by | February 3, 2012 · 1:07 pm

Start writing to President Obama and the DOE now

I don’t think anybody thinks it’s a good idea to raise tuition and make college unaffordable for students. However, President Obama’s announcement in the State of the Union the other week, and hearings happening in Senate committees already, suggest that the President doesn’t understand, or care about, the difference between tuition increases based on increasing costs, and increases based on collapsing state support. He needs to hear that message loud and clear.

Notice in this article from this morning’s (Feb 3) Inside Higher Education that nobody says a word about state support for public higher ed.

Senators Focus on Tuition Costs
February 3, 2012 – 3:00am

WASHINGTON — Members of the U.S. Senate’s education panel got a firsthand look Thursday at the president’s new higher education agenda, offering both bipartisan support and bipartisan expressions of concern.

At a hearing on college affordability before the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, lawmakers from both parties expressed agreement with President Obama’s assertion that tuition growth must be curtailed to maintain access to higher education, suggesting that college pricing is likely to be an election-year priority. But Democrats and Republicans alike tried unsuccessfully to pry loose more details about the president’s plan, and picked apart some aspects already made clear.

Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter testified but divulged no secrets about Obama’s Race to the Top-esque proposal for higher education, which would pay institutions that find ways to control tuition growth and increase value for students in much the same way the government rewarded states that improved their K-12 curriculums. Kanter said more information about funding for Obama’s plan will be released with the president’s 2013 budget proposal on Feb. 13.

While consensus emerged that college tuition can’t continue to increase unabated, opinions varied about the proper role of the federal government in stunting that growth. Sen. Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, said the free market can help determine what tuition prices are sustainable.

“Higher education is a great example of how the market place works,” he said. When tuition gets too expensive, he said, “people choose to go somewhere else.” (The hearing also featured testimony from officials of traditional two-year and four-year colleges talking about their efforts at innovation, and from advocates for alternatives such as Western Governors University.)

While those open-market principles are important to remember, Burr said, Congress sometimes has an important function in addressing college issues. “Where it’s appropriate for us to have a role,” he said, “I hope we play it.”

Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, pushed for brisk action and clarity about the more specific steps the administration wants legislators to take. She said students are essentially taking out a mortgage to pay for college and aren’t always seeing a return on that investment.

“They don’t know whether they’re going to have equity or an albatross of debt,” she said. “We can’t keep this going.”

Wyoming Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the committee’s senior Republican, said that efforts to expand grants for low-income students have failed to stop tuition growth and prove that legislation can accomplish only so much.

“If we’ve learned anything in recent years,” he said, “it’s that the government cannot solve this problem.”

But Obama says that government-supported reform is imperative. He introduced his agenda during last month’s State of the Union address, telling colleges they were “on notice” and that they risked losing taxpayer support if they couldn’t control their costs and increase their educational value.

Perhaps sensing a popular cause to champion with an election looming, senators in both parties seemed eager to continue discussions on how to hold down college prices.  Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, promised more discussion on the subject.

“This,” he said, ” is the first of many hearings.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/03/senate-help-committee-hears-college-affordability-testimony#ixzz1lK6xuXDu
Inside Higher Ed

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Filed under Advocacy, APSCUF, Barack Obama, Budget, Budget Cuts, Budget Deficit, Corporate University, Education reform, Inside Higher Ed, PASSHE, Public education, Shock Doctrine

by | February 1, 2012 · 1:26 pm

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!

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by | January 24, 2012 · 1:50 pm

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

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by | January 20, 2012 · 3:09 pm

Call for support for the Neshimany Federation of Teachers

Just got this e-mail, via Lisa Millhous, via the PA Federation of Teachers:

Please read this important announcement from brother Ted Kirsch, President, AFT Pennsylvania:
As you may know, teachers in the Neshaminy Federation of Teachers bargaining unit have been on strike for 9 days.  We are returning back to the classroom, but unfortunately, have not persuaded our school board to return to the bargaining table to negotiate a fair contract.

The board has refused to engage in good faith negotiations and has offered one proposal that decimates our rights as professionals.  This impasse has lasted for way too long — almost 4 years — and needs to end.  Please help us by signing our petition asking the board to negotiate.

At this point, it is not about who is wrong or right — it is about sitting down at the table to negotiate — something our board is refusing to do. Sign our petition here.

Feel free to forward the petition information to anyone who is concerned about education.

Thank you!

Take 5 seconds to sign the petition. This is beyond ridiculous.

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Filed under AFT, Collective Bargaining, Contract Negotiations, K-12 Education, Public education, Public employee unions, public employees

by | January 14, 2012 · 3:41 pm

Starting to think about strategy and tactics for the upcoming budget battle

As you should know by now, Governor Corbett has put in a request that PASSHE return about $20 million of our 2011-2012 budget allocation to the state. That’s on the heels, remember, of a 19% reduction in our budget already, and in spite of a sizeable rainy day fund that’s designed precisely to respond to situations like this one.

You should also know by now that the Governor’s next budget proposal address is scheduled for February 7. In it, we have no reason to believe he’ll do anything other than propose idiotically draconian budget cuts again for next year. Clearly he has no interest in the health or quality of public higher education in his state, even though his job mandates that he must. And just as clearly, nobody in the Office of the Chancellor or the on the Board of Governors seems inclined to fight with him about this anywhere near as avidly as the situation calls for. Their track record is terrible, so we shouldn’t expect much help from that direction. As long as we have an unsettled contract situation, anything the state does to butcher the budget strengthens PASSHE’s bargaining position (in their myopic calculus), so…

It’s clear, therefore, that just like last year, the brunt of beating back these budget attacks falls on the students, faculty, staff (thank heavens AFSCME is generally pretty well-organized!), and communities in which our universities operate. The people who actually depend on the success of the universities, that is, in the most direct and obvious ways have to be the ones who keep it from being devastated by any number of politicos who seem simply not to care what happens to it. As long as junket jobs exist, and as long as there’s a system that acts as a pawn in the chess game that seems to pass for budget and policy debates in the Commonwealth, they’re happy.

With all that said, although we have a lot of work to do over the next several months, I want to emphasize in the rest of this post one basic concept that I think needs to frame everything else we do. And that concept is, as I put it in a Facebook post to a KU student activist–

Remember who the opposition is: the Corbett Regime and their neo-liberal allies in the Chancellor’s Office. Not the people who disagree about whether it’s better to do civil disobedience or voter registration.

There are going to be actions of all kinds happening on our campuses over the next few months. Some of you will find some of them distasteful–either because they’re too aggressive or not aggressive enough; because they’re ‘paralyzing by analyzing’ or underinformed; because somebody didn’t coordinate with somebody else before scheduling two events at the same time. You get the idea.

But understand this. Every time you dismiss or attack somebody who’s on the same side you are because you don’t like their tactics, you’re making the Governor’s attacks work better. Unfortunately for sane people everywhere, Governor Corbett and his allies have easier pathways to make things happen than we do. They have convenient access to the channels of power that we don’t. We only make it worse for ourselves when we squabble and bicker with, rather than collaborate and encourage, our allies.

More to come, I’m sorry to have to say…

 

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Filed under Access, Advocacy, AFSCME, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Collective Bargaining, Communities, Contract Negotiations, Corporate University, Office of the Chancellor, PASSHE, Privatization, Public education, Public employee unions, public employees, Shock Doctrine, Student activism, Tom Corbett, Tuition increase, West Chester University

by | January 6, 2012 · 9:25 pm

For-profit, on-line education just doesn’t work as well

Just in case you’re wondering, yes, it’s important for us to keep track of K-12 educational policy for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that advocates for bad educational policy often look there, where evidence is very difficult to collect (and therefore claims are hard to dispute!), to support some of the bad ideas we fight at the college level every day.

I know many of you are more supportive of on-line, distance education than I am. It’s hard not to be, and I respect–in the abstract and at times in practice–that it can be done well. But nobody has yet made a convincing case to me–or anybody else, really–that switching to on-line, distance education in order to control educational costs is a good idea.

What evidence we can trust is making a very strong case that on-line K-12 education is exactly the terrible idea we thought it was. Today’s (Jan 6) New York Times, in the article “Students of On-Line Schools Are Lagging,” reports that:

About 116,000 students were educated in 93 virtual schools — those where instruction is entirely or mainly provided over the Internet — run by private management companies in the 2010-11 school year, up 43 percent from the previous year, according to the report being published by the National Education Policy Center, a research center at the University of Colorado. About 27 percent of these schools achieved “adequate yearly progress,” the key federal standard set forth under the No Child Left Behind act to measure academic progress. By comparison, nearly 52 percent of all privately managed brick-and-mortar schools reached that goal, a figure comparable to all public schools nationally.

Within these numbers are two important points–

1. On-line, for profit education simply isn’t working.

2. Maybe even more important for those of us who advocate for public education in all its forms, charter schools do not work better than traditional public schools, a claim that the Corbett administration makes in spite of the evidence, as do educational reformers like Arne Duncan and the gang.

Improve working conditions for teachers. Improve learning conditions for students. Fight poverty. Schools would magically work a whole lot better. It’s not complicated.

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Filed under Access, Arne Duncan, Budget, charter schools, Communities, Education reform, on-line schools, Privatization, Public education

by | December 7, 2011 · 12:23 pm

Just in case you were wondering…

I suspect when I start writing about the Ed ‘Reform’ [sic] folks, some of you think I’m waxing pretty paranoid. The Gates Foundation and Michele Rhee aren’t *really* as bad as I think they are, yada yada yada…

On the Daily Kos Labor blog yesterday, I stumbled across this gem, which reports that the Gates Foundation recently gave a $376,000+ grant to our friends at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

If you’ve only gotten your news in the last year from CNNMSNBCFOXNBCABCCBSNewYorkTimes, you may not recognize the name ALEC. Short version–ALEC is a ‘think tank’ (to put it generously) that crafts legislation, which gets distributed, sometimes barely revised, and often voted up in legislatures all over the country. Some recent examples you might recognize: Wisconsin’s union-killing ‘budget’ laws that led to mass protests in Madison and the recalls of several state Republican legislators and a current effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker; Ohio’s SB5, which was recently repealed by ballot initiative, that would have all but gutted public unions in that state; Michigan’s ’emergency manager’ law that allows the Governor to install a manager in any municipality he declares as an emergency, and which authorizes that manager to ignore collective bargaining agreements and other contracts with impunity.

These people are NOT OUR FRIENDS. And Bill Gates is giving them stacks of cash. Even I can do that math.

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Filed under ALEC, Bill Gates/Gates Foundation, Collective Bargaining, Education reform, Koch brothers, Michelle Rhee, Ohio SB5, Public education, Public employee unions, public employees, Teacher unions, Unions

by | December 1, 2011 · 1:56 am

Statewide “Call” to Action for Public Education

Folks:

An organization called Education Voters for PA is organizing a Statewide ‘Call’ to Action phone-in campaign for Monday, Dec. 5.

From their website–

Education Voters, joined by several allies, is organizing our firstStatewide “Call” to Action for Public Education! One week from today, on Monday, December 5th.  Thousands of people will set aside 5 minutes to call their local State Representatives and Senators with a short message about education being our highest priority as taxpayers and voters. CLICK HERE to pledge to call!

  • Class sizes are increasing in many communities.
  • Kindergarten, tutoring, arts, sports …. all being cut.
  • We keep reducing education to the point where someday soon, we could be teaching only subjects that will be on standardized tests.
  • We are raising taxes at the community level, putting more pressure on property taxes instead of having a statewide funding formula that is aligned to learning standards, fiscally responsible, fair and both Constitutional and ethical.

APSCUF members and other people concerned about education should support this effort. For further details, check out their website. All they ask is that you make the call to your legislator and then notify the organization that you’ve done it. It’s five minutes if you feel chatty with whoever answers the phone at your legislator’s office.

Please share with people you know who care about public education in PA, anywhere in the state.

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Filed under Advocacy, APSCUF, Budget, Budget Cuts, Communities, K-12 Education, Public education, Rally

by | November 14, 2011 · 2:53 pm

Another Aspect of Shared Governance

If you’ve talked to me about academic labor politics for more than 2 or 3 minutes, you probably know that I’ve become something of an evangelist about contingent labor in the last couple of years. It would be fair, I think, to accuse me of speaking with the righteousness of the converted, although that conversion–in my estimation–took about a decade longer than it should have.

I have also been writing, on and off over the last few years, about ways to expand our conception of shared governance to include populations that will help pressure management to cede back to faculty, and the communities we serve, at least a reasonable share of authority over our working conditions and areas of expertise.

Enter today’s (Monday, Nov 14) Chronicle of Higher Ed, featuring a story about an AAUP panel recommending that contingent faculty have access to shared governance just like regular full-time faculty on their campuses. For the record, these are draft recommendations; the final version isn’t on any official timetable.

Intuitively, this makes perfect sense to me. Anybody who has a stake in a policy should have something meaningful to say about whether the policy gets established and what it does. And, intuitively it makes sense to me that contingent faculty are a lot more likely to be policy allies than managers are, at least about most things most of the time.

There are criticisms coming from fulltime faculty, none of which is surprising, but no less galling (in my personal opinion) for their predictability. I won’t even give them the airtime by repeating them. Read them if you want. What they all boil down to is this: “We hate the exploitation of contingent faculty until altering the structure of academic labor costs us something.”

That’s not good enough.

 

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Filed under AAUP, Advocacy, APSCUF, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Communities, Contingent faculty, shared governance, Tenure

by | November 9, 2011 · 6:03 pm

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.

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