Tag Archives: education

Free College

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Hillary wants to rein in the rising cost of a college education.

States would have to increase their own spending on higher education, and universities would be required to control spending[.]

With those strings, Clinton would send an additional $350 billion of your tax money (including your higher taxes she’s proposing to pay for some of this) over the next 10 years to the states for their public universities and community colleges.

And

…new rules would ensure a certain portion of total spending is directed to instruction….

How like a Progressive to think the answer to stopping a rise in the cost of a thing is to spend more money on the thing. And then to add to the cost of the thing with compliance cost imposition.

Can our nation really afford another four or eight years of this lack of understanding about how a free economy works?

Teachers Unions and Chris Christie

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Jake Tapper fed Governor and Republican Presidential candidate Chris Christie the straight line:

[W]ho “at the national level deserves a punch in the face?”

Christie had the answer:

Oh, the national teachers union, who has already endorsed Hillary Clinton 16, 17 months before the election. …they’re not for education for our children. They’re for greater membership, greater benefits, greater pay for their members. And they are the single most destructive force in public education in America. I have been saying that since 2009. I’ve got the scars to show it. But I’m never going to stop saying it, because they never change their stripes.

What he said.

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.