Salinger. Dead. Really.

Click the map to perambulate . . .

As Holden Caulfield says, "Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up."

Jump to The NY Times piece.

Dig this classroom. Woof.

What Makes a Great Teacher?

The Atlantic looks at research Teach for America has just released on the characteristics that allow teachers to move their students up by multiple grade levels per year. A persistent focus on outcomes was more important than charisma. The article got me reflecting on my teaching in a global way that I hope is doing me good!
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

CCSF: Social Equity and Achievement Gap

Click the report to read it:

As always, your comments are appreciated.

Budget Update

From the Chancellor's Office of Communications:

On Friday, Jan. 8, Governor Schwarzenegger released his proposed
2010-11 State Budget. The overall picture is, as expected, bleak. The
governor identifies a projected budget shortfall of $19.9 billion
covering the 2009-10 and 2010-11 fiscal years. Of this amount, $6.6
billion is from 2009-10 and $13.3 billion is from 2010-11. While
slightly less than the $20.7 billion estimate offered by the Legislative
Analyst’s Office in November 2009, this budget shortfall will present
a daunting challenge to state budget makers who already have exhausted
many of the available budget solutions when adopting the 2009-10 State
Budget back in July.

The governor proposes closing the budget gap through a variety of
strategies. Major solutions are listed below:

· Expenditure reductions ($8.5 billion)

· Assumed increases in federal aid ($6.9 billion)

· Alternative funding/funding shifts ($4.5 billion)

· List of potential budget solutions that would be
“triggered” if assumed $6.9 billion increase in federal aid does
not materialize ($4.6 billion cuts; $2.4 billion revenues)

Despite the dire fiscal circumstances, the governor’s proposal
generally spares K-12 and higher education from further budget cuts. In
presenting his budget, the governor asserted that protecting the
state’s investment in education is necessary in order to promote
the future economic well-being of California. (The discussion is
centering around two issues, money from transporation out of the General
Fund that lowers the guarantee and a recalculation from prior years that
says Prop. 98 should have received $46 Billion instead of $49
Billion--they don't go back and recalculate, but the don't give us all
due under the maintenance factor--thus not a cut in year to year dollars
as they stay the same, but a "cut" from what the law guarantees--lps)


For the California Community Colleges, the Governor’s Budget contains
the following proposals:

· 2.2 percent enrollment growth ($126 million). This proposed
augmentation would fund approximately 26,000 full-time equivalent
students and help the colleges respond to the tremendous enrollment
demand they are currently experiencing.

· - 0.38 percent COLA (-$22.9 million). Due to declines in
various price indices, the statutory formula for calculating the cost of
living (COLA) adjustment for colleges and K-12 schools produces a
negative adjustment for 2009-10. Accordingly, the governor proposes
making this negative adjustment to college and school apportionments.

· No increase in student fees for community college students.

· 2010-11 Property Tax Adjustment. The Governor’s Budget
assumes local property taxes allocated to the community colleges in
2010-11 will decline by $33.7 million from their 2009-10 levels. The
governor also identifies another $5.6 million in projected declines in
other local revenues (student fees; oil and mineral revenues). The
budget proposal makes a corresponding increase of $39.3 in general fund
resources to protect colleges from these declines.

· Categorical Funding. The governor proposes reducing funding
for Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS) and Part-Time
Faculty Compensation by $10 million each and using these funds to
augment SB 70 Career Technical Education funding by $20 million.
Additionally, six workload categorical programs sustained COLA
reductions totaling $786,000, which represents their share of the -0.38%
COLA. With these exceptions, the governor proposes funding categorical
programs at the 2009-10 general fund levels.

· Increased Categorical Flexibility. The 2009-10 State Budget
provided community college districts with flexibility to shift funds
among various categorical programs, as well as relief from programmatic
requirements. The governor proposes adding EOPS, Fund for Student
Success (MESA, PUENTE, and Middle College High School), and Basic Skills
to the list of programs subject to the flexibility provisions.

· SB 70 Trailer Bill Language. The governor proposes enacting
clean-up legislation to clarify that SB 70 CTE funding is not subject to
the categorical flexibility provision.

· Suspension of Mandates. The governor proposes suspending all
community college mandates that have been filed at the Commission on
State Mandates.

· Possibility of additional funding deferrals. The Governor’s
Budget narrative notes that California will likely experience further
cash flow challenges in 2010-11, which may necessitate further funding
deferrals.

· Suspension of New Competitive Cal Grant Awards. The governor
proposes that no new Competitive Cal Grant awards be made in 2010-11,
resulting in $45.5 million in budget savings. This proposal would
disproportionately impact community college students who are the primary
recipients of this financial aid.

Given the state’s continuing fiscal crisis, the budget proposal for
the California Community Colleges is about as favorable as we could have
hoped. While it would not make up for the deep cuts the colleges
experienced in the 2009-10 State Budget, it would protect the colleges
from the effects of deteriorating property tax revenues and also
provides some enrollment growth funding to help colleges serve more
students. Perhaps most importantly, the proposal would shield the
colleges from additional budget cuts. However, the proposed suspension
of Competitive Cal Grant awards, if adopted, would have a profound
negative impact on our most vulnerable students.

The Office of Communications will continue to provide regular budget
updates and track budget stories. We will also give an update on a few
key items presented at the January 11 and 12 Board of Governors meeting
in the January 19 issue of News and Notes. Please stay tuned for
additional information.

The Office of Communications

Rip Van Winkle Wanders Into Web 2.0: Attending the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication

Once upon a time, a “youthful” thirty-four year old graduate student in composition worked on an edgy thesis on integrating visual media into writing classes. Rip even gave a presentation at a 1992 4C’s conference about students writing analytically about TV commercials. Dissecting TV commericials went beyond many teachers’ comfort zones, but intrigued them. It was fun to be intriguing, but it did not win him favor in the world of hiring committees and English Department meetings. He consigned his edgy thesis to an “ad essay” assignment and went to work: he had two young children to raise, and thousands of compositions to grade, (not just grade, but thoughtfully, individually respond to). He read, and he graded, and he diapered year, after year, after year. His fingers turned an inky blue, his knuckles grew gnarled; his hair fell out and turned grey. His most important media device became ear plugs, to shut out the noise of bickering children, video games, and their Lord of the Rings DVDs.

Twenty years later, at age fifty-four, Rip hobbled into the San Francisco Hilton to attend the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication. He dreamed of clasping his old thesis, now a sabbatical topic, close to his heart and find that a new generation of Internet savvy teachers would congratulate him for coming. But when he attended his first convention workshop on “Streaming Media,” Rip found that what he had worked on was passé. This new generation, instead of assigning students write through one medium (the word processor) about a separate visual medium (television), were assigning them to write “multi-modal compositions,” which combined graphics, sound effects, music, video clips, and podcasts. These were “papers” composed in the same medium that gave the students their subject matter. Their writing was a single ingredient in a multi-media soup, where several other modes of communication bobbed around simultaneously. Rip, in dire need of new glasses, could barely decipher the Power Point characters on the screen, and moved to the front of the room. Though he could not help rubbing his eyes, he mustered up every bit of academic authority and objectivity he had, and asked the presenters how these teachers of Multi-Modal Composition prepared themselves to teach graphic design, musical selection and placement, recording and editing of video and audio, as well as expository writing. This occasioned laughter from the audience, whose sympathies he could not discern, until a voice in the back asked, “Where have you been for the past twenty years, Grandpa?” The three presenters solemnly conferred, and Rip was told that teachers and students already shared rudimentary skills in operating digital cameras with sound, manipulating graphics, editing video and audio documents, and inserting and accessing hyper-links. Just a common proficiency, not expertise, was expected in these classes. Students already lived in multi-media environments, and that multi-modal compositions did not lead to new anxiety, but excitement. Most of the grade depended on their writing.

Rip began to tremble all over and to channel Dana Carvey’s Cranky Old Man character, who’d been channeling some old geezer from The Real McCoys on fifties television: When I was a boy, and we wanted multi-media, we didn’t have any Garage Band programs, just crappy musicians bothering the neighbors with their wretched noise! We didn’t have any You Tube, we had to make copies of copies of copies of Black Flag’s “TV Party” video! We didn’t have any Dance Dance Revolution! We did our slam dancing while listening to Gang of Four and watching experimental video art school outrage spliced together with 1940’s health education films AND WE LIKED IT!!

Okay, maybe I exaggerate about Rip. But why did these presentations leave me feeling like a stodgy old man, or worse, an uneducated hick, gaping at the sophisticates from the big city? There I was, 35 miles from Silicon Valley, a San Francisco hick (ironically most of the presenters were from Ohio State University, and Purdue University in Indiana). Many of them expressed no anxiety about whether or not their students wrote clearly, or interpreted multi-media messages perceptively. One community college instructor gave a presentation about using Wiki Spaces as a writing environment for a transfer level composition class. When I asked her about the basic writing classes at her school, she said that they were part of a separate program, and that Wiki was not on their agenda; it was a whole different program. Transfer level classes were moving onto the “information superhighway,” to use a Clinton-era term, and basic writing classes were on a dirt track in the woods, writing on word processors, with Internet access tightly controlled.

I did find conference participants who shared my concerns with a new digital divide. At one workshop, Ohio State graduate students talked about their study of the educational hierarchy and media access. In the most well-endowed schools, all students have laptops, most classrooms are wired for Internet use, and schools lend students digital recording equipment to do their multi-modal compositions. As you go down the educational hierarchy, these resources are less and less available. At City College there are those of us who use blogs in writing classes, or upload resources onto their web pages. But instruction in multi-modal texts, or even the phrase multi-modal composition, has not arrived. Maybe the right metaphor for us is not hillbilly but impoverished third world nation. The conference for me became a painful reminder that our world is divided, not merely between those who do and do not have access to the Internet, but also those who have the knowledge, skills, and equipment to use “Web 2.0” proficiently, and those who don’t, despite access.

As real as this picture of “Digital Divide 2.0” generally is, it is so inadequate. Our students are obviously on Web 2.0, often more fully and deeply than we are. “Facebook addiction” was the most popular writing topic among my students this last fall, obviously because so many students are on it. Or there is older problem: while community colleges have probably always had a sizeable contingent of monosyllabic young men, many of them I meet today are caught up in the worlds of on-line gaming or gambling. Or try this exercise in observation: walk through the LAC computer lab on any given day, and I predict you will find 25% of those students will be watching Japanese anime, You Tube, or some other visual treats. Let’s get more immediate: what is the latest form of diversion at the back of the community college classroom? Students are checking their I-Phones, with this tell-tale posture: faces downward, staring into their laps. Our students are clearly highly proficient in some kinds of Internet use, and woefully deficient in others. Teachers, this one included, have to consider that we often know much less about the medium and its mechanisms than do our students. And for the foreseeable future, they will always know more, and learn it faster, than we will. What will our teaching stance be toward our students’ involvement in Internet culture? I’m not ready to make a general statement on that, but I’m sure we don’t want to reduce our position to a restrictive and prescriptive police action.

Neither do I want to imply that we all need to jump on the Multi-Modal Bandwagon. You may wonder if I exaggerate the influence of one tendency in a large conference. It is true that many workshops and plenary sessions went on with little reference to the Bandwagon. But its rhetoric is ascendant: in the 2010 CCCC Convention Call, the official theme is “The Remix” a music industry derived term referring to serious audio reconstruction of old, often classic recording. This call is phrased to attract a new generation of teachers and grad students: “From mashups to CLUSTERF*%#!s and all the wikis, flashbacks, multimodalities, and mapping in between, the presentations for this year’s conference promise to push our discussions further. They might even tell us if Aristotle is in the DJ booth or on Twitter.”

The medium is not the only message, nor will that medium resolve any of the issues we face in the classroom. I recoiled at the insistence by some at the 2009 CCCC that teachers had to keep up with the multi-modal wave, when the advocates had not thought carefully about what new skills and competencies were involved, or how the new media was reshaping the message. Here we are, witnessing the money-driven rush to put California’s textbooks on line, and move to deposit the entire literary inheritance of humankind into the benign embrace of Google. In such a world, there is merit to the traditional linguistic conservatism of English teachers— “Slow down now. What does this mean?”

And yet…these presenters were saying that the ground of discourse on which we are teaching and reading and writing is shaky ground. Look at this blog, with its graphics, hyperlinked videos, texts, and who knows what other bells and whistles that I have not noticed. This is now a normal text. Even in The New York “All the News That’s Fit to Print” Times, photos and illustrations are ballooning, the sports page is growing, and who knows if comics are far behind. In Orality and Literacy Walter Ong stated that when a new technology reshapes discourse, it does not eliminate the prior form, but assimilates and integrates the old forms into the new discourse. The Multi-Modalists have gotten me to thinking: if writing is less and less used as a discrete, separate symbol system, whether in handwriting, print, or electronic media, will teaching writing as a separate mode of communication become archaic in my lifetime?

Further Reading and bibliography: http://homepages.findlay.edu/tulley/whatisMMC.htm

2010-11 Budget Issues

Perhaps we could use our blog comment area to work through some of what's at issue with the proposed budget.

• Inside Higher Ed news (1/7/10) . . .
  

• The Governor's proposed higher ed budget . . .
  

• 2010 State of the State Address . . .
  

• The Community College League of California . . .

• Fast Facts 2010 . . .

• State Senator Steinberg's response (with video) . . .
• Raise fees?
  

Major points of the proposed community college budget . . .

• Provides $126 million to fund enrollment growth of 2.21 percent (about 26,000 new full-time students)
• Reduces funding for apportionments and select categorical programs by $22.9 million to account for a negative cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), computed at -0.38% due to reductions in the statutory inflationary index
• Maintains all categorical cuts and flexibility allowances approved in 2009-10, and does not backfill the $35 million in federal funds provided this year to ease the cuts.
• Proposes student fees be maintained at $26/unit.
• Makes technical changes to accommodate and backfill reduced property taxes and other budget year revenue shortfalls and acknowledges, but does not backfill, student fee revenue shortfall of $10 million in the current year.
• Proposes the suspension of the competitive Cal Grant program, with no new awards provided beginning in fall 2010.

Talking points

• The governor has taken significant steps to protect college access at a very difficult fiscal time for California. This gives hope to the graduating high school seniors and unemployed Californians seeking education and a skilled job.
• Even with funding for 26,000 additional full-time students, enrollment will continue to exceed state support, and community colleges will have to prioritize basic skills, transfer and career technical enrollment.
• The decision to propose a negative cost-of-living adjustment is disappointing, as state mandated increases in pension benefits for non-academic employees appear to not be fully considered and districts are seeing continued double-digit health insurance increases. The negative COLA also fails to recognize a deficit that has accrued over the last two years as the state has failed to provide over 10% in statutorily guided COLAs. We will collect information on actual cost increases from districts to present to the Legislature if indeed the index does not match reality.
• The proposed elimination of the competitive Cal Grant program would hurt the neediest community college students at a time when California's citizens are deeply concerned with college affordability. This program provides 44,000 community colleges students grants of $1,551 for textbooks, transportation and supplies. These are generally older students whose income averages $14,000 and are ineligible for the state's entitlement program because they worked between high school and college.
• While no further categorical program cuts are proposed, devastating program cuts will have to be implemented as districts across California used one-time budget reserve funds to protect student access to the most vital programs. We commit to looking at the impact of these cuts on student success, particularly among the most vulnerable students, and finding ways to maintain the most essential services.
• From Sacramento to Washington, the recognized role of community colleges in our state and nation's economic future has never been higher, and locally elected trustees, faculty and staff are ready to step up to the challenge and deliver quality degrees, certificates and lower-division transfer curriculum to the record number of students and would-be students turning to our colleges.
• This budget proposal for community colleges clearly shows Governor Schwarzenegger’s commitment to help underemployed and unemployed Californians get back on their feet and cements his legacy as an advocate for the role of our colleges in that priority.

In honor of the Olympics . . .