Category Archives: PASSHE

by | June 24, 2011 · 8:54 pm

More news on the budget

This press release just out from State APSCUF:

The budget that’s likely to pass (by the way, without ANY significant Democratic input whatsoever) imposes an 18% cut on the PASSHE allocation, which would require a tuition increase in the neighborhood of 10% to level off. We can rest pretty sure that the Board of Governors will approve nothing of the sort.

It’s well worth taking one more shot at calling/writing your legislators to make one more appeal on our behalf. There’s nothing to lose. And now that we have a specific number, we can make a lot more concrete arguments about how these cuts will harm our campuses; we can sound simultaneously less shrill and more certain. May as well give it a try.

And then get ready. The cuts management has been threatening for months are about to start getting announced. APSCUF will fight like hell to minimize the damage to our institutions inflicted by this absurd political theater playing out on the backs of PA’s families–students, staff, and faculty.

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Filed under APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, PASSHE, Public education, Shock Doctrine, Tom Corbett

by | June 24, 2011 · 2:48 pm

Tentative Budget Deal Reached

The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting on Friday morning that the PA Legislature and Governor Fracker have reached a tentative deal on the state budget.

The preliminary reports are not good for us, although the numbers aren’t yet very precise. The article indicates that the “state-supported” universities will take a 19% hit, but doesn’t distinguish between PASSHE and the state-relateds. So we don’t yet know exactly what will happen to us.

If that 19% is even close to what we see when the numbers are released, we’re going to have lots of work to do protecting our system from the kinds of Draconian cuts we all know PASSHE already wants to make. Yet again, our state government has provided the cover under which our Chancellor and Board of Governors can radically overhaul our whole system, while pretending that it has anything whatsoever to do with economics.

As a pacifist, I usually am very stridently resistant to military metaphors, but in this case, … Oh hell, I still can’t do it.

But now at least the circular logic of management is laid bare: “We can’t afford to pay for anything [except more managers and management salaries]. Why not? Because we just gave all the money away. See?”

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Filed under Access, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Collective Bargaining, Contract Negotiations, Office of the Chancellor, PASSHE, Penn State University, Public education, Retrenchment, Shock Doctrine, Tom Corbett, Tuition increase, West Chester University

by | June 16, 2011 · 7:18 pm

PASSHE and the US Education Delivery Institute (Part 1 of ???)

[When I started writing this, I quickly realized that it’s going to be much longer than I thought. So it’s becoming a series.  –Seth]

[Updated 5 pm Thurs]

Way back in April of this year, I co-hosted a pre-conference workshop called Labor Organizing in Hard Times at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs, for short) in Atlanta.

During our workshop, I learned a new word: deliverology (which, blessedly, the WordPress spellchecker doesn’t recognize as a word). My friend and colleague Kathleen, who directs the Writing Center at Cal St U-Channel Islands, told us that the CSU system had bought into deliverology, and faculty around the system were already seeing some insidious implications.

I remember thinking (in my much the same way I knew PASSHE would hire the current Chancellor as soon as I learned a little about him) that it couldn’t be long before PASSHE jumped on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, that all happened in the midst of a very long day, and I forgot all about it.

Flash forward to last week. I got an e-mail with a link to the website for an organization called the US Education Delivery Institute (USEDI). Roughly paraphrased, the note said something like, “Just in case you need something else to piss you off” (from a colleague whose sense of humor sometimes runs toward the tongue-in-cheek).

I can only describe my reaction thus (slightly Disneyfied so we can keep our PG-13 rating on the blog): “You gotta be [bleep] kidding me!”

USEDI is the brainchild of Sir Michael Barber, former member of Tony Blair’s Ministry of Education. According to the organization’s website:

The U.S. Education Delivery Institute (EDI) was founded in May 2010 by Sir Michael Barber, former head of the U.K. Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, with support from the Education Trust and Achieve.

This is a unique time in education:  Many K-12 state systems have set ambitious goals as part of the Race to the Top competition, while higher education systems are working to achieve President Obama’s goal of making the United States number one in the world in college attainment by 2020.  Meanwhile, fiscal concerns are requiring education systems to do more with fewer resources.

While systems often have the right ambitions and promising policies, the process of planning and driving implementation receives less attention.  More often than not, leaders approach implementation by fighting fires, making a laundry list of initiatives, or otherwise managing in an uncoordinated way.

Prime Minister Tony Blair faced a similar implementation dilemma in 2001, as he was elected to a second term.  To help him deliver on his priorities, he created the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) and appointed Sir Michael Barber to lead the effort.  The PMDU pioneered a new approach to managing priorities – delivery – and used it with great success to help Blair achieve his priorities.  With the help of the delivery unit, the Blair government reached 80% of policy targets; Prime Minister Blair called his investment in delivery the best domestic reform he had made.

If you’re already noticing the absence of specifics (sometimes signified by asking yourself or anybody else in shouting distance “What does that even mean?”), welcome to it. You should look at the website more carefully than just the highlights (ahem) I’ll lift out in this series of posts, but the short version of what you’ll find is this: USEDI is an organization that helps schools/districts/colleges/universities/systems set and meet policy targets related to “delivering” educational product as efficiently as possible.

The litany of arguments describing and critiquing the corporatization of American higher education is well-established and rehearsed, and frankly it’s too depressing to rehash (again) here. Let’s just say the folks at USEDI have leapfrogged over all that.

[OK… It’s getting harder to write about this without being really angry and sarcastic. Anger is probably appropriate, but sarcasm probably isn’t. Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon!]

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Filed under APSCUF, deliverology, K-12 Education, PASSHE, Public education, Uncategorized, US Education Delivery Institute

by | June 13, 2011 · 6:46 pm

IUP management proposes radical (and not in a good way) overhaul of the university

My department chair (via our Dean, via the Provost) just e-mailed around this article from the Indiana Gazette (originally published Fri 6/11, updated Sat 6/12).

The short version is that IUP management proposes, by Fall 2012, eliminating 62 (yes, that’s right–SIXTY-TWO!!!!!!) programs from the university’s curriculum, ranging from Associates to Masters degree programs. Management offers a variety of rationales for elimination: low enrollments, high expenses, changing needs in the Commonwealth, the current budget crisis, and so on, all of which every PASSHE campus has heard before, and some of which aren’t especially consistent with each other. Management also lobs the retrenchment-grenade, albeit in a vague way. Furthermore, as IUP-APSCUF Vice-President Francisco Alarcon notes:

“I think it’s posturing for the most part,” said Vice President Francisco Alarcon. He said he believes the plan is an attempt by administrators to scare faculty into retirement, which would save the university money.

Alarcon said it is unclear to him the basis on which the decision to discontinue any given program was made. He said the decisions seemed arbitrary and had no real analysis behind them.

He also said the proposal fails to outline which programs are to benefit, and to what extent, from the elimination of others.

Buried among a great many slippery claims in the article, I was simultaneously relieved and disturbed to find this one, in a statement from IUP Interim President Werner:

“While commonwealth budget issues have been at the center of many of our discussions and decisions, even if future budgets are more favorable than currently projected, the university must still preserve and invest in its strongest and highest-quality programs through strategic reallocation,” he wrote.

Do you see what I see? I see a not-very-subtle admission that the agenda here has little, if anything, to do with the economic viability of IUP, and most certainly little, if anything, to do with the quality of the institution as it currently fulfills its mission. I see, as Kevin Mahoney has written about several times on the KUXchange, an effort to transform PASSHE schools, heart and soul, into degree-manufacturing facilities that turn out widgets, um, I mean degree-bearing workers, er, um, I mean students, er um (What about PEOPLE?!?), quality of their education be damned.

[I’ll have a post ready later this week about PASSHE’s participation in a program run by a think (ahem) tank called the US Educational Delivery Institute, one implication of which is that it provides another layer of cover for this attack.]

So, for those of us who work in or attend PASSHE schools, two points to leave you with–

1. We ALL have to be on the lookout for these moves on our campuses. If your management hasn’t yet unveiled (admitted to) these plans, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. You’re not.

2. I know the IUP-APSCUF chapter is one of the best organized chapters in our union. They’re very capable of fighting this fight, but they shouldn’t have to do it without knowing we support them and stand ready to help in any way we can.

 

 

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Filed under APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Collective Bargaining, Indiana University of PA, PASSHE, Program elimination, Public education, Retirement, Retrenchment, Shock Doctrine, West Chester University

by | June 13, 2011 · 3:58 pm

ACTION ITEM: Write your PA Senator NOW!

This letter went out to all APSCUF members from our Legislative Director, Laura Saccente, this morning. Some of you don’t read your e-mail over the summer, and many of you (who see the blog posts on Facebook) aren’t APSCUF members.

One editorial note–this version of the letter is addressed directly to constituents of Senator Dinniman. If he’s not your Senator, you should write to your own.

Laura’s letter explains why you need to do this, so I don’t have to. Just do it.

Dear APSCUF member,
 
In May 2011, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives approved a budget bill (House bill 1485) that would set the appropriation for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) at $427.8 million. While this is better than the originally proposed cut of 54 percent, it still represents a cut of 15 percent, or a $75 million reduction from last year’s state appropriation to PASSHE.
 
The budget proposal is currently in the Senate, and we need you to contact your Senator and ask for additional funding restoration for PASSHE.  Additional restoration could help keep a large tuition increase at bay and further reduce staff layoffs.   Please contact your own member, Senator Andrew Dinniman, the Education Chair, at andy@pasenate.com or (717) 787-5709.
 
Time is very limited and the budget will be wrapping up soon, so please take five minutes to send your email or make a phone call today!  Please do not use university email or stationary when making your case.  If you have already contacted your senator in recent months, this is the opportunity to follow up with him or her to request restoration of PASSHE funding.
 
When giving examples on the reason to restore funding, please consider how PASSHE has wisely used its appropriations dollars, how cuts may affect department/program cuts and class sizes, how a large tuition increase will limit the ability for some to attend, etc.  I’ve also attached a general budget message sheet if you need additional talking points.  Let your senator know today, before it’s too late, how the proposed cuts may impact your campus.
 
Thank you,
Laura Saccente

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Filed under Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, PASSHE, Public education, Student activism, Tom Corbett, West Chester University

by | June 7, 2011 · 1:47 pm

Another flagrant attack on tenure

Seth is back from a much needed vacation, and I wish my first post of the summer brought better news.

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed, an article called From Tenured to Adjunct describes the University of Louisiana system’s move to fire tenured faculty and rehire them as adjunct faculty. I won’t even summarize the details here–it’s too disheartening to rehash them, and you can read the story by clicking the link–but it’s clear that the financial issues are NOT at the heart of the matter. It’s also clear that because Louisiana law doesn’t require “financial exigency” as the standard they have to meet before they can retrench tenured faculty, they have a certain flexibility that PASSHE also has (because we don’t require it either).

As I’ve said dozens of times by now, in various settings: you may not find this frightening personally, although I can’t imagine how it doesn’t make you at least a little nervous. But even if it doesn’t scare you, it ought to BLOODY INFURIATE YOU that a bunch of suits would treat our colleagues and profession like this.

And again, as I’ve also said repeatedly here and elsewhere, thank whatever deity you believe in for our union, which makes it a whole lot harder for anti-education forces to have their way with us.

And when you get done thanking that deity, maybe it’s about time (if you haven’t already) for you to send an e-mail to your local APSCUF leadership asking what you can do to support our fight. Thankfulness is great; effort is better.

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Filed under APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Inside Higher Ed, PASSHE, Tenure, University of Louisiana

by | May 4, 2011 · 10:31 am

Follow the money!

I’m sorry to title this post with such a tired cliche, but dagnabbit, it’s right on target again!

As you’re likely aware, Governor Corbett is attacking not just public higher education but all public education in PA.  There’s legislation pending in Harrisburg that would transfer a huge chunk of the money Governor Drill-and-Kill (Drill the Shale, Kill the Schools) wants to cut from K-12 education into a voucher program.

From my early morning cruise through the blogosphere, two articles that help debunk the notion that vouchers are anything but money-stealers from public schools for private interests:

1. In Testing for Thee, but Not for Me, Kevin Drum reports the results of a study from Milwaukee Public Schools indicating (not for the first time!) that voucher-eligible schools are producing test scores that aren’t any better than their public school counterparts. So, all those lazygreedyunion teachers wouldn’t seem to be the problem, would they?

2. If you follow the KUXchange blog, you’ve seen them developing arguments, based on Naomi Klein’s notion of the Shock Doctrine, which holds (in simplistic terms) that the powerful often use rhetorics of crisis and disaster (shock) as smokescreens behind which they accrete power to themselves while people aren’t watching.  In Monday’s HuffPost Education section, Timothy Slekar from Penn State-Altoona applies the Shock Doctrine directly to Governor Drill-and-Kill’s K-12 budget proposal.  His most interesting finding, in my estimation, is that the voucher program in SB1, along with increased (you gotta be frackin’ kidding me!) testing requirements that add nothing to education, will ACTUALLY COST MORE than the proposed cuts would save.

Sometime later today, I’ll see if I can find this again, but about 6 weeks ago, I found evidence that the second largest individual contributor to the Corbett for Governor campaign is the guy who owns the Charter School Management firm that would profit the most from Drill-and-Kill’s “education reform” package.  Gee.  We’re surprised, aren’t we?

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Filed under Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Follow the Money, K-12 Education, PA Senate Bill 1, PASSHE, Penn State University, Public education, research, Shock Doctrine, taxes, Tom Corbett, Uncategorized, Vouchers/School Choice

by | April 28, 2011 · 9:06 pm

Corbett’s plan for PASSHE budget restoration

It’s taking almost all the inner strength I can muster not to launch into the most profane tirade in human history.  At what?  This proposal from Gov Kill-the-Schools-Drill-the-State Corbett:

Some Pennsylvania universities should consider drilling for natural gas below campus to help solve their financial problems, Gov. Tom Corbett said Thursday.

The Erie Times-News reported that Corbett made the suggestion during an appearance at a meeting of the Pennsylvania Association of Councils of Trustees at Edinboro University.

Corbett said six of the 14 campuses in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education are located on the Marcellus Shale formation, part of a vast region of underground natural gas deposits that are currently being explored and extracted.

So let me see if I understand this.  The state should slash its appropriations to the state-owned universities in half.  Then, the universities, at least the six lucky enough to be sitting on gas reserves (not WCU, by the way) should poison their communities, students, faculty, staff, and anybody else within poisoning distance by extracting that gas using a method that’s demonstrably stupid and dangerous.

And who would get the contracts to perform the extractions?  Me wonders, yes, me wonders, My Precious…

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Filed under Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Communities, Follow the Money, PASSHE, Public education, Tom Corbett, West Chester University

by | April 28, 2011 · 2:08 pm

Two MUST-READ posts from the KUXchange (KU’s local blog)

1. If you’re still not convinced that the threat of retrenchment is real, even at WCU, where President Weisenstein has been telling us for two years now about the sound financial health of the university, you need to read Kevin Mahoney’s post, I Went to Harrisburg, and My Head Exploded.  I’ve known Kevin for a long time now and know that he’s often motivated to fight against this kind of madness but rarely taken by surprise.  Even with all the research KU-APSCUF has done in the last couple of years, it was hard to anticipate what they’ve found.

2.  Contributor mslibrarygoddess says it loud and proud, in Don’t Want to Accept Responsibility? Blame Teachers! A couple of marquis moments.

Responding to the assertion by some politicians that teachers are the greedy ones:

[R]ather than seeing teachers as advocates, the government is making them out to be greedy millionaires who want to line their pockets with your tax dollars.

Hmmmm….if that’s what teachers were doing, wouldn’t they all be politicians? After all, aren’t politicians the people that have taken jobs that were supposed to be civil service positions, things you volunteered for to serve your community and if you were paid it was a modest salary, and made them into career positions that eat up tax dollars?

And:

Teachers are more than teachers. We do the work of educators, counselors, administrators, disciplinarians. We become more than just someone standing up in front of a room lecturing. We become people that are charged with the emotional and physical well being o students in addition to their academic well being.

And we do it all while we are under appreciated, while jobs are being taken away, while class sizes are exploding out of control and the time of the year when we work is dedicated to nothing but work. And we get blamed for everything because we speak out.

Taken together, these two posts underscore the OBLIGATION we have to fight against a radical agenda that doesn’t want an educated citizenry, wants to funnel pubic money into private pockets, and doesn’t much care about what else happens to anybody.

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Filed under Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Collective Bargaining, Communities, Kutztown University, Links, PASSHE, Public education, Retrenchment, Shock Doctrine, Student activism, Tom Corbett, Tuition increase, West Chester University

by | April 27, 2011 · 3:52 pm

Why we MUST turn out tonight at the Chester County Public Education Rally

[Please share widely among WCU Faculty, Students, Staff, Family members, Friends]

Tonight’s Chester County Rally for Public Education is on, rain or shine.  Current weather forecast (as of about 11:45 am) says a slight chance of rain the evening.

If you (and students are invited to do this too) want to join the APSCUF Funeral Procession (mourning the death of higher education if Tom Corbett wins) and march up to the courthouse, meet at the APSCUF office around 6’ish.  Wear black if you have it.

If you can’t or don’t want to join the procession, just be on the courthouse lawn @ 7.

If you’re still not convinced that YOU have to YOUR PART in this fight, if you still believe that us loudmouth rabble-rousers will do your part for you, if you don’t think the threat is serious enough to warrant being at the courthouse for one stinkin’ hour, read on.

This is a somewhat modified version of the “speech” I gave at the student-led walkout/rally last week in front of Sykes Hall, starting after the hortatory “thanks for coming” stuff.  –Seth

I have only four things to say today, and I’ll make them very quick.

1.  We’re winning this fight.  If you’ve read or listened to or seen any news in the last couple of weeks, you know that lawmakers in both parties are pushing back hard against Governor Corbett’s original proposal to slash our state budget allocation by more than half.

The reason we’re winning is because we’re doing THIS WORK: rallying, writing, calling, postcarding, petitioning.  Let there be no mistake about that.

2.  Now that we fall all good about ourselves…  We haven’t WON anything yet.  There won’t be a budget in place for weeks, and a lot of bad [oops!] can go down between now and then.

That means we can’t afford to let up.  The gains we’ve made in both legislative and public support are important and impressive but fragile, and the second we stop pushing, the second the hammer falls on us.

3.  Now that we’re all scared again, there are two important things for us to be doing right now.  First is turning out for events like the Rally for Public Education at the Chester Co. courthouse on Wed 4/27.  Second is to make sure our contact networks are alive and well through the summer so we can stay organized and keep fighting together.

4. And finally, whatever happens between now and the passage of our budget; whatever happens between now and full restoration of the budget we need and deserve: don’t ever forget who picked this fight.  It wasn’t us–students, faculty, staff members, university employees, our families, our friends.  It wasn’t us, and the people who did pick it need to pay a steep price for that.

For those of you (and I know who some of you are) who are getting ready to graduate, or who don’t believe the current attacks on public education mean anything to you, I have only this to say:

If you intend to teach in a public school at any level, you’re a target.

If you care about anybody who teaches in, otherwise works for, or attends a public school, you’re a target.

If you believe that anybody besides the wealthiest Pennsylvanians deserve a shot at achieving anything remotely resembling a secure future, you’re a target.

Don’t let the slow place of the budget process lull you to sleep.  FIGHT!

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Filed under Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Collective Bargaining, Communities, free speech, K-12 Education, PASSHE, Public education, Rally, Student activism, Tom Corbett, Tuition increase, West Chester University