Tag Archives: education

School Choice and Unions

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There’s a contradiction in terms.

In January parents filed a petition to convert Palm Lane Elementary in Anaheim into a charter under California’s 2010 parent-trigger law, which allows a majority of parents in any failing school to force changes.

Naturally, the school’s district officials and teachers union demurred. Never mind that

Palm Lane had made the state Department of Education’s list of underperforming schools since 2003. Fewer than 40% of students scored proficient in English in 2013. About 85% are Hispanic, and most are low-income.

(Where is the Obama DoJ and disparate impact? Oh, wait…).

The officials and the unions went so far as to disregard California law as they dragged their feet and openly obstructed the conversion—and loss of union jobs and of income for the district officials’ use.

[U]nion even complained that signature gatherers were bribing parents with free iPads, a false allegation that the district superintendent repeated in a cautionary letter to parents.

Though more than 60% of parents signed the petition, the district threw out dozens of signatures that could not be “verified.” That is, the parents could not be reached between the hours of 8:30 am and 4:30 pm to confirm that they signed the petition. Maybe that’s because they were working.

Fortunately, and once again, a judge got one right.

Last Thursday Orange County Superior Court Judge Andrew Banks ruled in favor of the parents on all counts and rebuked the district’s conduct as “unreasonable, arbitrary, capricious and unfair.” He also scored district officials for violating their obligation under the trigger law to work in good faith with parents….

Judge Banks has ordered the district to accept the petition and allow parents to immediately begin soliciting charter school proposals.

Been all right, too, if the Judge also had ordered the district officials and the union to compensate the petitioners for their time wasted fighting these frivolous delays. Such an order might have given these officials pause as they plan their inevitable, time-wasting, delaying tactic of appeals.

Still, it’s a good ruling.

Couple Thoughts about Academic Censorship

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The American Association of University Professors has decided to censure the University of Illinois because the school decided to withdraw it offer of employment to a “professor” who went off on an anti-Israel tirade on Twitter.

First thought: U of I Chancellor Phyllis Wise is taking the AAUP’s censorship seriously. Why? The man objected, loudly and vociferously, to Israel’s defending itself against the Palestinian Authority’s terror war that it launched from Gaza.

Second thought: the censure was done by voice vote. It was carefully anonymous. How can any action by a body like this be taken seriously by a body like a university when the voters are so timid or so ashamed of their votes that they avoid being on the record with their vote?

Third thought: Anita Levy, Associate Secretary for the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, & Governance said that U of I’s decision

violated Professor [Steven] Salaita’s [the professor in question] academic freedom and cast a pall of uncertainty over the degree to which academic freedom is understood and respected[.]

This is facially untrue. Salaita’s rants cast a pall over his own ability to respect the academic freedom of his peers and more importantly, of his students, and to teach and to grade in an objective manner. By withdrawing their offer of employment, the U of I was acting to preserve true academic freedom, not the freedom to behave in the manner selected academics deem appropriate.

Special Snowflakes

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…gotta be part of the blizzard. That’s the opening lament of a collection of graduate pupils in the University of California’s Master of Arts program in Art and Design. These Magnificent Seven, an entire class of the program and who have completed a year of it, wrote a letter explaining their decision to withdraw en masse from the program and posted it on the Art&Education Web site.

Some high points of their letter follow.

We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies.

No, Dears. No one, including USC, stuck a gun in your ears. You made this decision all by yourselves.

We were fully aware of the scarcity of, and the paucity of compensation for, most teaching jobs…. However, a different funding model was presented to us by the Roski administration upon our acceptance to the program: we would receive a scholarship for some of our first-year tuition; and for the entirety of our second year we would have a teaching assistantship with fully-funded tuition, a stipend, and benefits, upon completion of our first-year coursework. We, the incoming class of 2014, were the first students since 2011 to take on debt to attend Roski, and the first students since 2006 to gain no teaching experience during our first-year in the program.

So, before you signed accepting Art and Design’s appointments of you to their program, you knew the funding parameters which would apply to you, and you knew the nature of the changes made from the status quo ante. And you knew a priori the limited employment opportunities following graduation. Now you’re complaining because after a three year (three whole years) interregnum, reality intruded into the program and the monies available to support it, and you can’t get a free ride for both years—you only get benefits and a “fully-funded tuition, a stipend” for the second year, assuming your scholarship was enough up to snuff for the school to continue you.

Oh! The impermanence of Life! How will you get on in the real world, where change is reality, plans don’t match the world forever, or even for very long?

In a slew of unproductive, confounding, and contradictory meetings with the dean and other assorted members of the Roski administration in early 2015, we were told that we would now have to apply for, and compete with a larger pool of students for, the same TAships promised to us during recruitment.

Having to mingle with the unwashed, actually to compete with those not as good as you for scarce resources? The ignominy of it. Whatever to do? Oh, wait—you’ve decided that. Quit, and run away.

We will continue to hold crits ourselves and be involved in each other’s work. We will be staging a series of readings, talks, shows, and events at multiple sites throughout the next year, and will follow with seven weeks of “thesis” shows beginning in April of 2016. Our collective and interdependent force….

That’s what initiative is all about. That’s what you should have been doing right along during your year in the program. You shouldn’t need—as you’re belatedly discovering—to wait on someone else to tell you what you should do; faculty in a graduate program guides and critiques, they don’t tell or spoon-feed like a first grade teacher must.

RTWT. It’s sad and a tired, played out complaint.

A Financial Literacy Quiz

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It’s short, and it’s from AEIDeas.

Personal Finance Quiz. There three basic questions are often used to test basic financial literacy.

  • Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2% per year. After 5 years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow: more than $102, exactly $102, or less than $102?
  • Imagine that the interest rate on your savings account was 1% per year and inflation was 2% per year. After 1 year, would you be able to buy more than, exactly the same as, or less than today with the money in this account?
  • Do you think that the following statement is true or false? “Buying a single company stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.”

Only 27% of young adults could answer all three questions correctly.

Answers at the second link.

Texas Education

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Lawmakers in Austin are now debating SB 276, a bill that would provide school choice and educational freedom to all Texas students. It would allow parents who opt out of public schools to take with them 60% of the money the state would otherwise spend on their child—about $5,200—to pay private-school tuition. The rest of the money, roughly $3,000 per student, would go back into the state treasury.

There are a couple of alternative uses for those $3,000 than just dumping them back into the general pot.

Texas’ schooling, as elsewhere, is generally paid for with personal property taxes. Several years ago, Texas decided to consolidate those taxes, though, and redistribute them state-wide, rather than leaving them in the local community whose members had paid the taxes.

Thus: rather than sending the money to the general pot, leave the money with the school whose student(s) just left. This will increase the money available to be spent on the remaining students’ education. Of course, I’m naively assuming those $3k will be spent efficiently and for the benefit of the students….

Alternatively, the money could be earmarked, in keeping with the intent of that earlier property tax consolidation move, for the poorest of our school districts, giving them an increased opportunity to teach their students. Here, too, I’m making that same naïve assumption.

There is an alternative use for those $5,200, too. Don’t limit them to private-school tuition. Let the money be used for voucher payments/tuition at any school with room that the parents might prefer: parochial, charter, better performing public schools. Let the money be used, too, to defray parents’ costs of homeschooling.

Sending the $3k to the state’s general treasury, though, ought not at all be a deal breaker for this move, neither should the proposed commitment of the $5k to private-school tuition: SB 276 still is a major move forward. There’s plenty of time to come back again in the next legislative session to improve the move and to go farther. We’ll even have two school years of data to mull over as we consider the next move.

Now, there’s a thought.