Budget Problems / Solutions

News

Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs

November 30, 2007 | ISSUE 43•48

WASHINGTON—Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all actions, and states that have transpired at an earlier point in time—from their standard English and language arts programs.
Enlarge Image
A Chicago-area teacher begins the new past tense–free curriculum.
A part of American school curricula for more than 200 years, the past tense was deemed by school administrators to be too expensive to keep in primary and secondary education.
"This was by no means an easy decision, but teaching our students how to conjugate verbs in a way that would allow them to describe events that have already occurred is a luxury that we can no longer afford," Phoenix-area high-school principal Sam Pennock said. "With our current budget, the past tense must unfortunately become a thing of the past."
In the most dramatic display of the new trend yet, the Tennessee Department of Education decided Monday to remove "-ed" endings from all of the state's English classrooms, saving struggling schools an estimated $3 million each year. Officials say they plan to slowly phase out the tense by first eliminating the past perfect; once students have adjusted to the change, the past progressive, the past continuous, the past perfect progressive, and the simple past will be cut. Hundreds of school districts across the country are expected to follow suit.
"This is the end of an era," said Alicia Reynolds, a school district director in Tuscaloosa, AL. "For some, reading and writing about things not immediately taking place was almost as much a part of school as history class and social studies."
"That is, until we were forced to drop history class and social studies a couple of months ago," Reynolds added.
Nevertheless, a number of educators are coming out against the cuts, claiming that the embattled verb tense, while outmoded, still plays an important role in the development of today's youth.

• Newsroom

  

"Much like art and music, the past tense provides students with a unique and consistent outlet for self-expression," South Boston English teacher David Floen said. "Without it I fear many of our students will lack a number of important creative skills. Like being able to describe anything that happened earlier in the day."
Despite concerns that cutting the past-tense will prevent graduates from communicating effectively in the workplace, the home, the grocery store, church, and various other public spaces, a number of lawmakers, such as Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, have welcomed the cuts as proof that the American school system is taking a more forward-thinking approach to education.
"Our tax dollars should be spent preparing our children for the future, not for what has already happened," Hatch said at a recent press conference. "It's about time we stopped wasting everyone's time with who 'did' what or 'went' where. The past tense is, by definition, outdated."
Said Hatch, "I can't even remember the last time I had to use it."
Past-tense instruction is only the latest school program to face the chopping block. School districts in California have been forced to cut addition and subtraction from their math departments, while nearly all high schools have reduced foreign language courses to only the most basic phrases, including "May I please use the bathroom?" and "No, I do not want to go to the beach with Maria and Juan." Some legislators are even calling for an end to teaching grammar itself, saying that in many inner-city school districts, where funding is most lacking, students rarely use grammar at all.
Regardless of the recent upheaval, students throughout the country are learning to accept, and even embrace, the change to their curriculum.
"At first I think the decision to drop the past tense from class is ridiculous, and I feel very upset by it," said David Keller, a seventh-grade student at Hampstead School in Fort Meyers, FL. "But now, it's almost like it never happens."

Recent News »

Back to College (back in Sept '10)

Back to College

Whether you're a bright-eyed freshman, an experienced upper-classman, a faithful alumnus, an educated professor, a capable administrator, or even a college-sports enthusiast, you are probably familiar with some of the numerous public and private colleges and universities spread across the United States. The establishment and growth of these institutions, and their contributions to the Nation, have long been one of the most notable aspects of U.S. history.
The first institutions of higher learning in colonial North America were founded to supply the demand for clergy and school teachers. In recent decades, colleges and universities have trained the workers that put men on the moon and created the Internet age.
In 2009, there were over 10,000 establishments (places of employment, whether campuses, offices, research facilities, or other locations) operated by colleges and universities in the United States. ^{(Source: QCEW)} This Spotlight presents BLS data related to college and university students and graduates, as well as colleges and universities as an industry and place of employment.

COLLEGE STUDENTS AND GRADUATES

For the College Educated: Increasing Employment ...

All of the increase in employment over the past two decades has been among workers who have taken at least some college classes or who have associate or bachelor's degrees—and mostly among workers with bachelor's degrees. The number of these college-educated workers has increased almost every year. Over the 1992–2009 period, the number of college-educated workers increased from 27 million to 44 million. In contrast, the number of employed people with only a high school diploma or without a high school diploma has remained steady or decreased.

Read more . . .

Blogs vs. Term Papers

OF all the challenges faced by college and high school students, few inspire as much angst, profanity, procrastination and caffeine consumption as the academic paper. The format — meant to force students to make a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.

And so there may be rejoicing among legions of students who have struggled to write a lucid argument about Sherman’s March, the disputed authorship of “Romeo and Juliet,” or anything antediluvian. They have a champion: Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke, wants to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog.

Her provocative positions have lent kindling to an intensifying debate about how best to teach writing in the digital era.

“This mechanistic writing is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers,” says Professor Davidson, who rails against the form in her new book, “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.”

Read more . . .

CCSF Archival Photos

Randy's favorite class back in the '70s.

See more . . .

Outstanding SSTF Piece in the La Mesa Patch!

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

• Opinion,
• Schools

Are Community Colleges Meant Mainly to Crank Out Workers for Business?

AFT pair: “All of us know what the replacement of funding based on enrollment with funding based on completion would mean—cuts and scarcity and a ‘streamlining’ of the community college system that would limit access and eliminate programs and classes.”

• November 29, 2011

Editor’s note: The following letter—titled Who’s Behind the “Completion” Agenda?—was sent Tuesday to teachers in the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District and San Diego Community College District by their union, the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. It is being reprinted here with permission of Jim Mahler, president of AFT Guild local 1931.

To the editor:
In past communications, your AFT has warned against the creeping academic Taylorism that comes with the movement toward student learning outcomes and pointed to the long history of American corporate interests seeking to discipline and, in turn, profit from institutions of higher learning—whether it be plutocrats railing against the dangerous ideas in the academy or business leaders seeking to transform American colleges into narrow job training factories that provide them with skilled workers without the accompanying bother of having to foot the bill for this service in the form of paying their fair share of taxes.

With the release of the California Community College Board of Governors task force on Student Success report, we see yet another push by some “system representatives” and their “external partners” to push for a dumbed-down, totally instrumental view of our mission that focuses nearly exclusively on making community colleges more efficient machines cranking out workers for business.

The latest stalking horse is completion, with all the requisite hand-wringing and intellectually disingenuous bracketing off of the larger socio-economic forces that make it harder for our students to complete their degrees.

It’s all about the students’ success, they remind us, as if we had somehow forgotten them on the way to collecting our fat paychecks and gold-plated pensions.

In sum, the report recommends a comprehensive revamp of community colleges, noting that, “Taken together, these recommendations would reboot the California Community College system toward the success of its students.”

The “reboot” metaphor says it all about the ideology behind the report: It’s mechanistic with a open bias toward a technocratic business model that favors reductionist measurement systems over the failed human judgment based system of old.

It’s time to stop allowing students to “wander” through the curriculum and track them more efficiently. If only we do a better job of tracking and push our lax, waste-filled system with more accountability measures, all will improve despite a historic budget crisis the largest gap between the rich and the poor in modern history, and the legacy of systemic racism.
The end game of all this is, of course, funding based on these mechanistic “outcomes,” but the report doesn’t take us there quite yet.  As the authors note, they were “split” on whether this was the solution at present:

After considerable review, the Task Force was deeply divided on the topic of outcome-based funding. A vocal minority supported implementing some version of outcome-based funding, while the majority of Task Force members did not support such a proposal at this time due to various concerns, some of which are noted above. For many Task Force members, the lack of evidence demonstrating that outcome-based funding made a positive impact on student success was an important factor in their decision to reject implementing outcome-based funding at this time.

While some states have identified positive impacts, others have not and have terminated implementation of their outcomes-based funding models. The Task Force suggested that the Chancellor’s Office continue to monitor implementation of outcomes-based funding in other states and model how various formulas might work in California.

Of course, all of us know what the replacement of funding based on enrollment with funding based on completion would mean—cuts and scarcity and a “streamlining” of the community college system that would limit access and eliminate many programs and classes that don’t accommodate the Academic Taylorist party line.

Not surprisingly, in addition to the “system representatives,” the report received help from the Lumina Foundation and other corporate funded “external partners.”

And these sorts of “external partners” are far from being neutral players with a high-minded interest in the public good.  They are, in fact, part of a larger network of interests interested in privatization, union-busting, pension reform, and more.
As Eric Kelderman noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Lumina Foundation for Education has become one of the best-known higher-education philanthropies in the country, spending nearly $50-million annually on projects to improve college completion ... the foundation is shifting its focus away from giving money to new projects to develop policy ideas. Instead, Lumina will work to enact the changes needed to drastically improve college graduation rates ...
Still, Lumina's change in focus doesn't mean that the organization will be spending less money, he said. In fact, the foundation will expand its efforts by convening business leaders, lawmakers, higher-education groups, and faculty members to build consensus on specific policy measures . . .
In addition, he said, Lumina will draft model policies for states, including legislation. The group is already working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative-leaning organization, to write and introduce bills in statehouses.

But Kelderman’s characterization of ALEC as “conservative leaning” soft-pedals the significance of this group to the point of completely missing the significance of the connection between Lumina and ALEC.

Fortunately, John Nichols, in The Nation, has a much keener eye.  In a recent piece on ALEC, Nichols outlines their origins and history:

Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists frustrated by recent electoral setbacks, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics.
Inspired by Milton Friedman’s call for conservatives to “develop alternatives to existing policies [and] keep them alive and available,” ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account.
Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more.
In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.

So when Lumina joins forces with ALEC it means more than just a move toward influencing legislative policy; it means they are part of a larger network of monied interests pushing our country further toward plutocracy and corporate domination.

That is why there is nothing about creating educated citizens for our democracy in the BOG report, because that is simply not part of their agenda. Corporate interests collaborating to impose the business model in public higher education want efficient workers trained to follow top-down orders,not critical thinkers who might question their agenda or buck up against the slow creep toward “outcomes based funding” that would serve as a Trojan horse for privatization.

It is in keeping with this agenda that the Draft Recommendations of the California Community Colleges Student Success Task Force would, “Encourage students to declare a program of study upon admission and require declaration by the end [of] their second term” (Recommendation 2.5).

To those who seek to cut waste out of government expenditures on public education by eliminating the temptation students have to explore intellectual horizons and to learn about diverse vocational fields, this requirement compelling community college students to compartmentalize themselves in narrowly defined majors, soon after admission to college, seems entirely justifiable, notwithstanding that students in four-year universities have until the junior year to declare majors.
In the effort to discourage frivolous intellectual experimentation, the report asserts, “Declaring a program of study is much more specific than declaring an educational goal.  Doing so sets incoming students on an educational pathway and builds momentum for their success.”
To that end, “A student who is unable to declare a program of study by the end of their second term should be provided counseling and other interventions to assist them in education planning and exploring career and program options.”  And, for the rebels, “If these interventions fail to meet their desired end, students should lose enrollment priority after their third term.”

How to deal with students whose curiosity might get the better of them, even after committing, on cue, to a program of study?  Recommendation 3.1, on enrollment priorities, reveals one hammer:  “Continuing students should lose enrollment priority if they do not follow their original or a revised education plan.”

Woe to the career tech student who might venture to take a course in geography, philosophy, or fine arts!  What is the utility of radiation technology or mathematics students enrolling in political science to learn about legislative processes or the impact of free-trade agreements on the national economy and labor force demand?

Recommendation 4.1 certainly would eliminate that option for working-class students stretching to meet the costs of community colleges:  “Under this recommendation, students having the course in their education plan would pay the credit enrollment fee, while students not having the course in their education plan would pay a fee covering the full cost of instruction” or market value.

No allowance for the pursuit of interdisciplinary knowledge in this model!  Straight and narrow utilitarianism only!  The prospects for reducing public education expenses in running course sections in dangerous majors, such as history and sociology, or literature seem almost endless.

While recent discussions of the “Buffet rule” have focused people’s attention on the fact that the rich have gotten richer while the rest of us have suffered, they have also exposed the truth that, as opposed to the decades-old mantra of the anti-tax zealots, the affluent pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than the rest of us.

The rich have gained, the poor are poorer, and the middle class is shrinking.  You don’t have to have a Nobel Prize in economics to know that this is not fair. 

What this phenomenon has done is push us further towards plutocracy or the rule of the dollar.

As to whether all this amounts to a conspiracy, we urge you to consider the extensive activities of American Legislative Exchange Council.  As the Center for Media and Democracy’s ALEC Exposed website explains:

ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line.
Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.)
Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills.

ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. We agree. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door.

More specifically ALEC (which is 98 percent corporate funded) pushes a corporate agenda at the international, national, state, and local levels with regard to union busting, workers’ rights, the privatization of education, healthcare, the environment, energy, agriculture, voting, taxes, prisons, immigration, and much more.

It is not a conspiracy of the imaginary “nefarious elite”; it is how the very real economic elites have highjacked our government at every level (including education).  It’s how the Koch brothers’ money talks and democracy walks.  To put it another way, this is what plutocracy looks like.

To review ALEC’s activities on a state by state level, see where their money comes from and which politicians are part of the organization, see: www.alecexposed.org.
In particular, go to the privatizing education page and scroll down to the find the “treating universities like manufacturers” link.

Jim Miller and Jonathan McLeod
Miller teaches at San Diego City College and Jonathan McLeod at San Diego Mesa College. A debate on this issue was published Nov. 20 in The San Diego Union-Tribune under the heading Stressing Success.

About this column: Letters can be emailed to ken.stone@patch.com and are subject to editing. Please use your real name and give your hometown. Thank you.

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Randy Holiday Classics

Darlene Love will be on Letterman again soon!  Watch for her.  May you have a healthy and happy Festivus. 

Here's a retro-post from 2008:

The English Literature Club: This Friday!

The Hungry Reader at the Feast:

Model Writers, Model Readers.

Or, Which Fork Do I Use With Hemingway?

--Matt Duckworth

Friday, December 2, 1:30-2:30 p.m. in Batmale 349.

This talk is meant as a tour, of sorts, as a modeling of and reflecting upon dynamic literary exchanges from the perspective of an avid lifelong reader.

I'll be looking into work by Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast!), Richard Ford (including Ford on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner), William Hazlitt (quoting Coleridge on WW and STC), John Fowles, Richard Holmes (on Shelley and Byron's marksmanship and on literary biography as pursuit), Barry Lopez, Rebecca Solnit, Virginia Woolf, and others, as needed.

I will have handouts. There will probably be coffee and treats.

Please tell your students. Please attend, if this seems intriguing.

Thank you.

MD

Ben at Berkeley!

Hello Colleagues,

This Thursday, December 1 at 6:00 p.m. sharp, U.C. Berkeley’s famous “Story Hour” series will host me reading from and providing literary analysis of my novel, Barrio Bushido. At the beautiful Morrison Library inside of the Doe Library building, with arms extended, I welcome you and your students to attend this unique, unprecedented event. Never before has U.C. Berkeley’s “Story Hour” opened its doors for urban literature. Many times urban fiction is portrayed as senseless and ultra-violent. At this event I will explain how Barrio Bushido both reinforces and smashes those stereotypes.

Many of you know my story and work. I come from the streets, the Marine Corps, and academia. Many of our students can relate positively to my background. I have performed throughout the state and have led functions that go beyond the literary level, including a first ever Ya Basta! Leadership Conference and more recently a successful Leadership and Education conference entitled “Inventing Your Destiny.”

Please come to this U.C. Berkeley event and suggest that your students come as well. Perhaps they can receive extra credit for attending this event that may change their lives.

If you would like to find out more about this event, please click on the links below.

Thank you and have a great rest of the semester,

Benjamin Bac Sierra, English Instructor

http://storyhour.berkeley.edu/#sierra

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1479422798&ref=tn_tnmn#!/events/143674205737913/

Filmmaker Ralph Bakshi and Poet Melvin Wilk in Conversation with Richard B. Simon

LIVE! Saturday December 3, 2011, Tikva Pop-Up Record Store, San Francisco

Rich Simon will be "in conversation" with animation legend Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat) and his old friend from the neighborhood, poet Melvin Wilk, this Saturday, December 3, at the Tikva Pop-Up Jewish Record Store in the outer Mission in San Francisco.

Sponsored by the Idelsohn Society, the discussion will focus on the roots of Bakshi's work in his Jewish upbringing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and will feature an unprecedented poetry reading by Bakshi and Wilk ... as well as opportunities to ask questions in an intimate venue. 

First, at 7pm, we'll show Bakshi's American Pop, about a Jewish immigrant family's quest for musical glory in America. Discussion, poetry, and Q and A will follow.

It's free -- with a donation requested -- but it's a really small venue (a storefront!) so reserve tickets early.

The Tikva Record Store runs the month of December in the Outer Mission, where Mission meets Valencia at the foot of Bernal, by the Argus. It's "The First Pop-Up Jewish Record Store in the World" -- and will feature live bands, lectures, films, comedy, food trucks -- and, of course, lots of rare Yiddish vinyl ...

This should be pretty cool, folks.

Info and tix: http://tikvarecordsdec3-eorg.eventbrite.com/

American Pop, Ralph Bakshi and the Jewish Experience:

Filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, best known for his films FRITZ THE CAT and WIZARDS, is making a rare San Francisco appearance to show his classic film American Pop and discuss, with longtime friend/poet Melvin Wilk, his Jewish upbringing and the influence it had on his art. The conversation will be led by writer/scholar Richard Simon.

1 show - 7pm

Doors open 15 minutes prior to show time

Limited to 2 tickets each

All events are free with a rotating suggested donation at the door

TIKVA RECORDS

"The First Pop-Up Jewish Record Store in the World"

Open December 1-28, 2011
(3191 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA)
* All events are free with a rotating suggested donation
* Advance ticket reservations required via Eventbrite

The store will feature an eclectic series of exclusive live music performances, film screenings, academic lectures, comedians, remix workshops, food trucks, and more.

Special events will emulate the historical and cultural significance of Tikva Records - NYC's most prolific Jewish record label of the '50s, '60s and '70s. Events will explore the Jewish American songbook, and Jewish culture in general, interpreted by some of today's brightest performers, comedians, musicians and lecturers. Rare vinyl from select Jewish musicians of the past 80 years will be sold at the new Tikva Records, and we will have all of our latest album releases for sale including: Songs for the Jewish-American Jet Set, Black Sabbath, and Mazeltov, Mis Amigos. San Francisco Public School tours will commence during the daytime hours at Tikva Records, and food trucks will be carefully paired with each event listed below.

Happy Thanksgiving!

GIFSoup

Follow-up to the Nancy Sommers workshop

Many people have expressed their gratitude for the Wednesday's workshop on responding to student writing.  I know that it recharged my disposition and my essay marking right away, helping me simplify, step back, identify patterns of strength and need, and direct students toward future learning in upcoming online exercises, lab tutoring, and essay assignments. 

Maybe there was just too much to cover since the issue of grading deserves its own week-long conference, but we really needed to spend more time discussing the student essay by Estelle Costanza (Frank's wife, George's mother) so kindly and bravely provided by Kristen Hren.  (Who else would have volunteered to do this?)  This essay was an incredible choice for our workshop, so perhaps we could continue the essay-response discussion in the comment section of this blog post.

I would also ask that those of you who marked the essay give your marked copies to Kristen so that she can compare the different strategies.  I had hoped that during the workshop we would be able to go into small groups and compare our response strategies and the aesthetic of our marked papers, but there was not enough time.

One reason that there may not have been enough time was that we may have talked a bit too much about the assignment sheet.  That was important, of course, since one of our goals was to analyze the relationship between assignment design and student/teacher response, but we needed to give more attention to what the student wrote and our responses to that writing.  We can do that in the blog comment area and discuss ways to help Estelle Costanza reach even more of her potential.

I hope that our dialogue on this workshop material and our dialogue on responding to student writing will continue to unfold.

Again, thanks to those of you who prepped and participated, and a special thanks to Kristen for helping all of us, including Nancy Sommers, by sharing her work with us.  We owe her!  So give her your marked copies at the very least.  Thanks.

To the comments!

Thank you, Nancy Sommers!

Nancy Sommers provided a truly wonderful workshop on responding to student writing yesterday in Batmale Hall. Many of us have been energized by the dialogue, and hopefully that dialogue will continue. Another way to continue the dialogue is on Nancy's blog: http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/hackerhandbooks/. There you will also see links to Nancy's movies with students and teachers.

And, hey, if you haven't seen the free videos at Re:Writing via the Rules for Writers companion site, take a look.  You and your students might like them, among other things.

Jump to Video Central.

Brilliant and Inspiring Composition Scholar!

Is Proper English Dying? And Should Us Care?

This Jeff Yang piece is in the October 29 Wall Street Journal.

If, as Laurie Anderson sang, language is a virus, then English is the common cold.
Already ubiquitous — English has an estimated 1.5 billion speakers — it’s only growing more so, given its status in fast-growing emerging markets. Especially the fastest-growing and emerging-est market of all, China, where it was estimated last year by the China Daily newspaper that up to 400 million people are currently actively learning English, or nearly a third of the population. (It’s this statistic that led Jon Huntsman, former Ambassador to China and soon-to-be-former GOP presidential candidate, to remark recently that in a few years, China will have more English-speakers than America.)

Read the entire article in the October 29 Wall Street Journal . . .

Gene Yang at the SFPL on 11/5

You and your students might be interested in Gene Yang’s upcoming lecture on the inner workings behind graphic novels and his latest project(s). He is a rising star in the graphic novel narrative art form, and his novel ABC has been taught at CCSF and featured in reading groups. You can find out more at his site: geneyang.com

Event: Leveling Up with Gene Yang: Mixing Magic with Graphics

Date: Saturday, Nov. 5, 2011

Time: 1 – 2:30 p.m.

Place: San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch
100 Larkin Street
Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room
San Francisco, CA 94102