Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
CCSF's SLO Page
Use this page to learn more about student learning and program outcomes and assessment procedures and requirements.
There is even a handbook!
There is even a handbook!
CUNY Declares War...
Yesterday I reported that the English department at Queensborough Community College had voted to reject an administration-initiated restructuring of their composition program, and that the college’s Vice President for Academic Affairs had in response informed them that the department will be largely dismantled next fall.
According to the letter, which I have since posted on this site, CUNY intends to eliminate the composition program at QCC, dismiss all Queensborough English department adjuncts, and immediately cancel all job searches in the department. The administration has threatened to terminate full-time faculty left idle as a result of the downsizing, a move that by my estimate could lead to the firing of as many as nineteen of the department’s twenty-six full-timers. Some 175 composition sections per semester would be pushed off campus by the move, threatening local students’ ability to advance in their studies and overburdening resources at surrounding colleges.
That’s the situation as I understood it yesterday evening. I have since received further information about the crisis that confirms all of the above information and allows me to provide a fuller accounting of the events of last week.
The Queensborough dispute arose, as I noted yesterday, out of the Pathways initiative, a CUNY-wide administrative attempt to systematize and centralize course offerings throughout the system. Faculty throughout CUNY have argued that Pathways is insufficiently responsive to local campus conditions and students’ needs, but the administration has continued to push forward with the plan on an aggressive timetable.
At Queensborough’s English department the primary practical issue with Pathways was its reduction of weekly course hours for composition classes from four to three. This change would cut into students’ class time, require heavier faculty courseloads and — not incidentally — dramatically reduce faculty compensation for teaching composition, a particularly writing (and grading) intensive class.
Read the article . . .
Monday, April 30, 2012
McSweeney's Stages of Grading
The Stages of Grading.
BY Debby Thompson
- - - -
Stage I
Stage I begins in benign resentment. You’re determined, this time, not to let those 80 term papers and final exams destroy you. It won’t be like the last grading marathon at semester’s end. You will stay in charge. You have 800 pages to grade, 400 on American Drama and 400 on Literary Theory. You take out your purple grading pen.“Power serves as an overhanging subconscious,” says the first sentence. You experience your first twinges of pain. But it’s mild, still mild. You can still giggle at the assertion that “we adopt our social roles in order to panda to society.” You picture your social role—your teacher persona—as a black-and-white herbivore performing in a zoo for a crowd of unruly students. Then a character in a play you read this semester, you learn, suffers from “post-dramatic stress disorder.” He’s also in a “post-depressive state.” You’re still pre-, but barely.
Stage II
Stage II presents with mild but steady localized pain, mostly along the GI tract, and an inability to concentrate. Despair is still contained, but it’s eyeing the lymphatic system’s freedom train. Women are “co-modified.” Men are “discluded.” Role models are “immolated.” Passages are “taken out of context due to objective reality.” “Often times” is everywhere.Bad things are happening to language.
Martin Luther King, Jr. is “African,” while Shakespeare’s Othello is “African American,” and Shylock is “a Hebrew.”
Stage III
This stage manifests in moderate but bearable generalized pain. However, the despair—still unregistered—has entered the bloodstream. You have 400 pages to go. The mind slips and slides, rebels and resists.“In patriarchy, women subvert to men.”
You could cry at the injustice of crimes against language.
“The son remains in an imago consciousness while his father is alive, producing a haze of control around the lives he encounters.”
More haze than control. And the fog is thickening.
“Sherman Alexie makes many unreliable opinions and dissertations, these constant changing attributes allow for irreverence towards his dominance.”
You fantasize about just giving everyone an A. You fantasize about giving everyone an F.
“Is her struggle with God to be taken simply for what it is,” a student asks of a character, “or does it represent something deeper?”
There are struggles deeper than the struggle with God.
Stage IV
With 200 pages still to go, you hit Stage IV. Malignant language has become metastatic. It invades organs, swarms synapses. Death is inevitable. You are awash in despair.And then: Zen. You reach the level of hysteria where language abuse crosses over into poetry. In a series of papers on an odd little play about the digital afterlife, you find the observation, “Technology keeps people alive after they are dead,” only to be succeeded, shortly after, with “It is not conventional to live although dead.”
With ten more papers to go, you take a moment to marvel. Yes, it’s true, “the world is becoming less real” and “we now have cell phones instead of psyches” and, most fabulous of all, “the surreal life is full of dead people being alive.”
You’re so punch-drunk with language-love that you go back to the “panda to society” that you’d circled earlier and add a smiley face. You become one with comma splices and run-on sentences and dangling-ass modifiers, having once been someone who was alive and had a psyche but now knowing you are dead language ghosting the surreal afterlife with a purple pen.
SUGGESTED READS
List: Students’ Responses to a Quiz on McDonald’s, Presented as Evidence That I Might Not Be Cutting It As an American Culture Teacher at a College in Ningbo, Chinaby Chikako Kobaysahi (4/22/2002)
List: Actual Evaluations I Received from Students in My Analytical Chemistry Class
by P. John Wright (4/22/2002)
List: Injudicious Uses of Exclamation Points in the Teacher’s Video Company Catalog
by John Warner (4/22/2002)
RECENTLY
A McSweeney’s Books Preview of Alessandro Baricco’s Emmaus
by Alessandro Baricco (4/30/2012)
The Chorus Boy Chronicles: The Ballad of Jason Patrick Sands
by Brian Spitulnik (4/30/2012)
Teddy Wayne’s Unpopular Proverbs: Influence
by Teddy Wayne (4/30/2012)
POPULAR
Open Letters: An Open Letter to People Who Judge My Single, Post-College Lifestyleby Cleo Plagg (3/2/2012)
Monologue: I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.
by Mike Lacher (6/15/2010)
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do
by Colin Nissan (4/10/2012)
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
PBS on SSTF
Read and comment--
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/04/college-education-for-whom.html#commentsform
Watch--
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/04/college-education-for-whom.html#commentsform
Watch--
Watch California Community Colleges Face Tighter Budgets on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
The Lumina VP and Me
I spent the President’s Day weekend
in San Antonio, at a conference on the First Year Experience – largely for
four-year colleges developing freshman seminar-type programs.
The keynote speaker was Dewayne
Matthews, Lumina Foundation for Education’s VP for Policy and Strategy.
After hearing him speak, I think I
have a better understanding of what Lumina’s agenda is, at least as stated.
Matthews showed graphs demonstrating
that the US has fallen behind other wealthy industrialized nations in college
attainment – that after World War II, we ramped college degree attainment –
including AA -- up to 40% of Americans, and then after the late 1970s,
“something” happened that led us to stop there.
He also showed graphs that measured
unemployment and income level against level of education, and if the numbers
are correct, the data was stark. For those of us with graduate degrees,
unemployment is at 4%. For those with undergraduate degrees, it’s a bit higher
– and of course, it’s higher still for those with high school diplomas, and
highest for those without high school diplomas. Matthews branded these groups
(as I recall) “the working poor”. A conclusion which was jarring, but
reasonable enough.
Lumina’s mission, as stated in the
presentation, is to increase college degree attainment to 60%. He asserted that
30 million Americans – something like 22% of adults – had gone to some
college, but not graduated with a degree.
The argument is basically that these
workers, who he said often deeply regretted not having finished college, would
have been much better off economically, had they gotten at least an Associate’s
degree.
This is where I thought he got into
our terrain in the Community Colleges.
Lumina’s stated goal, then, is to
increase attainment by moving as many of that 22% as possible – represented by
a large slice of pie at the bottom of a pie chart – out of that “some college”
category and into degreed categories.
We saw some figures that showed that
the students would have been financially better off taking out loans and
staying in college through degree attainment, rather than dragging their
educations out over many years while also working. Though, as I recall, those
figures were based on pre-recession data that went up only to 2008.
Matthews also spoke to Lumina’s
support of common statewide core standards and aligning high school with
college – and these seem to be the policy agendae that are manifesting in the
SSTF recommendations. The goal being this target of 60% attainment by 2025 – as
you can see here:
http://www.luminafoundation.org/newsroom/newsletter/archives/2009-11.html
My assessment is that these are
worthy goals, and largely in line with the Obama Administration’s stated goals
of increasing college education levels in this country to prepare our workforce
to compete in the global marketplace. As stated, they are intended to improve
occupation and wage outcomes for individuals.
That said, Lumina – at least as
presented here – seems to have a big blind spot when it comes to the students
that we serve in California Community Colleges, who often have little choice
but to work while going to school – or incur enormous debt as heads of
household (for example), spending what Lumina suggests be a student-loan-based
income on food and rent for their families, rather than only on tuition and
books. And coming out into an economy in which it does indeed remain difficult,
even for the educated (though quite a bit less difficult than for those without
degrees, is Matthews’ point), to find work that will pay at a level at which
tens of thousands of dollars of debt might be worked off.
I spoke with a colleague from
Minott, North Dakota – a small city currently in the heady rush of a shale oil
boom – who agreed. So this isn’t just an urban-Californian concern.
That Lumina is a provider of student
loans is also troubling. Will that additional 22% of Americans come out of
college owing Lumina Foundation a monthly check for the rest of their working
lives? And is that the point? I can’t answer that – but the potential for
conflict of interest here is, at least, troubling.
I met Matthews later, getting out of
an elevator, and told him that at my community college in California,
colleagues were quite wary of Lumina and initiatives that were being forced on
us during a budget crisis. I told him that their program as stated -- the model
that Lumina’s policies seem to add up to, getting college students out of the
work force and into loans to get them to degrees faster – didn’t seem to
account for the reality of many community college students, many of whom are
supporting families. That it would not work for many of our students – and that
that was OK.
He said that they hadn’t articulated
their goals well for community colleges. I’m not sure if he meant that they had
not explained them well enough, or that the policies had not been developed
well enough (the other meaning of articulation in this context) to account for
the realities of community college students’ needs. If it’s the latter, then I
wonder why the recommendations are being put in place in our system. I’d guess
he meant the former. In which case, I suppose, I am doing his job for
him.
In any case, my overall assessment
is that the stated goal of 60% attainment is a worthy goal, and one that our
faculty should, in principle, support – and, of course, student by student, we
do support this goal. That’s why we do what we do.
I’m not sure pushing students out of
jobs and into loans is realistic for many of our students. Though, I have to
say, affectively speaking, I do encourage my students who are missing class in
order to work shifts at low-paying jobs, to lose the jobs if at all possible
and focus on school -- on degree attainment. So I am predisposed to accept
Lumina’s research results and conclusions.
Again, I am wary of Lumina’s
intentions. That if they are in the loan business, 30 million Americans sending
them monthly checks is quite a large sum of money – and that this is quite
likely, at least, potentially biasing in terms of their public policy agenda.
Does Lumina's loan business exist to further its altruistic goal? Or is it
vice-versa? Or, if the outcomes are positive, might this be one of those cases
in which it doesn't matter?
I’m less wary of Lumina’s working
with the Gates Foundation, which I think is a fairly altruistic organization.
And I think Gates’ support of Lumina’s program speaks to its merit. Gates wants
more American workers to be highly trained for good-paying, high tech jobs. I
think that, too, is a worthy goal, and one we, as a faculty, should, would, and
do support.
Then, I don’t think that all of
those 22% of Americans with “some college” were necessarily on a college degree
track – and I don’t think that we should eliminate educational opportunities
that the community colleges provide for people who are not working to attain
degrees. We also have a community mission to fulfill.
In such lean times, we do have
difficult choices to make.
Rich Simon
English
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Budget Problems / Solutions
News
Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs
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.
"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."
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.
"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 . . .
Monday, January 23, 2012
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 . . .
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Outstanding SSTF Piece in the La Mesa Patch!
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.”
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:
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:
Fortunately, John Nichols, in The Nation, has a much keener eye. In a recent piece on ALEC, Nichols outlines their origins and history:
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:
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.
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 ...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.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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