Why would Senate hearings for public universities be canceled right before the Governor announces his budget? Lots of focus (too much) on Penn State here. Wonder how PASSHE’s Chancellor responded?
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Meet with Senator Dinniman to support public education
Senator Dinniman has announced the following:
Public education has come under increasing attack in Harrisburg and it is time for the citizens of Chester and Montgomery counties to stand up and protect our schools both here and throughout Pennsylvania.
We are asking all those who value public education to come together for a meeting on Thursday, February 9, 2012, at 7 pm at Downingtown East High School, 50 Devon Drive (just off Route 113) in Exton.
Why February 9? Because the governor will be giving his annual budget address to the state legislature on February 7 and we need to respond. All indications are that this address will contain cuts that will be devastating to public education at all levels. We must come together to organize and to protect funding for early childhood education, basic education and public higher education. We can’t afford to wait until June and allow an anti-education budget and agenda to pass.
It is our hope to create an ongoing Coalition for Public Education that will stand strong as we face this year’s state budget and other challenges to public education to come.
We also plan to find ways to increase parental involvement in helping every child succeed. Parental involvement is the key to academic success in schools around the world. The future of our children and our nation depends on developing educational excellence in every school and at all levels of education.
Last year, more than a thousand people attended a rally in support of public education at the Chester County Courthouse and recently thousands of citizens joined in a write-in vote movement in the West Chester School Board election. Please join us to keep the momentum going forward as we face the upcoming state budget.
Our collective voice needs to be heard and your participation is crucial. Please let us know if you can attend the Feb 9 meeting by contacting Deb Woolson at my office at (610) 692-2112 or e-mailing dwoolson@pasenate.com. If you cannot attend but are interested in becoming involved in the planned Coalition for Public Education, also let us know.
Our children are depending on you!
Filed under Uncategorized
Statewide Call to Action for Public Education – January 25th!
Please join supporters of public education across Pennsylvania tomorrow in calling legislators tomorrow to let them know that you expect a state budget that reflects a commitment to the students and educators in our state. Many people will be calling in to advocate for K-12 funding, and we want to lend our voices in support of funding for public higher education. Information for the call to action can be found here: http://www.educationvoterspa.org/index.php/site/news/statewide-call-for-education-click-here/
Cheryl Wanko
Filed under Uncategorized
Say thank you to Ohio voters
I have to be quick about this and will have more to say later, but members of public sector unions, especially academic/teaching public sector unions, owe a gigantic show of gratitude to the overwhelming percentage of OH voters who voted yesterday to repeal SB5.
On today’s Washington Post “The Answer Sheet” blog, Valerie Strauss explains the implications of yesterday’s vote for teachers and teachers’ unions nationwide. Her point isn’t difficult to generalize to us.
Read it. Then raise a toast to every OH voter you know. This is what democracy looks like.
Filed under Uncategorized
Central Michigan University Faculty Back to Work… For Now [Reposting from State APSCUF]
The Central Michigan University Faculty Association held a day-long work stoppage on Monday, the first day of fall classes. Students joined with faculty on the picket lines to encourage administration representatives to return to the negotiations table.
A judge issued a temporary restraining order to halt the stoppage, and professors at CMU were back teaching classes on Tuesday.
Both sides have traded accusations about the other side’s intentions. The administration has claimed the strike was illegal, while the faculty union believes the university is refusing to bargain.
The union president kept her focus on the students in a statement:
“We’ve filed unfair labor practice charges against the university citing their refusal to bargain in good faith. This is why the faculty is not where they really want to be – with their students.”
On Friday morning, the two sides will argue their cases to a judge, who will then rule on whether to make the temporary restraining order permanent.
With both sides far apart on financial issues, a state-appointed fact finder will hear from the union and administration and make a recommendation on an agreement. The hearing dates are set for September, but it could take months for a final opinion.
We understand the predicament of our 600 colleagues at CMU. Ultimately, everyone that pursues academia as a career wants to spend his or her time in a classroom – not on a picket line. We know that the CMU faculty want what’s best for their 19,000 students, and we thank them for standing up for their rights and the rights of their students to a high-quality education with professors who are paid fairly.
For those who’d like to express their support for the CMU faculty, Progress Michigan has posted a petition calling on CMU administrators to return to the negotiating table.
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!]
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?
You Pay, Corporations Don’t (repost from KUXchange)
Yet another score from our friends at the KUXchange. The CLEAR Coalition explains one reason why tax revenues in PA aren’t higher. If the link to the vid doesn’t show up in your e-mail (for those of you who get posts by subscription), just click through to the blog post itself and the video is there.
Filed under Advocacy, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Communities, Follow the Money, Shock Doctrine, taxes, Tom Corbett, Uncategorized
APSCUF Scholarship information
Students–if you need money to help pay for school, especially if the Governor and Legislature ignore us and raise your tuition, you may be eligible for one of these scholarships!
We WANT to give money away (but only responsibly, of course). Help us do it!
Faculty: Help spread the word.
Filed under APSCUF, Budget, Scholarships, Tuition increase, Uncategorized, West Chester University
APSCUF-WCU 