepted to every school she applied to.
“Every single one of us are here for a reason, because we want to accomplish our goals to go to college,” she said. “But not having that money is a big challenge for our lives because we can’t live our dreams like everyone else can.”
Friday, May 20, 2011
Texas Panel Debates Future of Research Universities
Notable statement that goes out to all the people that want to continue calling policies that explicitly seek to track students based on subjective, merit critera that are mostly out of students' control an "unintended consequences":
"there was a need to "differentiate" in terms of placement of students in universities — i.e., to make sure that the best students go to well-funded, top universities, as opposed to trying to help everyone equally. That is, however, a "difficult social issue to talk about,... [i]f we want to take advantage of our great research universities, we cannot burden them with remedial education."
It's intentional, friends. For those who continue to play the pendejo game and act as if it isn't so, this is not for you.
-Patricia
by Kate Galbraith | Texas Tribune
5/19/2011
A panel of higher education and business executives at the University of Texas at Austin reflected high anxiety about the future of research universities, especially in Texas.
David Daniel, the president of UT Dallas, began this morning's discussion by noting that Texas has only three universities who are members of the Association of American Universities, a group of five dozen leading research universities in the country. These are: the University of Texas, Texas A&M and Rice University. California, by contrast, has nine, and New York now has six. As a result, Texas lags severely in hauling in federal research and development money, Daniel said.
Rex Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said that his company relied on the country's great research universities for engineering talent, and he would like to see a halt to the "erosion of technical competitiveness" in the United States.
Tillerson argued that there was a need to "differentiate" in terms of placement of students in universities — i.e., to make sure that the best students go to well-funded, top universities, as opposed to trying to help everyone equally. That is, however, a "difficult social issue to talk about," Tillerson said. He added: "If we want to take advantage of our great research universities, we cannot burden them with remedial education."
Michael Brown, a Nobel Laureate who is a professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, lauded the national research-funding model in place since the second World War, when the federal government built up the National Science Foundation and began pouring money into research. "That model is apparently under attack," he said.
Brown also said that he worried that in the United States today there is "almost fear of new knowledge. People are afraid to believe in evolution for example." He argued that the country needs a way to galvanize young people the way Sputnik did a few generations ago: "We need a national goal that will focus us, instead of [inventing] the next Facebook." Energy independence in 10 years, for example, would be a worthy goal, he said.
Moderator Larry Faulkner, the former president of UT-Austin, said that since the time of Sputnik, excitement about the sciences among young people has dissipated. And he, too, wants more funding for the great universities. "I have felt that in the current world that we have paid so much attention to open the door of opportunity and not enough to rewarding people who walk through the door," he also said.
Ray Bowen, the chairman of the National Science Board and the former president of Texas A&M, said that Texas faced a "unique problem," because many of our brightest students go out of state as a result of the state's lack of research universities.
Daniel, the UT Dallas president, said that who would provide the funding for universities — the state or tuition — was a crucial question going forward. The "biggest disappointment" of his lifetime, he said, was the gradual shift of considering higher education as an individual benefit rather than a public good. His biggest fear, he said, is that in another 20 years, state funding would hit zero — and unless state universities figure out an alternative funding model, all the top research universities will be private.
The panel was convened by the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas.
"there was a need to "differentiate" in terms of placement of students in universities — i.e., to make sure that the best students go to well-funded, top universities, as opposed to trying to help everyone equally. That is, however, a "difficult social issue to talk about,... [i]f we want to take advantage of our great research universities, we cannot burden them with remedial education."
It's intentional, friends. For those who continue to play the pendejo game and act as if it isn't so, this is not for you.
-Patricia
by Kate Galbraith | Texas Tribune
5/19/2011
A panel of higher education and business executives at the University of Texas at Austin reflected high anxiety about the future of research universities, especially in Texas.
David Daniel, the president of UT Dallas, began this morning's discussion by noting that Texas has only three universities who are members of the Association of American Universities, a group of five dozen leading research universities in the country. These are: the University of Texas, Texas A&M and Rice University. California, by contrast, has nine, and New York now has six. As a result, Texas lags severely in hauling in federal research and development money, Daniel said.
Rex Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said that his company relied on the country's great research universities for engineering talent, and he would like to see a halt to the "erosion of technical competitiveness" in the United States.
Tillerson argued that there was a need to "differentiate" in terms of placement of students in universities — i.e., to make sure that the best students go to well-funded, top universities, as opposed to trying to help everyone equally. That is, however, a "difficult social issue to talk about," Tillerson said. He added: "If we want to take advantage of our great research universities, we cannot burden them with remedial education."
Michael Brown, a Nobel Laureate who is a professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, lauded the national research-funding model in place since the second World War, when the federal government built up the National Science Foundation and began pouring money into research. "That model is apparently under attack," he said.
Brown also said that he worried that in the United States today there is "almost fear of new knowledge. People are afraid to believe in evolution for example." He argued that the country needs a way to galvanize young people the way Sputnik did a few generations ago: "We need a national goal that will focus us, instead of [inventing] the next Facebook." Energy independence in 10 years, for example, would be a worthy goal, he said.
Moderator Larry Faulkner, the former president of UT-Austin, said that since the time of Sputnik, excitement about the sciences among young people has dissipated. And he, too, wants more funding for the great universities. "I have felt that in the current world that we have paid so much attention to open the door of opportunity and not enough to rewarding people who walk through the door," he also said.
Ray Bowen, the chairman of the National Science Board and the former president of Texas A&M, said that Texas faced a "unique problem," because many of our brightest students go out of state as a result of the state's lack of research universities.
Daniel, the UT Dallas president, said that who would provide the funding for universities — the state or tuition — was a crucial question going forward. The "biggest disappointment" of his lifetime, he said, was the gradual shift of considering higher education as an individual benefit rather than a public good. His biggest fear, he said, is that in another 20 years, state funding would hit zero — and unless state universities figure out an alternative funding model, all the top research universities will be private.
The panel was convened by the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas.
Your education is not an equal opportunity
By Sam Chaltain, Special to CNN
May 16, 2011
Editor's note: Sam Chaltain is a Washington-based writer and educator and author of "We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free: Stories of Free Expression in America" and "Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education."
(CNN) -- Should your ZIP code determine your access to the American dream? Or is the U.S. Constitution's guarantee to provide "equal protection" a principle we have silently agreed to uphold in theory -- but not in practice?
I'm starting to wonder after reading about Tanya McDowell, the Connecticut mother facing felony charges for lying on her 5-year-old son's registration forms so he could attend a better school. McDowell's story is painfully reminiscent of Kelley Williams-Bolar, the Ohio mother who made a similar choice earlier this year -- and is now a convicted felon.
These two stories of civil disobedience come against the backdrop of an ongoing national conversation about our public school system -- and how it must be improved. They also provide an unsettling irony in lieu of the upcoming 57th anniversary of Thurgood Marshall's historic victory in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that triumphantly reaffirmed a core American principle: "In the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."
If Marshall were alive today, he would urge us to stop celebrating our symbolic victory in Brown and start accepting our actual responsibility for tolerating a public education system that is, clearly, still separate, and still unequal.
Marshall said so himself, in a lesser-known 1973 Court opinion, San Antonio v. Rodriguez. This time he was not the lead lawyer, arguing the case, but the Court's first African-American justice, issuing a ruling. And this time, he was on the losing side.
The case began when a group of poor Texas parents claimed that their state's tolerance of the wide disparity in school resources -- many of which were determined by the value of local property taxes -- violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. A state court agreed, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in a narrow 5-4 decision, reversed.
Gone from the court's 1973 ruling was its 1954 contention that "education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments." Gone, too, was its assertion that "it is doubtful any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity," wrote a unanimous court in Brown, "where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."
Instead, the five-justice majority in Rodriguez wrote simply that while the Texas school system "can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust ... it does not follow that this system violates the Constitution."
"Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state, it is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution." If it were, the majority conceded, "virtually every State will not pass muster."
For Justice Marshall, that was precisely the point. "The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed," he wrote, even though "no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society's well being."
Marshall understood that without equal access to a high-quality public education, democracy doesn't work. "Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights," he explained. "Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution."
So here we are, nearly 30 years after Rodriguez -- and nearly 60 after Brown -- and yet parents like Tanya McDowell and Kelley Williams-Bolar feel compelled to break the law to ensure that their children receive a fair shot at the American dream. Meanwhile, income inequality has reached unprecedented levels, the nation has simultaneously grown more racially and ethnically diverse, and massive spending disparities remain between schools.
In today's America, when it comes to public education, have we allowed our five-digit ZIP codes to become the equivalent of a lottery ticket to a better future? Is this really who we wish to be?
After so many years and so little real change, something new -- perhaps even something drastic -- needs to be done.
What if we took away the legal ambiguity that resulted in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision? What if we made the guarantee of an equal opportunity to learn our nation's 28th Amendment to the Constitution?
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sam Chaltain.
May 16, 2011
Editor's note: Sam Chaltain is a Washington-based writer and educator and author of "We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free: Stories of Free Expression in America" and "Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education."
(CNN) -- Should your ZIP code determine your access to the American dream? Or is the U.S. Constitution's guarantee to provide "equal protection" a principle we have silently agreed to uphold in theory -- but not in practice?
I'm starting to wonder after reading about Tanya McDowell, the Connecticut mother facing felony charges for lying on her 5-year-old son's registration forms so he could attend a better school. McDowell's story is painfully reminiscent of Kelley Williams-Bolar, the Ohio mother who made a similar choice earlier this year -- and is now a convicted felon.
These two stories of civil disobedience come against the backdrop of an ongoing national conversation about our public school system -- and how it must be improved. They also provide an unsettling irony in lieu of the upcoming 57th anniversary of Thurgood Marshall's historic victory in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that triumphantly reaffirmed a core American principle: "In the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."
If Marshall were alive today, he would urge us to stop celebrating our symbolic victory in Brown and start accepting our actual responsibility for tolerating a public education system that is, clearly, still separate, and still unequal.
Marshall said so himself, in a lesser-known 1973 Court opinion, San Antonio v. Rodriguez. This time he was not the lead lawyer, arguing the case, but the Court's first African-American justice, issuing a ruling. And this time, he was on the losing side.
The case began when a group of poor Texas parents claimed that their state's tolerance of the wide disparity in school resources -- many of which were determined by the value of local property taxes -- violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. A state court agreed, but the U.S. Supreme Court, in a narrow 5-4 decision, reversed.
Gone from the court's 1973 ruling was its 1954 contention that "education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments." Gone, too, was its assertion that "it is doubtful any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity," wrote a unanimous court in Brown, "where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."
Instead, the five-justice majority in Rodriguez wrote simply that while the Texas school system "can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust ... it does not follow that this system violates the Constitution."
"Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state, it is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution." If it were, the majority conceded, "virtually every State will not pass muster."
For Justice Marshall, that was precisely the point. "The Court concludes that public education is not constitutionally guaranteed," he wrote, even though "no other state function is so uniformly recognized as an essential element of our society's well being."
Marshall understood that without equal access to a high-quality public education, democracy doesn't work. "Education directly affects the ability of a child to exercise his First Amendment rights," he explained. "Education prepares individuals to be self-reliant and self-sufficient participants in society. Both facets of this observation are suggestive of the substantial relationship which education bears to guarantees of our Constitution."
So here we are, nearly 30 years after Rodriguez -- and nearly 60 after Brown -- and yet parents like Tanya McDowell and Kelley Williams-Bolar feel compelled to break the law to ensure that their children receive a fair shot at the American dream. Meanwhile, income inequality has reached unprecedented levels, the nation has simultaneously grown more racially and ethnically diverse, and massive spending disparities remain between schools.
In today's America, when it comes to public education, have we allowed our five-digit ZIP codes to become the equivalent of a lottery ticket to a better future? Is this really who we wish to be?
After so many years and so little real change, something new -- perhaps even something drastic -- needs to be done.
What if we took away the legal ambiguity that resulted in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision? What if we made the guarantee of an equal opportunity to learn our nation's 28th Amendment to the Constitution?
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sam Chaltain.
HB 400 Struggle Breaks Old Alliances, Creates New Ones
Translation: The people DO and CAN have power.
-Patricia
by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
May 20, 2011
Just past midnight, at the close of a 14-hour day last week on the floor of the Texas House, state Rep. Rob Eissler stood joking with reporters.
“I’m going to move my desk up to the front mic,” Eissler said, “so I can watch every bill that goes by.”
After failing on three separate occasions to pass his signature education bill for the session and running out of time on a fourth, the Woodlands Republican was describing his plan to attach the legislation as an amendment to other bills that are still working their way through the House.
The widely liked, pun-spinning Eissler has led the House Public Education Committee since 2007, and this session he has a Republican supermajority to back him. Yet even with 66 co-sponsors, he stumbled with the bill bundling several measures to relieve school district mandates required by the state — including removing the 22-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio in kindergarten through fourth grade, minimum salary requirements for teachers and contractual obligations dealing with layoffs.
The clash over the measure, House Bill 400, has been cast as teachers versus administrators, labor versus management. But in a session characterized by extreme partisanship, the legislation is notable for what it is not: Republican versus Democrat. While it has handed Democrats a rare strategic victory this session, it has drawn opponents from the left and the right.
“Education is not a partisan issue,” Eissler said. “Not everybody in one party is completely sold on one approach.”
In the months before the Legislature convened, there were many calls to free school districts from “unfunded mandates” at the state level to help them cope with the consequences of the impending deep financing cuts. Education leaders in both chambers — Eissler; Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano; and Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston — introduced separate legislation taking aim at state mandates. But even after budgets that reduced public education financing by $7.8 billion in the House and $4 billion in the Senate overwhelmingly passed, the bills have proven a tougher sell.
His joking aside, Eissler’s proposal has an uncertain future as an amendment to other legislation. And in the Senate, which requires a two-thirds vote to bring bills to the floor for consideration, mandate-relief proposals have stalled — though they could also potentially live on as amendments, at least until the session ends on May 30.
“When there is a big piece of legislation that draws lots fear and concern and opposition from significant players, that can cause members to delay or stall or wait to act until the end, or find less controversial ways of dealing with it or passing it,” said Sandy Kress, an architect of Bush administration education policy who is now an Austin lobbyist.
Lawmakers who philosophically endorse reduced spending can balk at what that means practically: teachers losing jobs, getting paid less and managing larger classes. “There’s an ugliness to a lower-funded environment that people don’t like to face,” Eissler said.
Confronting that ugliness makes legislators from both parties skittish, particularly those who represent rural districts, where schools can be the largest employers — and where the lines between labor and management are much less defined.
“With Republicans, we could say, ‘Well, surely they’ll side with management over labor,’” Kress said. “But if you’re from a small district, you don’t necessarily think unions and management if it’s the teacher you know and the school where your kid goes.”
Rep. Larry Phillips, R-Sherman, said “there’s a tension” in his party about how to handle mandate relief. He led the charge against HB 400 from the right with an amendment that would have made any measures temporary, kept the class-size ratio intact and applied salary reductions and furloughs to administrators as well as to teachers.
“Those of us who represent districts that are smaller, it’s different than maybe those big-city districts where it’s much more a business,” Phillips said. “For our school districts, it’s not a business but teaching kids.”
The state’s teachers associations have opposed the legislation in stronger language. They view the bill as an ideological attack on essential, hard-won contractual rights. For them, it represents an opportunistic use of the fiscal crisis to enact changes that the education community would not accept otherwise.
“These are management issues that shouldn’t be discussed when the Legislature is talking about way underfunding public education,” said Lonnie Hollingsworth, a lobbyist with the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, adding that the bill could be described as a “divide-and-conquer strategy.” Hollingsworth said the legislation had strained his group’s relationship with Eissler.
“I think they thought they could win HB 400 with 101 Republicans in the House, and they didn’t think they had to compromise,” he said.
Eissler said the fierce opposition from teachers groups has contributed to resistance to the bill. But he said that observing the groups’ deliberations on mandate-relief legislation in the Senate discouraged him from seeking their input.
“There were weeks and weeks and weeks of negotiations with the Senate,” he said. “Am I going to get a better deal than the Senate?”
Though Eissler’s legislation has exposed a fracture among House Republicans, it is Democrats — galvanized by the teachers associations — who can claim responsibility for derailing it. They have pummeled it to the ground with parliamentary tactics, including one from Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, after four hours of debate during the bill’s second appearance on the floor.
Martinez Fischer said he had teased his Republican colleague about the bill’s travails. “I’ve said that if this bill ever makes it to the floor again, I want you to wear a cat suit,” he said. “Because House Bill 400 has had more lives than any legislation I’ve seen in my 12 years of service.”
Cat suit or not, Eissler vowed that his measure would return to the floor — and pass. He also said his relationship with teachers associations was not in danger.
“I’ve always gotten along with the teacher groups, and I still do,” he said. “Other than this.”
-Patricia
by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
May 20, 2011
Just past midnight, at the close of a 14-hour day last week on the floor of the Texas House, state Rep. Rob Eissler stood joking with reporters.
“I’m going to move my desk up to the front mic,” Eissler said, “so I can watch every bill that goes by.”
After failing on three separate occasions to pass his signature education bill for the session and running out of time on a fourth, the Woodlands Republican was describing his plan to attach the legislation as an amendment to other bills that are still working their way through the House.
The widely liked, pun-spinning Eissler has led the House Public Education Committee since 2007, and this session he has a Republican supermajority to back him. Yet even with 66 co-sponsors, he stumbled with the bill bundling several measures to relieve school district mandates required by the state — including removing the 22-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio in kindergarten through fourth grade, minimum salary requirements for teachers and contractual obligations dealing with layoffs.
The clash over the measure, House Bill 400, has been cast as teachers versus administrators, labor versus management. But in a session characterized by extreme partisanship, the legislation is notable for what it is not: Republican versus Democrat. While it has handed Democrats a rare strategic victory this session, it has drawn opponents from the left and the right.
“Education is not a partisan issue,” Eissler said. “Not everybody in one party is completely sold on one approach.”
In the months before the Legislature convened, there were many calls to free school districts from “unfunded mandates” at the state level to help them cope with the consequences of the impending deep financing cuts. Education leaders in both chambers — Eissler; Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano; and Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston — introduced separate legislation taking aim at state mandates. But even after budgets that reduced public education financing by $7.8 billion in the House and $4 billion in the Senate overwhelmingly passed, the bills have proven a tougher sell.
His joking aside, Eissler’s proposal has an uncertain future as an amendment to other legislation. And in the Senate, which requires a two-thirds vote to bring bills to the floor for consideration, mandate-relief proposals have stalled — though they could also potentially live on as amendments, at least until the session ends on May 30.
“When there is a big piece of legislation that draws lots fear and concern and opposition from significant players, that can cause members to delay or stall or wait to act until the end, or find less controversial ways of dealing with it or passing it,” said Sandy Kress, an architect of Bush administration education policy who is now an Austin lobbyist.
Lawmakers who philosophically endorse reduced spending can balk at what that means practically: teachers losing jobs, getting paid less and managing larger classes. “There’s an ugliness to a lower-funded environment that people don’t like to face,” Eissler said.
Confronting that ugliness makes legislators from both parties skittish, particularly those who represent rural districts, where schools can be the largest employers — and where the lines between labor and management are much less defined.
“With Republicans, we could say, ‘Well, surely they’ll side with management over labor,’” Kress said. “But if you’re from a small district, you don’t necessarily think unions and management if it’s the teacher you know and the school where your kid goes.”
Rep. Larry Phillips, R-Sherman, said “there’s a tension” in his party about how to handle mandate relief. He led the charge against HB 400 from the right with an amendment that would have made any measures temporary, kept the class-size ratio intact and applied salary reductions and furloughs to administrators as well as to teachers.
“Those of us who represent districts that are smaller, it’s different than maybe those big-city districts where it’s much more a business,” Phillips said. “For our school districts, it’s not a business but teaching kids.”
The state’s teachers associations have opposed the legislation in stronger language. They view the bill as an ideological attack on essential, hard-won contractual rights. For them, it represents an opportunistic use of the fiscal crisis to enact changes that the education community would not accept otherwise.
“These are management issues that shouldn’t be discussed when the Legislature is talking about way underfunding public education,” said Lonnie Hollingsworth, a lobbyist with the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, adding that the bill could be described as a “divide-and-conquer strategy.” Hollingsworth said the legislation had strained his group’s relationship with Eissler.
“I think they thought they could win HB 400 with 101 Republicans in the House, and they didn’t think they had to compromise,” he said.
Eissler said the fierce opposition from teachers groups has contributed to resistance to the bill. But he said that observing the groups’ deliberations on mandate-relief legislation in the Senate discouraged him from seeking their input.
“There were weeks and weeks and weeks of negotiations with the Senate,” he said. “Am I going to get a better deal than the Senate?”
Though Eissler’s legislation has exposed a fracture among House Republicans, it is Democrats — galvanized by the teachers associations — who can claim responsibility for derailing it. They have pummeled it to the ground with parliamentary tactics, including one from Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, after four hours of debate during the bill’s second appearance on the floor.
Martinez Fischer said he had teased his Republican colleague about the bill’s travails. “I’ve said that if this bill ever makes it to the floor again, I want you to wear a cat suit,” he said. “Because House Bill 400 has had more lives than any legislation I’ve seen in my 12 years of service.”
Cat suit or not, Eissler vowed that his measure would return to the floor — and pass. He also said his relationship with teachers associations was not in danger.
“I’ve always gotten along with the teacher groups, and I still do,” he said. “Other than this.”
Thursday, May 19, 2011
The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic | Common Dreams
Very powerful, hitting words by renowned scholar Cornel West about President Obama.
Angela
Angela
"Arizona is not above the law!" by Rodolfo F. Acuña
This is a pretty good analysis of what's unfolding right now in Tucscon ISD. Among other things, Dr. Rudy Acuña says that someone need to tell Arizona that the South lost of the Civil War!
-Angela
Rough Draft
Arizona is not above the law!
by
Rodolfo F. Acuña
Last month marked the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, marking the start of the Civil War. Days before in his Inaugural Address President Abraham Lincoln summed up the differences between the south and the north saying, “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute."
The South lost the war, but the argument was hardly settled. Throughout the past 150 years people have sought to distort history creating the popular mythology that the war was about states’ rights.
Time Magazine recently wrote about the civil war, “150 years later, Americans have lost [Lincoln’s] clarity about the cause of the Civil War…,” asking “why we still fighting the Civil War?” The war, according to Time, was not about states’ rights, it was about the Constitution.
Yet, two-thirds of Americans believe myths made in Hollywood. The public is a-historical and wants to believe that the slaves were happy people deluding themselves that everyone in America is equal.
Part of the blame for this nonsense can be laid at the feet of the federal government and its failure to uphold the Constitution because it either not does not want to offend anyone or because it prefers to serve special interests. The courts with a few exceptions have allowed the 14th amendment to become a sham, allowing idiots to fly the confederate flag in defiance of history.
The truth be told, Dwight Eisenhower reluctantly enforced Brown v. the Board of Education. He was afraid to offend the sensibilities of southerners -- calling out the National Guard to prevent chaos. Still many Americans could not come to grips for their motives and throughout the fifties and sixties racist mobs protested that they were not racist; it was about states’ rights and local control of schools.
Here we are five decades later and the state of Arizona is still under the delusion that it is defying the Constitution because it is protecting its states’ rights. According to them, it has nothing to do with racism. State officials feel entitled to violate the law of the land, and squander millions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds to play out their prejudices.
Where is the federal government in all this? It allows the Koch brothers and their gaggle of billionaire to manipulate the rabble through fear and lies much the same as the slave owner plutocracy used the landless masses to fight a war to preserve their wealth.
I could be flippant and blame it on intelligence. Indeed, Arizona like most of its fellow red states ranks in the lower 40 percent of the nation in I.Q. something that they cannot blame on the undocumented since California is fourteenth and it ranks in the upper 30 percent with a much higher undocumented population. But, I realize that test results greatly depend on the quality of the schools, which Arizona and the rest of the red states refuse to fund.
Placing their faith on the strength of right wing legal assaults on the Brown case, Tucson superintendent John Pedicone and the majority of TUSD Board of Education believe that they can get their way in the courts many of which which are controlled by right wing ideologues.
The truth be told, the Tucson Unified School District has a long history of segregated schools and constitutional noncompliance. In 1974, the African and Mexican American communities sued the TUSD in an attempt to get it to comply with Brown. Four years later the TUSD agreed to end segregation and do away with the vestiges of segregation. But it remained under a court order until 2008 when the court released the district pending the court’s acceptance of a post unitary plan.
.
In 2010, the court accepted the TUSD’s Post Unitary Plan which board member Mark Stegeman admitted that he opposed because he disagreed with the plan’s contract to expand the Mexican American Studies program.
However, whether he agreed or not once the court passed the Post Unitary Plan, Stegeman was bound to implement it or resign his office. It was a binding contract and his continued opposition proves bad faith.
The truth be told, it was not as if the federal government was forcing the TUSD to do the impossible. To facilitate desegregation the federal government gives the TSUD $63 million annually in federal desegregation funds.
What it boils down to is that the district and Stegeman want to keep the money but they also want to play out their prejudices and kill the MAS program. For this Stegeman and his cabal evidently got assurances from state officials that they could violate its agreement and continue to get $63 million dollars.
The Mexican American Studies program receives about $500,000 of these special funds less than 1 percent of the special funds. MAS more than pays its way; the district profits another $12 million from the state for student attendance. Over the course of the thirty years the TUSD received more than a billion dollars in special funds apparently for acting in bad faith.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice joined by black and Latino plaintiffs has appealed a federal judge's decision to end court oversight of TUSD. It cites that after three decades the schools are still racially imbalanced. The TUSD is not acting in good faith the plaintiffs argue that there should be at least partial oversight.
Through this whole ordeal, TUSD has continued to drag its feet. On May 6, 2011 Pedicone admitted that there was a great deal of work to be done on the post-unitary plan. "We find ourselves so far behind it has to be a priority for this district. Concerns regarding the impact of our lack of completion of key responsibilities are paramount."
Even so, Pedicone and a majority of the board members continue to knowingly violate the post unitary plan. Board members lied to the 9th Circuit when they promised to expand Mexican American Studies. Stegeman lied when he said that he was working in good faith as did Michael Hicks and Miguel Cuevas.
Elected officials take an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Lying to the courts is a felony and an impeachable offense. If an ordinary citizen lies on his or her income tax, he or she is thrown in jail.
In Arizona most elected officials violate their oath of office with impunity, justifying their malfeasance with the perverted logic that the federal government has no jurisdiction over them and that they are somehow defending states’ rights.
This is galling. California pays over eight times more federal taxes than Arizona while having only five times as many people. Yet, Arizona and the red state cabal are getting much more representation in the U.S. Senate and are getting back more for every dollar paid in federal taxes. For every dollar Arizona sends to Washington D.C. it gets $1.19 while California receives 78 cents.
Like my daddy used to say, “If you are living in my house and I am paying the bills at least respect me.”
In this case the United States is paying the bills. Be grateful, respect the Constitution and don’t lie.
No one forced the TUSD to sign the Post Unitary Plan. It promised to expand Mexican American Studies. Yet it is trying to kill it because of lying state and local superintendents and a disingenuous board chairman.
These elected officials should read history: the issue of states’ rights was settled in 1865 and the Confederacy lost. As for the federal government, “respect for the rule of law is based on fair and equal application of the law.”
In conclusion, if Pedicone, Stegeman, Hicks and Cuevas want students and community members not to swarm their board meetings and respect them, they should lead by example—not lie, respect their contracts and keep their oath to obey the Constitution—if not they should resign.
CONTRIBUTE $5.00 A MONTH TO DEFEND LA RAZA STUDIES AND EDUCATION IN ARIZONA
Click on to http://www.saveethnicstudies.org/our_story.shtml
Click on to the "Donate" button and Fight Back and help push La Raza Studies to Number 1
-Angela
Rough Draft
Arizona is not above the law!
by
Rodolfo F. Acuña
Last month marked the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, marking the start of the Civil War. Days before in his Inaugural Address President Abraham Lincoln summed up the differences between the south and the north saying, “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute."
The South lost the war, but the argument was hardly settled. Throughout the past 150 years people have sought to distort history creating the popular mythology that the war was about states’ rights.
Time Magazine recently wrote about the civil war, “150 years later, Americans have lost [Lincoln’s] clarity about the cause of the Civil War…,” asking “why we still fighting the Civil War?” The war, according to Time, was not about states’ rights, it was about the Constitution.
Yet, two-thirds of Americans believe myths made in Hollywood. The public is a-historical and wants to believe that the slaves were happy people deluding themselves that everyone in America is equal.
Part of the blame for this nonsense can be laid at the feet of the federal government and its failure to uphold the Constitution because it either not does not want to offend anyone or because it prefers to serve special interests. The courts with a few exceptions have allowed the 14th amendment to become a sham, allowing idiots to fly the confederate flag in defiance of history.
The truth be told, Dwight Eisenhower reluctantly enforced Brown v. the Board of Education. He was afraid to offend the sensibilities of southerners -- calling out the National Guard to prevent chaos. Still many Americans could not come to grips for their motives and throughout the fifties and sixties racist mobs protested that they were not racist; it was about states’ rights and local control of schools.
Here we are five decades later and the state of Arizona is still under the delusion that it is defying the Constitution because it is protecting its states’ rights. According to them, it has nothing to do with racism. State officials feel entitled to violate the law of the land, and squander millions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds to play out their prejudices.
Where is the federal government in all this? It allows the Koch brothers and their gaggle of billionaire to manipulate the rabble through fear and lies much the same as the slave owner plutocracy used the landless masses to fight a war to preserve their wealth.
I could be flippant and blame it on intelligence. Indeed, Arizona like most of its fellow red states ranks in the lower 40 percent of the nation in I.Q. something that they cannot blame on the undocumented since California is fourteenth and it ranks in the upper 30 percent with a much higher undocumented population. But, I realize that test results greatly depend on the quality of the schools, which Arizona and the rest of the red states refuse to fund.
Placing their faith on the strength of right wing legal assaults on the Brown case, Tucson superintendent John Pedicone and the majority of TUSD Board of Education believe that they can get their way in the courts many of which which are controlled by right wing ideologues.
The truth be told, the Tucson Unified School District has a long history of segregated schools and constitutional noncompliance. In 1974, the African and Mexican American communities sued the TUSD in an attempt to get it to comply with Brown. Four years later the TUSD agreed to end segregation and do away with the vestiges of segregation. But it remained under a court order until 2008 when the court released the district pending the court’s acceptance of a post unitary plan.
.
In 2010, the court accepted the TUSD’s Post Unitary Plan which board member Mark Stegeman admitted that he opposed because he disagreed with the plan’s contract to expand the Mexican American Studies program.
However, whether he agreed or not once the court passed the Post Unitary Plan, Stegeman was bound to implement it or resign his office. It was a binding contract and his continued opposition proves bad faith.
The truth be told, it was not as if the federal government was forcing the TUSD to do the impossible. To facilitate desegregation the federal government gives the TSUD $63 million annually in federal desegregation funds.
What it boils down to is that the district and Stegeman want to keep the money but they also want to play out their prejudices and kill the MAS program. For this Stegeman and his cabal evidently got assurances from state officials that they could violate its agreement and continue to get $63 million dollars.
The Mexican American Studies program receives about $500,000 of these special funds less than 1 percent of the special funds. MAS more than pays its way; the district profits another $12 million from the state for student attendance. Over the course of the thirty years the TUSD received more than a billion dollars in special funds apparently for acting in bad faith.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice joined by black and Latino plaintiffs has appealed a federal judge's decision to end court oversight of TUSD. It cites that after three decades the schools are still racially imbalanced. The TUSD is not acting in good faith the plaintiffs argue that there should be at least partial oversight.
Through this whole ordeal, TUSD has continued to drag its feet. On May 6, 2011 Pedicone admitted that there was a great deal of work to be done on the post-unitary plan. "We find ourselves so far behind it has to be a priority for this district. Concerns regarding the impact of our lack of completion of key responsibilities are paramount."
Even so, Pedicone and a majority of the board members continue to knowingly violate the post unitary plan. Board members lied to the 9th Circuit when they promised to expand Mexican American Studies. Stegeman lied when he said that he was working in good faith as did Michael Hicks and Miguel Cuevas.
Elected officials take an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Lying to the courts is a felony and an impeachable offense. If an ordinary citizen lies on his or her income tax, he or she is thrown in jail.
In Arizona most elected officials violate their oath of office with impunity, justifying their malfeasance with the perverted logic that the federal government has no jurisdiction over them and that they are somehow defending states’ rights.
This is galling. California pays over eight times more federal taxes than Arizona while having only five times as many people. Yet, Arizona and the red state cabal are getting much more representation in the U.S. Senate and are getting back more for every dollar paid in federal taxes. For every dollar Arizona sends to Washington D.C. it gets $1.19 while California receives 78 cents.
Like my daddy used to say, “If you are living in my house and I am paying the bills at least respect me.”
In this case the United States is paying the bills. Be grateful, respect the Constitution and don’t lie.
No one forced the TUSD to sign the Post Unitary Plan. It promised to expand Mexican American Studies. Yet it is trying to kill it because of lying state and local superintendents and a disingenuous board chairman.
These elected officials should read history: the issue of states’ rights was settled in 1865 and the Confederacy lost. As for the federal government, “respect for the rule of law is based on fair and equal application of the law.”
In conclusion, if Pedicone, Stegeman, Hicks and Cuevas want students and community members not to swarm their board meetings and respect them, they should lead by example—not lie, respect their contracts and keep their oath to obey the Constitution—if not they should resign.
CONTRIBUTE $5.00 A MONTH TO DEFEND LA RAZA STUDIES AND EDUCATION IN ARIZONA
Click on to http://www.saveethnicstudies.org/our_story.shtml
Click on to the "Donate" button and Fight Back and help push La Raza Studies to Number 1
Wisconsin legislators focus on teacher discipline
By Erin Richards of the Journal Sentinel
May 16, 2011
Madison - School boards across Wisconsin could use teacher evaluations - which rely in part on the results of students' standardized state test scores - as part of the reason for dismissing and disciplining educators, according to legislation considered by the Assembly and Senate education committees Monday.
Senate Bill 95 proposes modifying 10 state mandates so that local school districts have more flexibility to decide what's best for their communities, said Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), a co-sponsor of the bill with Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills).
The legislation covers a wide range of areas - from allowing school boards to offer physical education credit to high school students who participate in one season of an extracurricular sport, to changing the way a state-funded class-size reduction program is implemented in the elementary grades - but was criticized by some legislators who thought it was too hastily brought to a hearing Monday.
Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) noted that details about the bill were released only one business day earlier, on Friday, by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
"I'm pretty sure if there had been more notice on this, this room would have been packed," she said, looking at the meager crowd of about 30 people.
The head of the largest state teachers union opposed nearly all of the proposals in the bill. But representatives from the state school boards association and the state school administrators association generally supported the provisions.
Olsen said the bill was prompted by requests from administrators and school board members.
One of the most contentious proposals in the bill is a provision that would allow school boards to use teacher evaluations as a reason - but not the sole reason - for dismissing or disciplining teachers.
During the federal Race to the Top competition last year, Wisconsin modified its state law regarding teacher evaluations by dropping the "firewall" that existed between student test scores and teacher evaluations.
But critics called it a tepid modification because results of student test scores still couldn't be used as a basis for dismissal of a teacher, and any changes to evaluation plans had to be negotiated with the unions.
"The issue is that state statutes do not allow student test scores to be used for discipline or suspension," Olsen explained during the hearing. "You can use them for evaluation. But if you use that evaluation for discipline or removal, then we've got a problem."
Union opposes bill
Mary Bell, head of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, condemned nearly all aspects of the bill Monday and said it would erode the quality of the public schools.
"It paves the way for privatization and the arbitrary use of student test scores," Bell said.
Many educators and legislators spoke about the need for multiple measures to be used when evaluating teachers. No single year's test scores or 40-minute principal visit to the classroom would be a fair assessment, said Jennifer Breezee, a high school English teacher in the DeForest Area School District.
"We want assessments, but we want quality assessments," she said. "This is not the way to do it."
Other speakers opposed allowing school boards to offer 1.5 units of physical education credit to high school students who participate in one season of an extracurricular sport.
PE credit for sports
Keith Bakken, executive director for the advocacy group Wisconsin Health and Physical Education and a Mount Horeb school board member, opposed allowing physically active students to opt out of physical education classes and still get credit.
"Physical education is an academic subject," he said. "What you see as a mandate is something I've seen for 16 years as a standard."
From the School Administrators Alliance, John Forester said it's always difficult to change state law, especially when it comes to education and what's best for children.
Forester, the group's head of governmental relations, said school administrators were seeking changes to the mandates because it would allow them to stretch to other areas the limited dollars they have.
For example, districts are allowed to contract for physical and occupational therapy services for students. But if a school district needs to contract for other special education service, such as educational interpreters or audiologists, it cannot pay for it with state aid. Forester said that's problematic for some districts that can't hire qualified staff for one or two students who need specific services.
He also spoke in favor of lifting the limits on what school libraries can spend on computers and software, because electronic delivery content systems are evolving.
But Bell said that allowing schools to spend more of the money they receive for library expenses on computers means they could spend less on instructional materials, such as books.
The legislation would also provide flexibility to districts in how they implement a class-size reduction program known as SAGE, which has helped keep class sizes small in kindergarten through third grade in some districts.
The legislation would allow districts to choose which grades would implement the program, thereby offering it to at least some children even if the district couldn't afford to offer it to all kindergartners through third graders.
Opponents said that could lead to an inconsistent application of the program, which would negate the benefits of keeping class sizes small for young children.
The bill could also allow for a longer school year in MPS by eliminating the requirement that the Milwaukee School Board schedule no more than 200 teaching days.
***
Bill’s highlights
The mandate relief proposed in Senate Bill 95 addresses areas related to pupil expulsions, the requirements of a class-size reduction program known as SAGE, special education services, pupil transportation costs, funding for school libraries, the number of teaching days in Milwaukee Public Schools, academic credit for sports participation, and the date in November by which districts must approve the tax levy in general election years.
May 16, 2011
Madison - School boards across Wisconsin could use teacher evaluations - which rely in part on the results of students' standardized state test scores - as part of the reason for dismissing and disciplining educators, according to legislation considered by the Assembly and Senate education committees Monday.
Senate Bill 95 proposes modifying 10 state mandates so that local school districts have more flexibility to decide what's best for their communities, said Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), a co-sponsor of the bill with Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills).
The legislation covers a wide range of areas - from allowing school boards to offer physical education credit to high school students who participate in one season of an extracurricular sport, to changing the way a state-funded class-size reduction program is implemented in the elementary grades - but was criticized by some legislators who thought it was too hastily brought to a hearing Monday.
Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) noted that details about the bill were released only one business day earlier, on Friday, by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
"I'm pretty sure if there had been more notice on this, this room would have been packed," she said, looking at the meager crowd of about 30 people.
The head of the largest state teachers union opposed nearly all of the proposals in the bill. But representatives from the state school boards association and the state school administrators association generally supported the provisions.
Olsen said the bill was prompted by requests from administrators and school board members.
One of the most contentious proposals in the bill is a provision that would allow school boards to use teacher evaluations as a reason - but not the sole reason - for dismissing or disciplining teachers.
During the federal Race to the Top competition last year, Wisconsin modified its state law regarding teacher evaluations by dropping the "firewall" that existed between student test scores and teacher evaluations.
But critics called it a tepid modification because results of student test scores still couldn't be used as a basis for dismissal of a teacher, and any changes to evaluation plans had to be negotiated with the unions.
"The issue is that state statutes do not allow student test scores to be used for discipline or suspension," Olsen explained during the hearing. "You can use them for evaluation. But if you use that evaluation for discipline or removal, then we've got a problem."
Union opposes bill
Mary Bell, head of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, condemned nearly all aspects of the bill Monday and said it would erode the quality of the public schools.
"It paves the way for privatization and the arbitrary use of student test scores," Bell said.
Many educators and legislators spoke about the need for multiple measures to be used when evaluating teachers. No single year's test scores or 40-minute principal visit to the classroom would be a fair assessment, said Jennifer Breezee, a high school English teacher in the DeForest Area School District.
"We want assessments, but we want quality assessments," she said. "This is not the way to do it."
Other speakers opposed allowing school boards to offer 1.5 units of physical education credit to high school students who participate in one season of an extracurricular sport.
PE credit for sports
Keith Bakken, executive director for the advocacy group Wisconsin Health and Physical Education and a Mount Horeb school board member, opposed allowing physically active students to opt out of physical education classes and still get credit.
"Physical education is an academic subject," he said. "What you see as a mandate is something I've seen for 16 years as a standard."
From the School Administrators Alliance, John Forester said it's always difficult to change state law, especially when it comes to education and what's best for children.
Forester, the group's head of governmental relations, said school administrators were seeking changes to the mandates because it would allow them to stretch to other areas the limited dollars they have.
For example, districts are allowed to contract for physical and occupational therapy services for students. But if a school district needs to contract for other special education service, such as educational interpreters or audiologists, it cannot pay for it with state aid. Forester said that's problematic for some districts that can't hire qualified staff for one or two students who need specific services.
He also spoke in favor of lifting the limits on what school libraries can spend on computers and software, because electronic delivery content systems are evolving.
But Bell said that allowing schools to spend more of the money they receive for library expenses on computers means they could spend less on instructional materials, such as books.
The legislation would also provide flexibility to districts in how they implement a class-size reduction program known as SAGE, which has helped keep class sizes small in kindergarten through third grade in some districts.
The legislation would allow districts to choose which grades would implement the program, thereby offering it to at least some children even if the district couldn't afford to offer it to all kindergartners through third graders.
Opponents said that could lead to an inconsistent application of the program, which would negate the benefits of keeping class sizes small for young children.
The bill could also allow for a longer school year in MPS by eliminating the requirement that the Milwaukee School Board schedule no more than 200 teaching days.
***
Bill’s highlights
The mandate relief proposed in Senate Bill 95 addresses areas related to pupil expulsions, the requirements of a class-size reduction program known as SAGE, special education services, pupil transportation costs, funding for school libraries, the number of teaching days in Milwaukee Public Schools, academic credit for sports participation, and the date in November by which districts must approve the tax levy in general election years.
Bill Would End Tuition Break for Illegal Immigrants
Ok. So on one end the state is up in arms about poor college completion rates, and places this concern and its goal to be a top-ten-state in college graduates at the fore. Then comes this... an explicit, ideological attack on immigrant students that completely contradicts the previous goal. This is both offensive and shameful!
-Patricia
by Aziza Musa | Texas Tribune
May 19, 2011
When she was 12 years old, Edilsa Lopez was abducted when she was walking on a street in her native country, Guatemala. The kidnappers brought her to the United States and moved her from city to city along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Lopez, who told her story earlier this year when she testified before the House State Affairs Committee, managed to eventually run away and called an aunt who lived in Houston. Lopez dreamed of being the first person in her family to graduate from college. So she worked hard: She learned English in one year, enrolled herself in a local high school, graduated in the top 10 percent of her class and decided to go to college. Lopez said that when she learned she could pay lower in-state tuition rates even though she was not in the U.S. legally, it motivated her to succeed in school.
Now, Lopez is an economics, business and international relations senior at the University of Texas. But Lopez says a measure championed by Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, and other Republicans may threaten her ability to finish school and could hurt the chances for other Texas students who are not living here legally to attend college.
In 2001, Texas became the first state to allow students without legal documentation of citizenship to pay in-state tuition rates, provided they could show they lived in the Texas for at least three years before their high school graduation. The law requires the students to sign an affidavit promising they will apply for permanent residency as soon as they meet the requirements. Currently, 11 other states have a similar system in place.
Birdwell’s bill would repeal that law. GOP state Reps. Bill Zedler, of Arlington, and Erwin Cain, of Como, have also filed amendments to a budget bill the House is expected to debate today that would effectively repeal the in-state tuition provision. Based on rates published on the UT website, that would mean Lopez could pay about $10,500 more each semester as a full-time liberal arts student.
With less than two weeks left in the legislative session, the measure is stuck in the Senate Higher Education Committee. Birdwell, though, has tried to unstick his bill and attempted last week to tack it on as an amendment to another education-related bill. When Democratic senators raised concerns about the amendment, Birdwell withdrew it.
Birdwell argues that his bill makes tuition rates fairer, requiring students who are not living here legally to pay the same amount as out-of-state students. And he said he doesn't worry that the measure will drive down college attendance.
But Richard Piñeda, an associate communication studies professor at UT-El Paso, disagrees. Most students in this situation arrive in Texas at a very young age, and he said it's unlikely they will return to their country of origin. Repealing in-state tuition could send students living in Texas without documentation to other states in search of higher education. Texas would lose money, and those students who remain would likely be less educated, he said.
"The idea is if you keep locking people out of different services and benefits, it doesn't necessarily solve the problem. It doesn't deter the forces of immigration," he said.
According to a recent report by researchers at Roger Williams University's Latino Policy Institute, states that let students without legal citizenship pay in-state tuition rates saw a 31 percent increase in college enrollment and a 14 percent decline in the number of high school dropouts. Of the nine studies reviewed, the researchers found two that said in-state tuition provisions cost taxpayers.
The Higher Education Coordinating Board estimates that almost 20,000 students would be affected by the change. Assuming many of these students would enroll in less expensive schools or drop out altogether if faced with higher tuition costs, the coordinating board calculates that the state's institutions of higher learning would suffer a net loss of almost $92 million in tuition in fiscal year 2016 alone.
Dominic Chavez, the board’s spokesman, said that if the bill passed, students would have to show legal proof of their residency status; the board would determine what satisfied residency requirements and universities would review the documents.
Birdwell offered a new version of the bill on May 11 clarifying that his legislation would exclude non-residents who have already completed 30 or more credit hours.
Supporters of the bill — like Duke Machado, director of GOP Is for Me, a group that educates the Hispanic community on conservative issues — say they do not want their tax dollars to fund education for non-citizens. “The bottom line is that we have to make the determination that we are American citizens and that our money, our tax dollars should go to our citizens,” Machado told the Senate Higher Education Committee.
The bill has staunch opponents, though, including Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. They say the legislation wouldn't save taxpayer money because undocumented immigrants contribute to the tax base and to the economy. And if the non-citizen immigrants are better educated, they can contribute more.
Luis Figueroa, a MALDEF Southwest Regional Office staff attorney, said the bill could lead to more school dropouts. Figueroa argues the state would not save money because the number of affected students paying tuition would drop. “There’s no real reason to single them out and make them pay more,” he said.
For Lopez, the bill could mean an early end to her college career. “It would be heartbreaking because I have worked so hard,” she said. She pays her own tuition, without family support, and she's not eligible for federal financial aid. Lopez said she could not afford to pay thousands more to finish her degree.
“All we want is an opportunity,” she told lawmakers at the hearing earlier this year.
-Patricia
by Aziza Musa | Texas Tribune
May 19, 2011
When she was 12 years old, Edilsa Lopez was abducted when she was walking on a street in her native country, Guatemala. The kidnappers brought her to the United States and moved her from city to city along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Lopez, who told her story earlier this year when she testified before the House State Affairs Committee, managed to eventually run away and called an aunt who lived in Houston. Lopez dreamed of being the first person in her family to graduate from college. So she worked hard: She learned English in one year, enrolled herself in a local high school, graduated in the top 10 percent of her class and decided to go to college. Lopez said that when she learned she could pay lower in-state tuition rates even though she was not in the U.S. legally, it motivated her to succeed in school.
Now, Lopez is an economics, business and international relations senior at the University of Texas. But Lopez says a measure championed by Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, and other Republicans may threaten her ability to finish school and could hurt the chances for other Texas students who are not living here legally to attend college.
In 2001, Texas became the first state to allow students without legal documentation of citizenship to pay in-state tuition rates, provided they could show they lived in the Texas for at least three years before their high school graduation. The law requires the students to sign an affidavit promising they will apply for permanent residency as soon as they meet the requirements. Currently, 11 other states have a similar system in place.
Birdwell’s bill would repeal that law. GOP state Reps. Bill Zedler, of Arlington, and Erwin Cain, of Como, have also filed amendments to a budget bill the House is expected to debate today that would effectively repeal the in-state tuition provision. Based on rates published on the UT website, that would mean Lopez could pay about $10,500 more each semester as a full-time liberal arts student.
With less than two weeks left in the legislative session, the measure is stuck in the Senate Higher Education Committee. Birdwell, though, has tried to unstick his bill and attempted last week to tack it on as an amendment to another education-related bill. When Democratic senators raised concerns about the amendment, Birdwell withdrew it.
Birdwell argues that his bill makes tuition rates fairer, requiring students who are not living here legally to pay the same amount as out-of-state students. And he said he doesn't worry that the measure will drive down college attendance.
But Richard Piñeda, an associate communication studies professor at UT-El Paso, disagrees. Most students in this situation arrive in Texas at a very young age, and he said it's unlikely they will return to their country of origin. Repealing in-state tuition could send students living in Texas without documentation to other states in search of higher education. Texas would lose money, and those students who remain would likely be less educated, he said.
"The idea is if you keep locking people out of different services and benefits, it doesn't necessarily solve the problem. It doesn't deter the forces of immigration," he said.
According to a recent report by researchers at Roger Williams University's Latino Policy Institute, states that let students without legal citizenship pay in-state tuition rates saw a 31 percent increase in college enrollment and a 14 percent decline in the number of high school dropouts. Of the nine studies reviewed, the researchers found two that said in-state tuition provisions cost taxpayers.
The Higher Education Coordinating Board estimates that almost 20,000 students would be affected by the change. Assuming many of these students would enroll in less expensive schools or drop out altogether if faced with higher tuition costs, the coordinating board calculates that the state's institutions of higher learning would suffer a net loss of almost $92 million in tuition in fiscal year 2016 alone.
Dominic Chavez, the board’s spokesman, said that if the bill passed, students would have to show legal proof of their residency status; the board would determine what satisfied residency requirements and universities would review the documents.
Birdwell offered a new version of the bill on May 11 clarifying that his legislation would exclude non-residents who have already completed 30 or more credit hours.
Supporters of the bill — like Duke Machado, director of GOP Is for Me, a group that educates the Hispanic community on conservative issues — say they do not want their tax dollars to fund education for non-citizens. “The bottom line is that we have to make the determination that we are American citizens and that our money, our tax dollars should go to our citizens,” Machado told the Senate Higher Education Committee.
The bill has staunch opponents, though, including Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. They say the legislation wouldn't save taxpayer money because undocumented immigrants contribute to the tax base and to the economy. And if the non-citizen immigrants are better educated, they can contribute more.
Luis Figueroa, a MALDEF Southwest Regional Office staff attorney, said the bill could lead to more school dropouts. Figueroa argues the state would not save money because the number of affected students paying tuition would drop. “There’s no real reason to single them out and make them pay more,” he said.
For Lopez, the bill could mean an early end to her college career. “It would be heartbreaking because I have worked so hard,” she said. She pays her own tuition, without family support, and she's not eligible for federal financial aid. Lopez said she could not afford to pay thousands more to finish her degree.
“All we want is an opportunity,” she told lawmakers at the hearing earlier this year.
How a teacher turned a ‘B’ track class into Honors
I'm very honored to be featured in Valerie Strauss' blog in the WASHINGTON POST, as well as in Sam Chaltain's book, FACES OF LEARNING. What’s neat is that everyone in the world is welcome to post their story. All they need to do is go to the FOL website and post their powerful learning story here:
The goal is to help change the discourse in this country about what powerful learning looks like and what it can do so that we as practitioners, scholars, policy makers and advocates can hold that up against the kind of pedestrian, test-driven, and mind-numbing opportunities to which far too many children are exposed. I feel very honored to be featured in Strauss’ blog.
It really is so amazing to think that so much of who I am professionally today literally tracks back to this one teacher who I never really got close to but who gave me and everybody else a chance. I sense that we all rose to the level of her expectations. It was a really focused class. We all respected her, paid attention, and did our work, I recall.
While this time period in history was way before the test mania we see today, a point of this piece is that discrimination is institutional, pervasive, and takes many forms. Tracking still exists in this country--in policies and practice despite the volumes of evidence of just how harmful it is. We treat education in this country more like a privilege rather than as a human right and we continue to use tools mediated through attitudes, prejudices and a culture of racism and classism, to encourage the ascendancy of certain segments of society over others--indeed, over huge swaths of underprivileged, frequently pigmented, accented, undocumented humanity. Hence, the struggle for a more just world and a livable planet continues....
-Angela
How a teacher turned a ‘B’ track class into Honors
by
Valerie Strauss, WASHINGTON POST Blog, The Answer Sheet 05/17/2011
A teacher named Mrs. Eli changed Angela Valenzuela’s life by insisting on treating members of a lower-tracked 11th grade class of Mexican Americans as honors students. Now Valenzuela is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a leading voice on the needs of English Language Learners.
Her story about Mrs. Eli below is the latest installment in a series on The Sheet called “Faces of Learning,” a national campaign designed to explore what powerful learning environments and highly effective teachers really look like.
The campaign is designed to answer the following questions: How do people learn? How do I learn? What does the ideal learning environment look like? And how can we create more of them?
Everybody, regardless of age or occupation, is encouraged to go to the campaign’s website and share their story, said the creator, educator and author Sam Chaltain, who wrote a book entitled “Faces of Learning” that tells 50 stories of defining moments in education.
You can share your own story here, and also find a free tool that helps assess individual learning strengths and weaknesses and also provides research about how different people best learn.
Earlier stories in this series on this blog can be found here, here, here. here and here. And you can follow the Lifelong Learning series on WAMU radio with these and other Faces of Learning stories.
Here’s Angela Valenzuela’s story:
Perhaps the most significant, life-determining learning experience happened in the eleventh grade in Mrs. Eli’s class in my West Texas hometown high school named San Angelo Central High School. I remember the first day of the school year in her class. At first–in the brief moments before class was to start–it seemed like any other eleventh-grade class. That is, pretty normal.
Then Mrs. Eli came stomping into the classroom angrily, did a quick visual survey, and commented that we were not the class of students that she had expected. “I always teach honors!” she exclaimed. She then stomped back out of the classroom while mumbling something loudly about having to leave in order to go and talk to the principal about straightening this matter out.
Perhaps we were not supposed to take her attitude toward us personally since the “problem” was that there was a bureaucratic mix up. Regardless, the chill in the air that she left behind was palpable. Humiliated, we all gazed at each other through the corners of our eyes and we shrunk in our chairs. I attended a large, comprehensive high school and so I knew only a handful of the students in the class. It remains the most silent beginning of any class I had ever taken in my life.
Without a single word being said in the 15 minutes that Mrs. Eli was gone, we were forced to collectively contemplate the hard, cold fact that none of us were honors students and that our presence in her classroom was a mistake. We sat patiently, nervously awaiting the resolution to this problem.
At the time, the school’s tracking system was mysterious to me. I wondered how it was that others read novels and were able to take trips to Washington, D.C. when I was not. I knew what experiences I was missing by being a member of the band and sitting next to my Anglo band member friends in the clarinet and flute sections who seemed to always be reading interesting books and had more challenging homework assignments than me. They would innocently ask me if I had read John Steinbeck, George Orwell, or Lord of the Flies. My band friends would tell me what these texts were about and I wondered why I never got them assigned to me in my classes.
No one at school ever explained why these differences existed. In time, however, I came to understand that the culprit was tracking. After all, the band itself was tracked during the concert season into the A and B bands. It was uncanny that all of the Mexican Americans got tracked to the “B Band.” Unofficially, we called it “the Mexican band.” I was always between the A and B bands because of the inner turmoil that these exclusionary practices created for me.
I struggled with wanting to do well and fit in within the existing band hierarchy. In the A Band, I felt alienated because I felt subject to unfair, evaluative criteria which meant that regardless of how well I played, my rankings would never reach either a fair or high level. Therefore despite the seemingly endless hours that I dedicated to practicing my clarinet or even the outside recognition that I received from various regional and statewide competitive events, my merits as a musician were never fully acknowledged nor encouraged. The B Band was a different story. There, I was the best player in the clarinet section and I was psychically and emotionally at ease in a space that I felt honored and respected me. Because of my musical abilities, some students looked up to me in an admiring way.
Mrs. Eli’s entrance was just as startling as her exit. She walked back into the classroom huffing and puffing. With her mouth twisted in anger and frustration, she continued where she had left off fifteen minutes earlier. After stirring our deepest insecurities about whether an of us could possibly “make it” in an honors class, she loudly asserted, “Well! I am not going to teach you any differently than I teach my honors students!”
That day turned out to be a turning point for the rest of my life. In that class, I read my first novel. I wrote my first twelve-page term paper. I wrote about Charles Dickens. This assignment took me for the first time to my local university library and I was able to see all of the books written by Dickens. I read and memorized extended passages of Macbeth and Hamlet and was given the opportunity to read and fall in love with the romantic poets, including Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau.
My family, church, and community imbued me with a strong, positive sense of self. Where I was lacking, however, was with respect to my academic self-esteem. Not only did I begin to genuinely cultivate a bona fide college-going identity, but this class also empowered me to imagine that I, too, could thrive in that environment. Mrs. Eli’s class liberated me from a subterranean, subaltern fear that I would never be “college material.”
In turn, I realized that I could rise to standards that were much higher than those that were set for me in my regular classes. It is therefore no accident that I later went to college and majored in English and minored in Spanish in the same hometown university to which Mrs. Eli’s class had sent me.
Despite our rough beginning, Mrs. Eli stood by her word. She treated us equitably, similar to all of the other honors students that she had taught previously and she was a good teacher to boot. She was always well-prepared, she encouraged discussion, and she shared her love of literature with us. While from a pedagogical perspective, Mrs. Eli was not particularly innovative, her uncompromising decision to teach “regular” students to a level of college-ready mastery redeemed her–at least as far as I was concerned.
I have always wanted to thank you, Mrs. Eli, for helping a rather nondescript, small-framed, Mexican girl in exactly the way that she needed to be helped at a crucial point in her life. Gracias!
The goal is to help change the discourse in this country about what powerful learning looks like and what it can do so that we as practitioners, scholars, policy makers and advocates can hold that up against the kind of pedestrian, test-driven, and mind-numbing opportunities to which far too many children are exposed. I feel very honored to be featured in Strauss’ blog.
It really is so amazing to think that so much of who I am professionally today literally tracks back to this one teacher who I never really got close to but who gave me and everybody else a chance. I sense that we all rose to the level of her expectations. It was a really focused class. We all respected her, paid attention, and did our work, I recall.
While this time period in history was way before the test mania we see today, a point of this piece is that discrimination is institutional, pervasive, and takes many forms. Tracking still exists in this country--in policies and practice despite the volumes of evidence of just how harmful it is. We treat education in this country more like a privilege rather than as a human right and we continue to use tools mediated through attitudes, prejudices and a culture of racism and classism, to encourage the ascendancy of certain segments of society over others--indeed, over huge swaths of underprivileged, frequently pigmented, accented, undocumented humanity. Hence, the struggle for a more just world and a livable planet continues....
-Angela
How a teacher turned a ‘B’ track class into Honors
by
Valerie Strauss, WASHINGTON POST Blog, The Answer Sheet 05/17/2011
A teacher named Mrs. Eli changed Angela Valenzuela’s life by insisting on treating members of a lower-tracked 11th grade class of Mexican Americans as honors students. Now Valenzuela is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a leading voice on the needs of English Language Learners.
Her story about Mrs. Eli below is the latest installment in a series on The Sheet called “Faces of Learning,” a national campaign designed to explore what powerful learning environments and highly effective teachers really look like.
The campaign is designed to answer the following questions: How do people learn? How do I learn? What does the ideal learning environment look like? And how can we create more of them?
Everybody, regardless of age or occupation, is encouraged to go to the campaign’s website and share their story, said the creator, educator and author Sam Chaltain, who wrote a book entitled “Faces of Learning” that tells 50 stories of defining moments in education.
You can share your own story here, and also find a free tool that helps assess individual learning strengths and weaknesses and also provides research about how different people best learn.
Earlier stories in this series on this blog can be found here, here, here. here and here. And you can follow the Lifelong Learning series on WAMU radio with these and other Faces of Learning stories.
Here’s Angela Valenzuela’s story:
Perhaps the most significant, life-determining learning experience happened in the eleventh grade in Mrs. Eli’s class in my West Texas hometown high school named San Angelo Central High School. I remember the first day of the school year in her class. At first–in the brief moments before class was to start–it seemed like any other eleventh-grade class. That is, pretty normal.
Then Mrs. Eli came stomping into the classroom angrily, did a quick visual survey, and commented that we were not the class of students that she had expected. “I always teach honors!” she exclaimed. She then stomped back out of the classroom while mumbling something loudly about having to leave in order to go and talk to the principal about straightening this matter out.
Perhaps we were not supposed to take her attitude toward us personally since the “problem” was that there was a bureaucratic mix up. Regardless, the chill in the air that she left behind was palpable. Humiliated, we all gazed at each other through the corners of our eyes and we shrunk in our chairs. I attended a large, comprehensive high school and so I knew only a handful of the students in the class. It remains the most silent beginning of any class I had ever taken in my life.
Without a single word being said in the 15 minutes that Mrs. Eli was gone, we were forced to collectively contemplate the hard, cold fact that none of us were honors students and that our presence in her classroom was a mistake. We sat patiently, nervously awaiting the resolution to this problem.
At the time, the school’s tracking system was mysterious to me. I wondered how it was that others read novels and were able to take trips to Washington, D.C. when I was not. I knew what experiences I was missing by being a member of the band and sitting next to my Anglo band member friends in the clarinet and flute sections who seemed to always be reading interesting books and had more challenging homework assignments than me. They would innocently ask me if I had read John Steinbeck, George Orwell, or Lord of the Flies. My band friends would tell me what these texts were about and I wondered why I never got them assigned to me in my classes.
No one at school ever explained why these differences existed. In time, however, I came to understand that the culprit was tracking. After all, the band itself was tracked during the concert season into the A and B bands. It was uncanny that all of the Mexican Americans got tracked to the “B Band.” Unofficially, we called it “the Mexican band.” I was always between the A and B bands because of the inner turmoil that these exclusionary practices created for me.
I struggled with wanting to do well and fit in within the existing band hierarchy. In the A Band, I felt alienated because I felt subject to unfair, evaluative criteria which meant that regardless of how well I played, my rankings would never reach either a fair or high level. Therefore despite the seemingly endless hours that I dedicated to practicing my clarinet or even the outside recognition that I received from various regional and statewide competitive events, my merits as a musician were never fully acknowledged nor encouraged. The B Band was a different story. There, I was the best player in the clarinet section and I was psychically and emotionally at ease in a space that I felt honored and respected me. Because of my musical abilities, some students looked up to me in an admiring way.
Mrs. Eli’s entrance was just as startling as her exit. She walked back into the classroom huffing and puffing. With her mouth twisted in anger and frustration, she continued where she had left off fifteen minutes earlier. After stirring our deepest insecurities about whether an of us could possibly “make it” in an honors class, she loudly asserted, “Well! I am not going to teach you any differently than I teach my honors students!”
That day turned out to be a turning point for the rest of my life. In that class, I read my first novel. I wrote my first twelve-page term paper. I wrote about Charles Dickens. This assignment took me for the first time to my local university library and I was able to see all of the books written by Dickens. I read and memorized extended passages of Macbeth and Hamlet and was given the opportunity to read and fall in love with the romantic poets, including Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau.
My family, church, and community imbued me with a strong, positive sense of self. Where I was lacking, however, was with respect to my academic self-esteem. Not only did I begin to genuinely cultivate a bona fide college-going identity, but this class also empowered me to imagine that I, too, could thrive in that environment. Mrs. Eli’s class liberated me from a subterranean, subaltern fear that I would never be “college material.”
In turn, I realized that I could rise to standards that were much higher than those that were set for me in my regular classes. It is therefore no accident that I later went to college and majored in English and minored in Spanish in the same hometown university to which Mrs. Eli’s class had sent me.
Despite our rough beginning, Mrs. Eli stood by her word. She treated us equitably, similar to all of the other honors students that she had taught previously and she was a good teacher to boot. She was always well-prepared, she encouraged discussion, and she shared her love of literature with us. While from a pedagogical perspective, Mrs. Eli was not particularly innovative, her uncompromising decision to teach “regular” students to a level of college-ready mastery redeemed her–at least as far as I was concerned.
I have always wanted to thank you, Mrs. Eli, for helping a rather nondescript, small-framed, Mexican girl in exactly the way that she needed to be helped at a crucial point in her life. Gracias!
Diversity Initiatives Multifaceted and Productive at UT-Austin
Here is some good press about the work that we do within the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement and the Texas Center for Education Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.
Angela
Angela
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
UT regents seek more detail about faculty workloads
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
On the same day that University of Texas System regents unanimously agreed to refrain from micromanaging the state's largest university system, at least one regent seemed to do just that by requesting records on individual faculty members' workloads, average grades for each undergraduate course and student evaluation scores of teachers, as well as a timeline for producing those materials, emails obtained by the American-Statesman show.
Regent Alex Cranberg requested the materials for each course taught in the 2009-10 academic year at the UT System's nine academic campuses, according to the emails. One email said Regent Brenda Pejovich joined Cranberg in the request, but officials said in interviews that she had not done so.
Cranberg submitted his request to Sandra Woodley, a vice chancellor for the system, on Thursday afternoon, hours after Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa received an unqualified vote of support, including a standing ovation, from the Board of Regents following a speech in which he declared that universities “simply cannot be micromanaged.” Woodley had a staff member send the request to the campuses on Friday.
Gene Powell, chairman of the regents, emphasized Cigarroa's role as the system's CEO at Thursday's meeting and in an interview later that day.
"And from this point forward," Powell told the Statesman, "the board's going to be working on his goals and his measurements for how we continue to be great and how we continue to change as we go forward to continue to be a university, a group of universities, of the first class."
But the emails, along with a UT System spreadsheet detailing earlier requests for information from the campuses, indicate that Cranberg and Pejovich are playing a significant role when it comes to determining the measurements. Their focus on faculty productivity borrows in part from seven controversial "breakthrough solutions" offered by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based think tank, and partially endorsed by Gov. Rick Perry.
Pejovich is a member of the foundation's board of directors. Cranberg is a longtime associate of Jeff Sandefer, a foundation director, architect of the breakthrough solutions and a major Perry donor. Cranberg did not return calls, and Pejovich referred a request for comment to Powell.
Powell said in an interview Tuesday that requests by regents to collect and organize data don't amount to micromanaging.
"No one is telling these institutions what to do," Powell said. "The regents are not managing; they're gathering information to study, which is their fiduciary responsibility."
However, Powell emailed a "clarification" to campus officials Tuesday in which he said that a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday for submitting a timeline for producing additional information was no longer operative.
"So, no one needs to gather any data or answers to Regent Cranberg's questions until after the task force members have a chance to visit with Regent Cranberg this Wednesday (today)," Powell wrote.
The task force in question is an advisory panel on excellence and productivity. Pejovich chairs the panel and Cranberg is a member.
Powell said he sent the email in response to questions and concerns raised by regents and campus leaders who serve on the task force. He said the task force members didn't realize that Cranberg was requesting the materials "as an individual regent and not as a member of the task force."
The UT System employs 18,893 faculty members at nine universities and six health institutions, according to information posted on the system's website.
The campuses previously supplied the UT System with lists of teacher salaries, number of courses taught, value of research grants and other matters. In releasing an 821-page spreadsheet with that data on May 5 in response to an open-records request, system officials cautioned that it was of limited value and said it would not be used to rate teachers.
Anthony de Bruyn, a spokesman for the UT System, said the additional information sought by Cranberg includes average student ratings of professors for each class, average grades and an accounting of each faculty member's workload, including credits taught, administrative duties, research activities and so forth.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
On the same day that University of Texas System regents unanimously agreed to refrain from micromanaging the state's largest university system, at least one regent seemed to do just that by requesting records on individual faculty members' workloads, average grades for each undergraduate course and student evaluation scores of teachers, as well as a timeline for producing those materials, emails obtained by the American-Statesman show.
Regent Alex Cranberg requested the materials for each course taught in the 2009-10 academic year at the UT System's nine academic campuses, according to the emails. One email said Regent Brenda Pejovich joined Cranberg in the request, but officials said in interviews that she had not done so.
Cranberg submitted his request to Sandra Woodley, a vice chancellor for the system, on Thursday afternoon, hours after Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa received an unqualified vote of support, including a standing ovation, from the Board of Regents following a speech in which he declared that universities “simply cannot be micromanaged.” Woodley had a staff member send the request to the campuses on Friday.
Gene Powell, chairman of the regents, emphasized Cigarroa's role as the system's CEO at Thursday's meeting and in an interview later that day.
"And from this point forward," Powell told the Statesman, "the board's going to be working on his goals and his measurements for how we continue to be great and how we continue to change as we go forward to continue to be a university, a group of universities, of the first class."
But the emails, along with a UT System spreadsheet detailing earlier requests for information from the campuses, indicate that Cranberg and Pejovich are playing a significant role when it comes to determining the measurements. Their focus on faculty productivity borrows in part from seven controversial "breakthrough solutions" offered by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based think tank, and partially endorsed by Gov. Rick Perry.
Pejovich is a member of the foundation's board of directors. Cranberg is a longtime associate of Jeff Sandefer, a foundation director, architect of the breakthrough solutions and a major Perry donor. Cranberg did not return calls, and Pejovich referred a request for comment to Powell.
Powell said in an interview Tuesday that requests by regents to collect and organize data don't amount to micromanaging.
"No one is telling these institutions what to do," Powell said. "The regents are not managing; they're gathering information to study, which is their fiduciary responsibility."
However, Powell emailed a "clarification" to campus officials Tuesday in which he said that a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday for submitting a timeline for producing additional information was no longer operative.
"So, no one needs to gather any data or answers to Regent Cranberg's questions until after the task force members have a chance to visit with Regent Cranberg this Wednesday (today)," Powell wrote.
The task force in question is an advisory panel on excellence and productivity. Pejovich chairs the panel and Cranberg is a member.
Powell said he sent the email in response to questions and concerns raised by regents and campus leaders who serve on the task force. He said the task force members didn't realize that Cranberg was requesting the materials "as an individual regent and not as a member of the task force."
The UT System employs 18,893 faculty members at nine universities and six health institutions, according to information posted on the system's website.
The campuses previously supplied the UT System with lists of teacher salaries, number of courses taught, value of research grants and other matters. In releasing an 821-page spreadsheet with that data on May 5 in response to an open-records request, system officials cautioned that it was of limited value and said it would not be used to rate teachers.
Anthony de Bruyn, a spokesman for the UT System, said the additional information sought by Cranberg includes average student ratings of professors for each class, average grades and an accounting of each faculty member's workload, including credits taught, administrative duties, research activities and so forth.
A stricter version of conservatism takes root
A stricter version of conservatism takes root
The 2011 legislative session is nearing its end, and the Republican-controlled body has struggled at times to find consensus on fixing the state's budget shortfall.
An important reason why a consensus has not been reached is that once-feasible options for fixing the budget have lost favor.
I've talked before in this space about the rainy day fund, a $9 billion pot of money raised through oil and gas taxes. The Republican-majority Legislature and Gov. Rick Perry nearly emptied that fund to help fix a smaller budget shortfall in 2003. In 2005, Perry called for using it again to create the Emerging Technology Fund, which invests state dollars in startup technology companies and awards research grants to universities.
But this year, despite the fact that the fund contains billions more than it did in either of those years, and despite the fact that schools and other services face sizable spending cuts, Perry has said that the fund should not be used to balance the budget over the next two years.
Many lawmakers agree with him, which is why the House approved a budget that did not spend that money over the next two years and the Senate tried to do the same.
Also in 2003, the Legislature balanced the budget with deferrals, which allow lawmakers to shift payments to school districts or state agencies from the final days of one budget cycle into the first few days of the next cycle. Spending isn't actually reduced so much as it is pushed to the next balance sheet. This maneuver allowed the 2003 Legislature, for instance, to delay an $800 million education payment, which the 2005 Legislature came back and repaid after the economy had improved.
Legislative leaders have proposed another education deferral this time. But several House conservatives have expressed concerns about supporting it, saying the state should not push costs to the next budget cycle.
The 2003 Legislature also used other tools, such as entering a multistate lottery and putting a fee on facilities for people with developmental disabilities, that don't seem to have much traction this time around.
So as the budget shortfall has grown larger, members of the Legislature seem to be adopting an increasingly strict definition of what it means to be a conservative. For this we can thank a number of factors, including the rise of the tea party and its successes in last November's elections, as well as the increasing prominence of interest groups such as Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, whose lawmaker scorecards can come quite in handy during a Republican primary.
Talmadge Heflin, the Republican chairman of the budget-writing Appropriations Committee in 2003, is now the director of the Center for Fiscal Policy at the small-government Texas Public Policy Foundation. The foundation isn't crazy about using the rainy day money over the next two years or deferring payments.
"We see a more dismal outlook for the national economy" than at this point in 2003, Heflin said, adding that he and colleagues also worry about how national health care reform will affect state Medicaid costs in coming years.
A hard-line approach against tricks that were more politically palatable in the past could force the Legislature to make spending cuts that are even more drastic.
Previous lawmakers were willing to use the rainy day fund and deferred payments to make spending cuts less severe. But that was before the tea party, before Perry rode an anti-spending wave to a GOP primary win and before most of us had heard of Barack Obama.
This is not 2003.
jembry@statesman.com; 445-3572
The 2011 legislative session is nearing its end, and the Republican-controlled body has struggled at times to find consensus on fixing the state's budget shortfall.
An important reason why a consensus has not been reached is that once-feasible options for fixing the budget have lost favor.
I've talked before in this space about the rainy day fund, a $9 billion pot of money raised through oil and gas taxes. The Republican-majority Legislature and Gov. Rick Perry nearly emptied that fund to help fix a smaller budget shortfall in 2003. In 2005, Perry called for using it again to create the Emerging Technology Fund, which invests state dollars in startup technology companies and awards research grants to universities.
But this year, despite the fact that the fund contains billions more than it did in either of those years, and despite the fact that schools and other services face sizable spending cuts, Perry has said that the fund should not be used to balance the budget over the next two years.
Many lawmakers agree with him, which is why the House approved a budget that did not spend that money over the next two years and the Senate tried to do the same.
Also in 2003, the Legislature balanced the budget with deferrals, which allow lawmakers to shift payments to school districts or state agencies from the final days of one budget cycle into the first few days of the next cycle. Spending isn't actually reduced so much as it is pushed to the next balance sheet. This maneuver allowed the 2003 Legislature, for instance, to delay an $800 million education payment, which the 2005 Legislature came back and repaid after the economy had improved.
Legislative leaders have proposed another education deferral this time. But several House conservatives have expressed concerns about supporting it, saying the state should not push costs to the next budget cycle.
The 2003 Legislature also used other tools, such as entering a multistate lottery and putting a fee on facilities for people with developmental disabilities, that don't seem to have much traction this time around.
So as the budget shortfall has grown larger, members of the Legislature seem to be adopting an increasingly strict definition of what it means to be a conservative. For this we can thank a number of factors, including the rise of the tea party and its successes in last November's elections, as well as the increasing prominence of interest groups such as Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, whose lawmaker scorecards can come quite in handy during a Republican primary.
Talmadge Heflin, the Republican chairman of the budget-writing Appropriations Committee in 2003, is now the director of the Center for Fiscal Policy at the small-government Texas Public Policy Foundation. The foundation isn't crazy about using the rainy day money over the next two years or deferring payments.
"We see a more dismal outlook for the national economy" than at this point in 2003, Heflin said, adding that he and colleagues also worry about how national health care reform will affect state Medicaid costs in coming years.
A hard-line approach against tricks that were more politically palatable in the past could force the Legislature to make spending cuts that are even more drastic.
Previous lawmakers were willing to use the rainy day fund and deferred payments to make spending cuts less severe. But that was before the tea party, before Perry rode an anti-spending wave to a GOP primary win and before most of us had heard of Barack Obama.
This is not 2003.
jembry@statesman.com; 445-3572
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Teachers Aren't the Enemy
Pedro Noguera and Michelle Fine | The Nation
April 21, 2011
Public school teachers and their unions are under a sustained assault that is still unfolding. In 2010 Michelle Rhee, former Washington, DC, schools chancellor, announced the creation of a multimillion-dollar lobbying organization for the explicit purpose of undermining teachers unions. She has charged that “bad teachers” are the primary cause of the problems that beset America’s schools. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has asserted that effective teachers need no experience. Romanticizing the young, energetic, passionate (read: cheap) teacher, he has made eliminating seniority preferences in layoffs (aka, last in, first out—or LIFO) his pet cause (it has been stymied for the time being by the state legislature).
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has slashed school aid by $1.2 billion while refusing to comply with a court-mandated formula for school funding equity. He has become a right-wing hero by demonizing teachers, lambasting unions, challenging tenure rights and introducing a crude teacher-evaluation process based on student test scores. Christie is also pushing what he calls a “final solution”—$360 million in tax credits for a tuition voucher system that would permit any child in New Jersey go to any school, public or private, and would include state subsidies for some students already attending parochial schools and yeshivas.
It’s hard to think of another field in which experience is considered a liability and those who know the least about the nuts and bolts of an enterprise are embraced as experts.
The attack has diverse roots, and comes not only from Republicans. Groups like Democrats for Education Reform have dedicated substantial resources to undermining teachers unions. With Race to the Top, the Obama administration has put its weight behind a reform agenda featuring charter schools, which employ mostly nonunion labor, as its centerpiece. A disturbing bipartisan consensus is emerging that favors a market model for public schools that would abandon America’s historic commitment to providing education to all children as a civil right. This model would make opportunities available largely to those motivated and able to leave local schools; treat parents as consumers and children as disposable commodities that can be judged by their test scores; and unravel collective bargaining agreements so that experienced teachers can be replaced with fungible itinerant workers who have little training, less experience and no long-term commitment to the profession.
In this atmosphere of hostility to public schools and teachers, it has become nearly impossible to have a rational discussion among educators, parents, advocates, youth and policy-makers about what should be done. Honest analyses suggest that removing ineffective teachers is an excessively slow and arduous process, though unions are often blamed when administrators have failed to document problems systematically. Likewise, the LIFO system for layoffs does need reform because it contributes to high turnover in the most disadvantaged schools. These schools are the hardest to staff, and in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, many veteran teachers have found ways to avoid being assigned to such schools. But candid conversations about how to solve these problems are extraordinarily difficult when any comment critical of unions is likely to be used as a weapon by the right.
None of the reforms on the table address the inequality and opportunity gaps that plague our schools. Raging debates over LIFO, seniority, teacher evaluation and test-based school closings do little to improve schools and much to distract from the real challenges. Moreover, because current reforms have been designed to promote school choice and weaken the unions, they have been exacerbating the challenges rather than fixing them.
* * *
But teachers unions and their allies are fighting back. Trade unionists, civil rights activists and educators have rallied with the Wisconsin protesters and put Governor Scott Walker on the defensive. To have the greatest impact, the unions must find a way to mobilize parents, young people and communities. Without their support, teachers will not succeed in countering these assaults. Getting that support will not be easy, because it requires educators to acknowledge that the school status quo is untenable and to join labor rights to educational justice.
In a small but growing number of school districts, teachers and their unions are taking the lead rather than waiting for policy-makers to act. At Columbus High School in the Bronx, teachers are working with students and parents to resist the district’s efforts to close the school by addressing the causes of student failure. In the South Bronx, parents, labor, educators and community organizers, united as CC9, have designed a strategy to reverse teacher turnover by providing new teachers with support from veteran lead teachers.
In Chicago, Karen Lewis, of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), is presiding over the Chicago Teachers Union with a platform to reverse Renaissance 2010, a program to close many schools serving poor children of the South Side and timed to coincide with the demolition of housing projects pushing great numbers of poor people out of the city. CORE is focused on much more than salaries and benefits. It is challenging the use of high-stakes testing to punish students, teachers and schools, organizing for greater equity in school finances and mobilizing with parents against school closings.
In Milwaukee, longtime education activist Bob Peterson, editor of Rethinking Schools, is running for union president. Peterson worked with a broad array of local activists to defeat mayoral control of the schools and co-founded an educator/parent task force on responsible assessment.
And in California, the California Teachers Association sponsored the Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA), which has targeted funding toward reducing class size, hiring more counselors and providing professional development for teachers focused on the sharing of best practices. Schools that have enjoyed QEIA support have shown marked student improvements, particularly for low-income young people of color and English as a second language learners. This activism will culminate in a national Save Our Schools March in Washington on July 30.
We can begin to feel the rumble of solidarity, with parents, teachers, labor and youth taking back what is rightfully theirs—public schools and democratic public education.
This article appeared in the May 9, 2011 edition of The Nation.
April 21, 2011
Public school teachers and their unions are under a sustained assault that is still unfolding. In 2010 Michelle Rhee, former Washington, DC, schools chancellor, announced the creation of a multimillion-dollar lobbying organization for the explicit purpose of undermining teachers unions. She has charged that “bad teachers” are the primary cause of the problems that beset America’s schools. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has asserted that effective teachers need no experience. Romanticizing the young, energetic, passionate (read: cheap) teacher, he has made eliminating seniority preferences in layoffs (aka, last in, first out—or LIFO) his pet cause (it has been stymied for the time being by the state legislature).
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has slashed school aid by $1.2 billion while refusing to comply with a court-mandated formula for school funding equity. He has become a right-wing hero by demonizing teachers, lambasting unions, challenging tenure rights and introducing a crude teacher-evaluation process based on student test scores. Christie is also pushing what he calls a “final solution”—$360 million in tax credits for a tuition voucher system that would permit any child in New Jersey go to any school, public or private, and would include state subsidies for some students already attending parochial schools and yeshivas.
It’s hard to think of another field in which experience is considered a liability and those who know the least about the nuts and bolts of an enterprise are embraced as experts.
50% of graduates with a teaching degree are no longer teaching after 3 years. This BEFORE teachers were public enemy #1.This costs districts thousands per teacher who leaves. Ask yourselves this; who will be left to teach the kids?
The attack has diverse roots, and comes not only from Republicans. Groups like Democrats for Education Reform have dedicated substantial resources to undermining teachers unions. With Race to the Top, the Obama administration has put its weight behind a reform agenda featuring charter schools, which employ mostly nonunion labor, as its centerpiece. A disturbing bipartisan consensus is emerging that favors a market model for public schools that would abandon America’s historic commitment to providing education to all children as a civil right. This model would make opportunities available largely to those motivated and able to leave local schools; treat parents as consumers and children as disposable commodities that can be judged by their test scores; and unravel collective bargaining agreements so that experienced teachers can be replaced with fungible itinerant workers who have little training, less experience and no long-term commitment to the profession.
In this atmosphere of hostility to public schools and teachers, it has become nearly impossible to have a rational discussion among educators, parents, advocates, youth and policy-makers about what should be done. Honest analyses suggest that removing ineffective teachers is an excessively slow and arduous process, though unions are often blamed when administrators have failed to document problems systematically. Likewise, the LIFO system for layoffs does need reform because it contributes to high turnover in the most disadvantaged schools. These schools are the hardest to staff, and in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, many veteran teachers have found ways to avoid being assigned to such schools. But candid conversations about how to solve these problems are extraordinarily difficult when any comment critical of unions is likely to be used as a weapon by the right.
None of the reforms on the table address the inequality and opportunity gaps that plague our schools. Raging debates over LIFO, seniority, teacher evaluation and test-based school closings do little to improve schools and much to distract from the real challenges. Moreover, because current reforms have been designed to promote school choice and weaken the unions, they have been exacerbating the challenges rather than fixing them.
* * *
But teachers unions and their allies are fighting back. Trade unionists, civil rights activists and educators have rallied with the Wisconsin protesters and put Governor Scott Walker on the defensive. To have the greatest impact, the unions must find a way to mobilize parents, young people and communities. Without their support, teachers will not succeed in countering these assaults. Getting that support will not be easy, because it requires educators to acknowledge that the school status quo is untenable and to join labor rights to educational justice.
In a small but growing number of school districts, teachers and their unions are taking the lead rather than waiting for policy-makers to act. At Columbus High School in the Bronx, teachers are working with students and parents to resist the district’s efforts to close the school by addressing the causes of student failure. In the South Bronx, parents, labor, educators and community organizers, united as CC9, have designed a strategy to reverse teacher turnover by providing new teachers with support from veteran lead teachers.
In Chicago, Karen Lewis, of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), is presiding over the Chicago Teachers Union with a platform to reverse Renaissance 2010, a program to close many schools serving poor children of the South Side and timed to coincide with the demolition of housing projects pushing great numbers of poor people out of the city. CORE is focused on much more than salaries and benefits. It is challenging the use of high-stakes testing to punish students, teachers and schools, organizing for greater equity in school finances and mobilizing with parents against school closings.
In Milwaukee, longtime education activist Bob Peterson, editor of Rethinking Schools, is running for union president. Peterson worked with a broad array of local activists to defeat mayoral control of the schools and co-founded an educator/parent task force on responsible assessment.
And in California, the California Teachers Association sponsored the Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA), which has targeted funding toward reducing class size, hiring more counselors and providing professional development for teachers focused on the sharing of best practices. Schools that have enjoyed QEIA support have shown marked student improvements, particularly for low-income young people of color and English as a second language learners. This activism will culminate in a national Save Our Schools March in Washington on July 30.
We can begin to feel the rumble of solidarity, with parents, teachers, labor and youth taking back what is rightfully theirs—public schools and democratic public education.
This article appeared in the May 9, 2011 edition of The Nation.
Gov. Perry Appoints Five to State Board for Educator Certification
Office of the Governor • Austin, Texas
Monday, May 16, 2011
Gov. Rick Perry has appointed five members to the State Board for Educator Certification. The board develops certification, continuing education requirements and standards of conduct for public school teachers.
Curtis Culwell of Garland is superintendent of the Garland Independent School District. He is a member and past chairman of the University Interscholastic League Legislative Council, a member of the American and Texas associations of School Administrators, and the Select Committee on Public School Finance Weights, Allotments and Adjustments. He is also past president of the Texas School Alliance, a past member of the Texas Task Force on Appraisal Reform, and a volunteer for the March of Dimes and United Way of Dallas County. Culwell received a bachelor's degree from Sam Houston State University, and a master's degree and doctorate degree in educational administration from Texas A&M University at Commerce. He is reappointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2017.
Kathryn Everest of Arlington is director of guidance and counseling for the Fort Worth Independent School District. She is a member of the American Counseling Association and American School Counselor Association, and a member and immediate past director of the Texas Association of Counselor Education and Supervision. She is also co-founder and co-coordinator of the Tarrant County Trauma Response Team in Schools, past vice president of the Texas School Counseling Association, and a past board member of the Texas Counseling Association. Everest received a bachelor's degree, a master's degree in educational counseling, and an educational administrator certification from the University of North Texas. She is appointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2015.
Suzanne McCall of Lubbock is an elementary school teacher in the Slaton Independent School District. She is president of the Slaton Classroom Teacher Association, director of District 17 of the Texas Classroom Teacher Association, and a sustaining member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority. She is also a past coach of the Slaton Little Dribblers and a past volunteer with the Lubbock Food Bank. McCall received a bachelor's degree from Texas Woman's University. She is appointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2017.
Christie Pogue of Buda is an editorial assistant for the Texas State University Armed Forces and Society Journal. She is a member of the American Society of Public Administrators, Hays Consolidated ISD Parent/Teacher Association, and Hays Consolidated ISD Athletic and Band Booster clubs. She is also a past trustee of the Texas Association of School Boards, past vice president of the Hays Consolidated ISD School Board, and a founder and past chair of the North Hays Leadership Council. Pogue received a bachelor's degree and is pursuing a master of public administration from Texas State University. She is reappointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2017.
Grant W. Simpson of Gainesville is dean and a professor at St. Edward's University School of Education. He is a member of the American and Texas associations of Colleges for Teacher Education, former chair of the Region 9 P-16 Council, and a past member of the Texas Professors of Educational Administration. Simpson received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College, a master's degree in special education from the University of Texas, and a doctorate of educational administration from Texas A&M University. He is reappointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2017.
These appointments are subject to Senate confirmation.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Gov. Rick Perry has appointed five members to the State Board for Educator Certification. The board develops certification, continuing education requirements and standards of conduct for public school teachers.
Curtis Culwell of Garland is superintendent of the Garland Independent School District. He is a member and past chairman of the University Interscholastic League Legislative Council, a member of the American and Texas associations of School Administrators, and the Select Committee on Public School Finance Weights, Allotments and Adjustments. He is also past president of the Texas School Alliance, a past member of the Texas Task Force on Appraisal Reform, and a volunteer for the March of Dimes and United Way of Dallas County. Culwell received a bachelor's degree from Sam Houston State University, and a master's degree and doctorate degree in educational administration from Texas A&M University at Commerce. He is reappointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2017.
Kathryn Everest of Arlington is director of guidance and counseling for the Fort Worth Independent School District. She is a member of the American Counseling Association and American School Counselor Association, and a member and immediate past director of the Texas Association of Counselor Education and Supervision. She is also co-founder and co-coordinator of the Tarrant County Trauma Response Team in Schools, past vice president of the Texas School Counseling Association, and a past board member of the Texas Counseling Association. Everest received a bachelor's degree, a master's degree in educational counseling, and an educational administrator certification from the University of North Texas. She is appointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2015.
Suzanne McCall of Lubbock is an elementary school teacher in the Slaton Independent School District. She is president of the Slaton Classroom Teacher Association, director of District 17 of the Texas Classroom Teacher Association, and a sustaining member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority. She is also a past coach of the Slaton Little Dribblers and a past volunteer with the Lubbock Food Bank. McCall received a bachelor's degree from Texas Woman's University. She is appointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2017.
Christie Pogue of Buda is an editorial assistant for the Texas State University Armed Forces and Society Journal. She is a member of the American Society of Public Administrators, Hays Consolidated ISD Parent/Teacher Association, and Hays Consolidated ISD Athletic and Band Booster clubs. She is also a past trustee of the Texas Association of School Boards, past vice president of the Hays Consolidated ISD School Board, and a founder and past chair of the North Hays Leadership Council. Pogue received a bachelor's degree and is pursuing a master of public administration from Texas State University. She is reappointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2017.
Grant W. Simpson of Gainesville is dean and a professor at St. Edward's University School of Education. He is a member of the American and Texas associations of Colleges for Teacher Education, former chair of the Region 9 P-16 Council, and a past member of the Texas Professors of Educational Administration. Simpson received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College, a master's degree in special education from the University of Texas, and a doctorate of educational administration from Texas A&M University. He is reappointed for a term to expire Feb. 1, 2017.
These appointments are subject to Senate confirmation.
Villarreal: Legislature Unlikely to Pass Funding for Education
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 16, 2011
Contact: Peter Clark
Phone: 512-463-0532 (o), 512-417-9262 (c)
Email: Peter.Clark@house.state.tx.us
Legislature Unlikely to Pass Funding for Education
Governor's Focus on Divisive Social Issues Distracted from Real Responsibilities
Austin - With the Texas Legislature facing an imminent deadline to finish the
state budget, House and Senate budget negotiators are expected to announce that
the Legislature is unable to agree on a plan for funding public and higher
education. State Rep. Mike Villarreal, a member of the House Appropriations
Subcommittee on Education, released the following statement:
"The Legislature has failed to accomplish our most important responsibility --
providing schools with the support they need to educate our children. The
Legislature has been focused on divisive social issues that the Governor put at
the top of the agenda instead of ensuring our schoolchildren receive a quality
education. If the Legislature returns over the summer, parents, teachers, and
students will have an opportunity persuade their elected representatives to put
our kids' education first."
State Representative Mike Villarreal
Texas House of Representatives
###
May 16, 2011
Contact: Peter Clark
Phone: 512-463-0532 (o), 512-417-9262 (c)
Email: Peter.Clark@house.state.tx.us
Legislature Unlikely to Pass Funding for Education
Governor's Focus on Divisive Social Issues Distracted from Real Responsibilities
Austin - With the Texas Legislature facing an imminent deadline to finish the
state budget, House and Senate budget negotiators are expected to announce that
the Legislature is unable to agree on a plan for funding public and higher
education. State Rep. Mike Villarreal, a member of the House Appropriations
Subcommittee on Education, released the following statement:
"The Legislature has failed to accomplish our most important responsibility --
providing schools with the support they need to educate our children. The
Legislature has been focused on divisive social issues that the Governor put at
the top of the agenda instead of ensuring our schoolchildren receive a quality
education. If the Legislature returns over the summer, parents, teachers, and
students will have an opportunity persuade their elected representatives to put
our kids' education first."
State Representative Mike Villarreal
Texas House of Representatives
###
Monday, May 16, 2011
College Presidents Are Too Complacent
By Daniel Yankelovich | Commentary, The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 15, 2011
This issue of The Chronicle features two important surveys of higher education: one with college presidents and one with the public. These new data give us a chance to take a second look at some of the trends I discussed in an article for The Chronicle in November 2005. At that time, those trends appeared to be pushing higher education into a new era of turmoil, crisis, and challenge.
In sharp contrast to my 2005 article, the tone of the two new Chronicle surveys suggests to me the opposite of turmoil and crisis. Though some Americans grumble about not getting great value for their money, the vast majority are pretty well satisfied with the performance of higher education. Most Americans who have been exposed to higher education feel that their investment has been a sound one. A majority of college presidents believe that higher education is moving in the right direction. Almost four out of five (76 percent) say they are convinced that our higher-education system is doing a good or an excellent job of providing value for the money spent by students and their families.
The college presidents do acknowledge that higher education confronts many problems. For example:
* Troubling increases in student plagiarism.
* High schools doing an ever-poorer job of preparing students.
* Failure to do an "excellent job" of providing academic programs that meet the needs of today's economy.
* The increasing inability of students and their families to pay for a college education.
* The conviction that our system of higher education is losing ground relative to those of other nations.
* The likely failure of President Obama's goal to have this country achieve rates of college completion superior to any other country's by 2020.
But these decidedly nontrivial problems somehow fade into the background as the college presidents express their satisfaction with today's higher-education system. From the perspective of the trends that trouble me, this high level of satisfaction signals a lack of awareness of the dangers that lie ahead. The message I get from the survey of college presidents is, "We are doing just fine under difficult circumstances. If you send us more money and better-prepared high-school students, we can do an even better job." Neither the general public nor the presidents of our colleges seem conscious of the seriousness of the threat; they therefore lack the sense of urgency needed to confront it.
Both college presidents and the public seem to be reacting to what might be called "the old normal"—the world as it existed in the two decades before the deep recession of 2008-9. In the old normal, American universities were tops in the world; our economy was the undisputed world leader; the dollar was strong; income inequalities were much narrower than they are now; unemployment averaged about 5 percent; low-skill, high-paying jobs were commonplace; and our science and technology held undisputed world leadership.
In the old normal, higher-education credentials were seen by the public as desirable, virtually guaranteeing higher incomes and social status, but they weren't seen as indispensable to making a decent living. (In The Chronicle survey, Americans ranked having a strong work ethic, knowing how to get along with others, and learning new skills on the job as more important to success than achieving higher-education credentials.) And in the old normal employers valued higher-education credentials less for specific job skills than for a certain polish: being able to understand complex instructions, feeling socially comfortable, speaking fluently and grammatically, and making clear presentations. Companies felt that they could impart the specific skills they required to people whose college credentials proved that they were good learners.
That is not what higher education has to deliver in the world of the "new normal." In this emerging world, education beyond high school becomes indispensable to making a good living.
The threat, as I see it, is an impending crisis in this nation's powerful, if unwritten, social contract. Higher education is becoming the main battleground in a national struggle over how to keep faith with this contract.
At its core, the social contract that binds Americans together is amazingly simple. It is an implicit understanding that all citizens should be given a fair chance to achieve social mobility. It promises Americans the opportunity to better themselves and to improve their lot in life. Throughout much of our country's history, this social contract has functioned to the satisfaction of the public. Indeed, despite today's political polarization, we live with one another with a remarkable degree of social harmony.
The survey of the public shows that Americans don't believe that the lack of higher-education credentials has prevented them from getting the kinds of jobs, incomes, and social status they seek. But now all sorts of national and worldwide trends are merging to increase the importance of higher education. U.S.-government projections are that nearly eight out of 10 new jobs will require some sort of higher education, including work-force training.
It is not easy to discern to what extent structural change will reshape our economy. Some features of the new normal are all too clear. The era of low-skill, high-paying jobs is dead and gone. Many of those jobs are easy to export to countries with far lower standards of living.
Similarly, it is hard to imagine that we can quickly reverse the growth of economic inequality. The Institute of Policy Studies reports that CEO pay has soared from 30 times that of the average worker in the 1970s to more than 260 times today. The top sliver of the income distribution does better and better, while middle-class incomes stagnate.
We may not return to the old unemployment rate of 5 percent in the foreseeable future. Companies have learned how to make money even under recession conditions by laying off people and taking advantage of technology and manufacturing abroad. Asian countries are also determined to overcome our lead in science and technology, and their students excel in math and related subjects.
Put all those conditions together, and you get a far different world than the one that existed in even the recent past.
The survey of college presidents shows that our institutions of higher education are making some constructive changes to adapt to the new trends. Most recognize that today's students need far more flexibility than in the past. The lockstep pattern of going to college directly from high school and spending the next two to four years there without interruption is no longer a practical path for many students. Increasingly, students spread their higher-education experience over a decade or more after they graduate from high school, and our colleges are preparing to provide this flexibility.
The presidents are also aware of the potential of online methods for delivering course instruction. The public still believes that online instruction is second-best to personal instruction, without realizing that online instruction enjoys several extraordinary advantages. The most obvious one is flexibility: the ability to learn at your own tempo and at times of greatest convenience (especially if you are employed). A less obvious advantage is that with online instruction, it is possible to have the nation's greatest teachers as your instructors.
Colleges are also aware of the increasing burden of higher costs on students and their families. Many institutions are pursuing programs to increase student aid and make loans more available to students.
Those steps are positive, but they fall far short of meeting the main challenge—the new normal for the world economy. If the United States is to live up to its social contract of offering Americans a fair shot at social mobility, higher education must make transformative changes in at least three areas: becoming more affordable, doing a better job of linking two-year colleges to the world of work and to four-year colleges, and ensuring that the nation maintains its lead in science, technology, and other high-level skills.
Affordability. Both the college presidents and the public agree that parents and students themselves should take the main responsibility of paying for college. But families can no longer meet those inexorably rising costs. Increasingly, students are dependent on financial aid or loans. In the public survey, only 39 percent of college graduates relied mainly on loans or financial aid to pay most of their costs. Among current students, that figure has soared to 65 percent, with only a minority able to rely mainly on their own or their parents' resources.
Clearly, higher education cannot continue its pattern of annual increases in costs without the system's becoming unglued. New initiatives to rein in costs and increase revenue are badly needed. For example, the desires of many baby-boom retirees to continue their college education opens a new market for colleges, especially among alumni.
Better integration of two-year colleges. Our system of community colleges is a national treasure, all too often taken for granted and undersupported. A significant and growing percentage of the nation's 12 million college students attend community colleges, and the number is likely to rise as the proportion of minority youths increases. Community colleges address the needs of our ever more diverse population, compensating for some of the failures of our K-12 system.
One of the country's most troubling societal problems is that the college-completion rate of students from low-income families is disastrously below that of students from middle-income families. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education are devoting major resources to finding strategies for narrowing the gap, and we should be grateful for that effort, but it makes one wonder why the government and higher-education institutions themselves are not doing more to correct this potentially explosive problem. With the disappearance of high-paying, low-skill jobs, earning higher-education credentials becomes the only way that tens of millions of Americans can better themselves economically.
We cannot depend on our two-year colleges to alleviate that problem without helping them to create closer ties with employers and four-year colleges. A closer integration with employers will help to ensure that students have jobs waiting for them, and it will sharpen their focus on the skills that are most in demand in the workplace.
The relationship with four-year colleges calls for a subtler strategy. Many four-year institutions take a condescending attitude toward community colleges, regarding them as mere steppingstones to the "real education" that the four-year colleges provide. If they were to take a less patronizing attitude, they might find it easier to cooperate with community colleges in developing programs to meet the needs of today's economy. Such a strategy would enable the four-year colleges to keep faith with the mission that should mean most to them—a commitment to provide the broad-based education that promotes the intellectual growth of their students.
Imparting the higher skills that good jobs demand. I have saved for last the most complex area of necessary change—maintaining world leadership in science, technology, and related entrepreneurship. The issue here is not a matter of American hubris. It is a matter of economic common sense. Between them, China and India have populations of well over two billion people, many of them hard working, ambitious, smart, and talented. The Chinese, who have a long tradition of economic domination, are playing catch-up with the United States. If we are able to maintain our own entrepreneurial vitality, their successes will add to world growth. But if we lag too far behind, the Chinese will gobble up our high-level jobs as well as our low-level ones.
A survey by Public Agenda, a public-policy research group, shows that a major obstacle to better science-and-math education is that Americans simply don't see its relevance to their lives and believe that the training their children are getting in those subjects in the K-12 years is "fine as it is." Consequently, there is a lot of resistance to upgrading math and science instruction in the schools.
In my view, the single most effective form of intervention would be for the science and technology communities to prepare—and test with young people—persuasive online forms of instruction that communicate the relevance, importance, and magnitude of the opportunity that studies in science, technology, and math present, especially for women and minorities. Additionally, college science faculty should cooperate with local high schools to develop more-germane curricula and lesson plans.
If we do not act to prepare America's students to succeed in the emerging world economy, there simply won't be enough truly good jobs for them. Such a failure would violate the social contract and bring about the kind of unrest and resentment that plagues so many other nations.
Indeed, a huge responsibility rests on our institutions of higher education. A wake-up call is in order for the presidents who lead them.
Daniel Yankelovich is founder and chairman of three organizations: Viewpoint Learning Inc., a company that develops specialized dialogues on public-policy issues; Public Agenda, a nonprofit policy-research organization; and DYG Inc., a market- and social-research firm.
May 15, 2011
This issue of The Chronicle features two important surveys of higher education: one with college presidents and one with the public. These new data give us a chance to take a second look at some of the trends I discussed in an article for The Chronicle in November 2005. At that time, those trends appeared to be pushing higher education into a new era of turmoil, crisis, and challenge.
In sharp contrast to my 2005 article, the tone of the two new Chronicle surveys suggests to me the opposite of turmoil and crisis. Though some Americans grumble about not getting great value for their money, the vast majority are pretty well satisfied with the performance of higher education. Most Americans who have been exposed to higher education feel that their investment has been a sound one. A majority of college presidents believe that higher education is moving in the right direction. Almost four out of five (76 percent) say they are convinced that our higher-education system is doing a good or an excellent job of providing value for the money spent by students and their families.
The college presidents do acknowledge that higher education confronts many problems. For example:
* Troubling increases in student plagiarism.
* High schools doing an ever-poorer job of preparing students.
* Failure to do an "excellent job" of providing academic programs that meet the needs of today's economy.
* The increasing inability of students and their families to pay for a college education.
* The conviction that our system of higher education is losing ground relative to those of other nations.
* The likely failure of President Obama's goal to have this country achieve rates of college completion superior to any other country's by 2020.
But these decidedly nontrivial problems somehow fade into the background as the college presidents express their satisfaction with today's higher-education system. From the perspective of the trends that trouble me, this high level of satisfaction signals a lack of awareness of the dangers that lie ahead. The message I get from the survey of college presidents is, "We are doing just fine under difficult circumstances. If you send us more money and better-prepared high-school students, we can do an even better job." Neither the general public nor the presidents of our colleges seem conscious of the seriousness of the threat; they therefore lack the sense of urgency needed to confront it.
Both college presidents and the public seem to be reacting to what might be called "the old normal"—the world as it existed in the two decades before the deep recession of 2008-9. In the old normal, American universities were tops in the world; our economy was the undisputed world leader; the dollar was strong; income inequalities were much narrower than they are now; unemployment averaged about 5 percent; low-skill, high-paying jobs were commonplace; and our science and technology held undisputed world leadership.
In the old normal, higher-education credentials were seen by the public as desirable, virtually guaranteeing higher incomes and social status, but they weren't seen as indispensable to making a decent living. (In The Chronicle survey, Americans ranked having a strong work ethic, knowing how to get along with others, and learning new skills on the job as more important to success than achieving higher-education credentials.) And in the old normal employers valued higher-education credentials less for specific job skills than for a certain polish: being able to understand complex instructions, feeling socially comfortable, speaking fluently and grammatically, and making clear presentations. Companies felt that they could impart the specific skills they required to people whose college credentials proved that they were good learners.
That is not what higher education has to deliver in the world of the "new normal." In this emerging world, education beyond high school becomes indispensable to making a good living.
The threat, as I see it, is an impending crisis in this nation's powerful, if unwritten, social contract. Higher education is becoming the main battleground in a national struggle over how to keep faith with this contract.
At its core, the social contract that binds Americans together is amazingly simple. It is an implicit understanding that all citizens should be given a fair chance to achieve social mobility. It promises Americans the opportunity to better themselves and to improve their lot in life. Throughout much of our country's history, this social contract has functioned to the satisfaction of the public. Indeed, despite today's political polarization, we live with one another with a remarkable degree of social harmony.
The survey of the public shows that Americans don't believe that the lack of higher-education credentials has prevented them from getting the kinds of jobs, incomes, and social status they seek. But now all sorts of national and worldwide trends are merging to increase the importance of higher education. U.S.-government projections are that nearly eight out of 10 new jobs will require some sort of higher education, including work-force training.
It is not easy to discern to what extent structural change will reshape our economy. Some features of the new normal are all too clear. The era of low-skill, high-paying jobs is dead and gone. Many of those jobs are easy to export to countries with far lower standards of living.
Similarly, it is hard to imagine that we can quickly reverse the growth of economic inequality. The Institute of Policy Studies reports that CEO pay has soared from 30 times that of the average worker in the 1970s to more than 260 times today. The top sliver of the income distribution does better and better, while middle-class incomes stagnate.
We may not return to the old unemployment rate of 5 percent in the foreseeable future. Companies have learned how to make money even under recession conditions by laying off people and taking advantage of technology and manufacturing abroad. Asian countries are also determined to overcome our lead in science and technology, and their students excel in math and related subjects.
Put all those conditions together, and you get a far different world than the one that existed in even the recent past.
The survey of college presidents shows that our institutions of higher education are making some constructive changes to adapt to the new trends. Most recognize that today's students need far more flexibility than in the past. The lockstep pattern of going to college directly from high school and spending the next two to four years there without interruption is no longer a practical path for many students. Increasingly, students spread their higher-education experience over a decade or more after they graduate from high school, and our colleges are preparing to provide this flexibility.
The presidents are also aware of the potential of online methods for delivering course instruction. The public still believes that online instruction is second-best to personal instruction, without realizing that online instruction enjoys several extraordinary advantages. The most obvious one is flexibility: the ability to learn at your own tempo and at times of greatest convenience (especially if you are employed). A less obvious advantage is that with online instruction, it is possible to have the nation's greatest teachers as your instructors.
Colleges are also aware of the increasing burden of higher costs on students and their families. Many institutions are pursuing programs to increase student aid and make loans more available to students.
Those steps are positive, but they fall far short of meeting the main challenge—the new normal for the world economy. If the United States is to live up to its social contract of offering Americans a fair shot at social mobility, higher education must make transformative changes in at least three areas: becoming more affordable, doing a better job of linking two-year colleges to the world of work and to four-year colleges, and ensuring that the nation maintains its lead in science, technology, and other high-level skills.
Affordability. Both the college presidents and the public agree that parents and students themselves should take the main responsibility of paying for college. But families can no longer meet those inexorably rising costs. Increasingly, students are dependent on financial aid or loans. In the public survey, only 39 percent of college graduates relied mainly on loans or financial aid to pay most of their costs. Among current students, that figure has soared to 65 percent, with only a minority able to rely mainly on their own or their parents' resources.
Clearly, higher education cannot continue its pattern of annual increases in costs without the system's becoming unglued. New initiatives to rein in costs and increase revenue are badly needed. For example, the desires of many baby-boom retirees to continue their college education opens a new market for colleges, especially among alumni.
Better integration of two-year colleges. Our system of community colleges is a national treasure, all too often taken for granted and undersupported. A significant and growing percentage of the nation's 12 million college students attend community colleges, and the number is likely to rise as the proportion of minority youths increases. Community colleges address the needs of our ever more diverse population, compensating for some of the failures of our K-12 system.
One of the country's most troubling societal problems is that the college-completion rate of students from low-income families is disastrously below that of students from middle-income families. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education are devoting major resources to finding strategies for narrowing the gap, and we should be grateful for that effort, but it makes one wonder why the government and higher-education institutions themselves are not doing more to correct this potentially explosive problem. With the disappearance of high-paying, low-skill jobs, earning higher-education credentials becomes the only way that tens of millions of Americans can better themselves economically.
We cannot depend on our two-year colleges to alleviate that problem without helping them to create closer ties with employers and four-year colleges. A closer integration with employers will help to ensure that students have jobs waiting for them, and it will sharpen their focus on the skills that are most in demand in the workplace.
The relationship with four-year colleges calls for a subtler strategy. Many four-year institutions take a condescending attitude toward community colleges, regarding them as mere steppingstones to the "real education" that the four-year colleges provide. If they were to take a less patronizing attitude, they might find it easier to cooperate with community colleges in developing programs to meet the needs of today's economy. Such a strategy would enable the four-year colleges to keep faith with the mission that should mean most to them—a commitment to provide the broad-based education that promotes the intellectual growth of their students.
Imparting the higher skills that good jobs demand. I have saved for last the most complex area of necessary change—maintaining world leadership in science, technology, and related entrepreneurship. The issue here is not a matter of American hubris. It is a matter of economic common sense. Between them, China and India have populations of well over two billion people, many of them hard working, ambitious, smart, and talented. The Chinese, who have a long tradition of economic domination, are playing catch-up with the United States. If we are able to maintain our own entrepreneurial vitality, their successes will add to world growth. But if we lag too far behind, the Chinese will gobble up our high-level jobs as well as our low-level ones.
A survey by Public Agenda, a public-policy research group, shows that a major obstacle to better science-and-math education is that Americans simply don't see its relevance to their lives and believe that the training their children are getting in those subjects in the K-12 years is "fine as it is." Consequently, there is a lot of resistance to upgrading math and science instruction in the schools.
In my view, the single most effective form of intervention would be for the science and technology communities to prepare—and test with young people—persuasive online forms of instruction that communicate the relevance, importance, and magnitude of the opportunity that studies in science, technology, and math present, especially for women and minorities. Additionally, college science faculty should cooperate with local high schools to develop more-germane curricula and lesson plans.
If we do not act to prepare America's students to succeed in the emerging world economy, there simply won't be enough truly good jobs for them. Such a failure would violate the social contract and bring about the kind of unrest and resentment that plagues so many other nations.
Indeed, a huge responsibility rests on our institutions of higher education. A wake-up call is in order for the presidents who lead them.
Daniel Yankelovich is founder and chairman of three organizations: Viewpoint Learning Inc., a company that develops specialized dialogues on public-policy issues; Public Agenda, a nonprofit policy-research organization; and DYG Inc., a market- and social-research firm.
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