Earl Warren Japanese Garden, CSU Long Beach

Selling Water By the River:  Reflections on AAUP and NEA’s national leadership strategy

Teri Yamada, Professor of Asian Studies, CSU Long Beach

In our current gilded age where all politics is business, we educators yearn for ethical leaders to admire.   Under assault in the trenches, our faculty unions are undermined at the local level, often by both political parties who are using this bad economy to privatize public education.  It is depressing as we fight the good fight against multibillionaires.   Therefore, we can at least hope that our national education associations will have our backs, effectively lobbying for us at both the federal and state levels to stop this wildcat privatization.  As associations who represent us, we expect NEA (National Education Association) and AAUP (American Association of University Professors) to model the highest standards of ethical conduct and leadership as we struggle daily on our campuses to organize against faculty apathy, and as we lobby our state legislatures to act responsibly for the public good. In our local fights for equity and access to public higher education for every qualified student in our respective states, in our struggle to maintain quality education and academic freedom, in our efforts to preserve secure jobs with benefits, we need help!  We need effective ethical help.

Our expectation of ethical and effective leadership holds true for both AAUP and NEA.  Both serve the public higher education sector as our national representatives to the media and the Department of Education in Washington D.C.  How our AAUP and NEA leaders comport themselves, what they say to the media, to Arnie Duncan and President Obama, reflects back on the entire higher education sector.  It is time for some self-reflection.

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education commentary, former AAUP general secretary Gary Rhoades made a number of points about leadership and the difficult questions that AAUP must face if it is to survive as a respected and effective association.  The challenges are great.  But we all will be diminished if AAUP is unable or unwilling to embrace constructive criticism and prove by its actions that transformation is possible.  The United University Professions  (SUNY), have demonstrated the consequences of unresponsiveness by their February vote to end affiliation with AAUP after twelve years of relationship, citing a number of complaints including poor communication and lack of responsiveness.

NEA has also challenged patience.  Several years ago, NEA decided to establish or form a relationship with a proprietary affiliate called the NEA Academy (1) .  This Academy’s purpose it to serve as a portal to “online professional development products,” which means it provides a link to other providers’ online courses for teacher continuing education and Master’s Degrees.  Claiming to have a Content Quality and Review Board, the NEA Academy has published its Requirements for Inclusion in its products list.    These requirements include such standards as “content that aligns with NEA policy.”   One of the top three providers for NEA Academy’s courses is Western Governors University (WGU)

NEA stipulates that its vision is “a great public school for every student” and that its mission is “to advocate for education professionals.”  It promotes public education as a core value: “We believe public education is the cornerstone of our republic. Public education provides individuals with the skills to be involved, informed and engaged in our representative democracy.”   The question then is why does NEA embrace Western Governors University, a private, anti-faculty union provider of online courses?  How does this fit with NEA’s mission to advocate for “education professionals” when WGU is an institution that eschews teacher-based instruction; it has no teachers.  Why do this when so many excellent public universities and community colleges across the nation have online programs of the highest quality which adhere to the philosophy that teachers form the core of education?  Shouldn’t educators also deserve “a great public school” for their continuing education?

When our national associations fail to serve us well —as we battle on the ground to protect faculty jobs and save collective bargaining, to preserve adjunct positions with benefits and job security, to ensure quality control over curriculum, to save public education and academic freedom—we must wonder whom AAUP and NEA are serving.

Notes:

(1) This relationship needs further clarification.  NEA Academy charges a course fee for its portal services.

References

Rhoades, Gary. “Forget Executives the AAUP Should Turn to Grass-Roots Leaders” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 January 2012.

Schmidt, Peter.  “AAUP Loses Major Affiliate at SUNY” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 February 2012.

2/19/12

DISCLAIMER:  Restructuring Public Hi Ed is curated solely by me.  All editorial decisions as to what is posted are based upon my interest and concern about restructuring in the public higher education sector.  These blog posts should in no way reflect upon any other person or organization since this is a “personal blog.”   Please send your blog posts and comments on restructuring in public higher education for consideration to me at teri.yamada@gmail.com.

Southwest Minnesota State University

Prof. Kolnick mentions California in his blog below.  The CSU has the sad distinction of making the U.S. Department of Education’s list of the top 32 public, 4-year universities in the United States with the steepest tuition increases from 2007-2010 as reported in SFGate: “Now, the U.S. Department of Education has premiered a database on its web-site comparing college costs of all kinds. Of 32 public, four-year schools in the United States with the steepest tuition increases from 2007 to 2010, 22 are CSUs, with tuition rising 35 percent at Humboldt State at the low end, to 47 percent at San Diego State.”  This year, if the budget situation in California does not improve, the CSU will face restructuring that could destroy the integrity of our institutions.   ty

                                                   Guest blog by Jeff Kolnick, professor of History, Southwest Minnesota State University

M4 Rally, CSU Long Beach

Western Governors University (WGU) Is in Your State:  Deconstructing the Academy

        Teri Yamada, Professor of Asian Studies, CSU Long Beach

In our cultural echo chamber of deception, as Joseph Goebbels   said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” The media has served business well in the production of panic over America’s imminent fall in the global economy. We are told that our decline in global competitiveness is due to the failure of “traditional public education.”

For the past several years, the Lumina Foundation for Education   has been calling for the United States to increase higher education attainment rates — the proportion of the population that holds a high-quality postsecondary degree or credential — to 60 percent by the year 2025. This call — known as “Lumina’s Big Goal” — has been embraced by many others. Foundations, state governments, national higher education associations, and President Obama have all issued their own call for increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials.

Their way to meet this goal is to alter the “unchanging public education system” through disruptive technology and privatization. In this mythic death and rebirth struggle, we must rid ourselves of the ossified, brick-and-mortar educational institutions and embrace the redemptive and disruptive online learning platforms of virtual education.   Stephen Ehrmann refers to this phenomenon as “the rapture of technology” (1).

The big money behind rapture technology ensures the effectiveness of its propaganda. Public discourse on education has been remolded to focus on the cause of its “failure” defined as teachers and their unions.  And remedies are offered in the form of privatization through vouchers and charters, online delivery, and school funding tied to the measurable outcomes of retention and graduation rates.

The result is contested cultural space over  the meaning and value of education. For example, the Lumina Foundation promotes its definition:

“Quality in higher education must be defined in terms of student outcomes, particularly learning outcomes, and not by inputs or  institutional characteristics. The value of degrees and credentials…rests on the skills and knowledge they represent.” (2  )

Compare this reductive utilitarianism to the “affinity philosophy of learning” embedded in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s cutting edge digital media and learning initiative ;

“If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community (creative) and economic life (3 ).

Both Lumina and MacArthur advocate a shift from an instructor-centered model of education to a student-centered learning model; but MacArthur’s frame does not erase  “teachers” from education although it does reshape their role as instructors.  The Lumina value of reductive utilitarianism is the basis for the WGU model of learning.  The goal of this learning is to demonstrate competency over a specific vocational skill set defined by measurable outcomes.

WGU began in 1995 when several governors of western states decided to create a virtual university to confer “competency-based” degrees.  They had the following concerns (4):

• To accommodate access of rural students, the governors wanted delivery of cost-effective education at any place, any time;
• The rising cost of education combined with population growth would surpass the capacity of the brick-and-mortar institutions; there would be no more money to build new campuses;
• State colleges were not producing enough skilled graduates, and the graduates they were producing had uneven skill sets.  So a competency-based degree, certified by a third party, seemed to make sense “in an employment climate where it is commonplace to question what it means to have a degree” (5); they had corporate support for this plan;
• The governors felt their state colleges had been unresponsive to these problems so the governors decided to shake things up, “to foster innovation in higher education institutions.”

The governors embraced a competency-based, online delivery model that required re-conceptualizing the function of “traditional” faculty in higher education.   This re-conceptualization is called “unbundling”: the splitting off into distinct functions of a faculty role and assigning each function to a distinct human agent or technology.

Unbundling enables virtual universities to control costs by increasing “instructor productivity” (6).   Research and university service are removed from the role of “faculty.”  Academic advising is not recognized in this world-view as part of a faculty’s role in the university.  The remaining component —instruction —is further unbundled to the following five distinct activities:

• Designing the course;
• Developing the course through the selection of instructional methods and course materials;
• Delivery;
• Mediating a student’s learning process (such as identifying learning styles);
• Assessing levels of competence.

These five activities are then assigned to technology or separate agents. In this way, the traditional understanding of “faculty” is deconstructed.  WGU does not offer instruction directly but brokers “learning opportunities” through various technologies. Advisers (mentors/monitors) assist students in choosing the “learning opportunity” to achieve a certain goal.   Those who design the courses and programs belong to WGU Program Councils consisting of faculty members and industry specialists.  WGU agents are all contract laborers; there is no tenure.  So we are left to contemplate Jerry Farber’s concerns, expressed in 1998:

If you take the new developments in educational and communications technology, lift them up on a millennial wave of technological enthusiasm, integrate them into the competency-based/outcomes movement in education which has persisted in one form or another since the 1970s or earlier, and put them in the service of corporate interests, which are moving toward a de facto takeover of higher education, you come up with a rough approximation of what appears to be happening in a great many colleges and universities at the turn of the century (7 ).

ACTION PLAN : Check to see if there is a stealth bill  to establish WGU as an “official branch” in your state.  We recently discovered one in California.  If so, consider educating your elected representatives now.

• Ask your legislators how the “competency based” instruction of WGU will impact your state’s public university systems? What is the cost-benefit analysis? How many jobs will be lost to out-of-state WGU employees? The low cost of WGU tuition— its main selling point to “customers” —is politically attractive to state legislators since it undercuts for-profit providers who voraciously consume federal and state grant money and are difficult to regulate.  One can argue that our legislators should be investing in state community colleges, which offer even lower-cost vocational training programs, many with online components and a richer learning experience.

•  Ask your legislators to explain WGU’s lack of transparency and accountability.  WGU refuses to release official accreditation reports.  It is impossible to assess their  “success” in terms of graduation and retention rates until they release longitudinal studies of yearly cohorts for each program. Currently they refuse to provide this data on the basis they are a “private non-profit.”

For fun,  watch Aimee Shreck’s cartoon  “We Don’t Have Teachers at WGU!”    Bill Lyne of United Faculty of Washington provided the “real conversation” for this media moment.

Notes:

(1) AFT, “Teaming Up With Technology,” p. 19.

(2) Both Farber and Johnstone discuss these.

(3) This is a quote from Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Steven J. Tepper in Jenkin’s “Confronting the Challenges…” a MacArthur Foundation report,  p.  61.

(4) These concerns are found in both Farber and Johnstone.

(5) Paulson, 124.

(6) See Paulson for this explanation.  Note that there are other models of disruptive unbundling, for example University of Phoenix.

(7) Farber, 809-10.

References:

AFT.  “Teaming Up with Technology: How Unions Can Harness the Technology Revolution on Campus.” Report of the Task Force on Technology in Higher Education. January 1996.

Farber, Jerry. “The Third Circle: On Education and Distance Learning.” Sociological Perspectives. 41.4 (1998): 797-814.

Jenkins, Henry et al. “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.” Occasional Paper on Digital  Media and Learning.  MacArthur Foundation.

Johnstone, Douglas. “A Competency Alternative: Western Governors University.” Change. 37.4 (July-Aug 2005): 24-33.

Paulson, Karen.  “Reconfiguring Faculty Roles for Virtual Settings.” The Journal of Higher Education. 73.1 (Jan-Feb, 2002): 123-140.

JANUARY 2012.

With permission of Kris Olds (Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison), we are re-posting his Oct. 23, 2011 blog on “flexibility.”   Similar to the misuse of “accountability,”  “efficiency,” and “access,”  flexibility is another concept  being manipulated by the engineers of privatization or “financialization” of the public education sector in the United States, especially  the virtual school movement with its deep pockets, embedded politicians, and influential lobbyists.  For example, “flexibility” appears in a recent statement by former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, now working with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as directors of the Digital Learning Council:  “This thing <digital learning/virtual schools> is going to happen.  The question is whether there is going to be a road map—one that provides some direction and at the same time major flexibility.”  In the real world, it appears that flexibility is often decoupled from accountability given the current poor track record of many virtual schools/Educational Management Organizations (EMOs).   Abby Rapoport in her reportage for the Texas Observer “Education Inc.: How Private Companies Profit from Public Schools” also mentions the use of  efficiency,  often partnered with flexibility, as part of the ideology of  privatization: 

“Public education has always offered big contracts to for-profit companies in areas like construction and textbooks. But in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom—most of it supplied by private companies. The movement has been supported by business communities and non-profits like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and often takes a free market approach to public education. Reformers litter their arguments about education policy with corporate rhetoric and business-school buzzwords. They talk of the need for ‘efficiency,’ ‘innovation’ and ‘assessment’ in the classroom.”

 We are currently losing the rhetorical war on  the public perception of  “value” in public education. We need to show how an iteration and repetition of the same concepts —access, flexibility, innovation, efficiency, accountability—is being used to manipulate public perception.  Just because a virtual school provides access doesn’t mean it provides accountability in terms of student success, defined as completion to graduation and actually learning something WE define as important.  The same virtual school, however, may be accountable to share holders interested in projected  higher dividends achieved through access.   Rupert Murdock, who recently purchased Wireless Generation, an education technology company, sees “...a $500 billion sector <K-12>  in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs…”. Who would oppose the goals of  flexibility, accountability and innovation given the embedded positive emotional resonance of those values in mainstream U.S. culture? These terms are being endlessly repeated and conflated with virtual schools/digital learning/EMOs because of  the strong emotional resonance of these values with the public.  We need to clarify how the semantic boundaries of these terms are being manipulated, conflated, and misrepresented.    And we probably need to explain this more often and more effectively to the general pubic in 2012.  

Kris Olds blogs at GlobalHigherEd: Surveying the Construction of Global Knowledge/Spaces for the ‘Knowledge Economy.’

‘Flexibility’ is genuinely slippery concept, one that provides some sense of coherence with vagueness. It is also a concept that is a resource to be used in the pursuit of power.

I’m most familiar with the concept of flexibility in relationship to the changing nature of production systems. There has been a long debate in Economic Geography, for example, about phenomena like ‘flexible specialization’ and ‘flexible accumulation’. These interrelated concepts have helped scholars and industry analysts make sense of how production systems are evolving to cope with increasingly levels of competitive pressure, the emergence of global value chains, new forms of territorial development, and so on.

The concept of flexibility was also used, in abundance, when I lived and taught in Asia until 2001. It was frequently used in association with the corporatization (aka autonomy) agendas occurring at the same time as Asian higher education systems and institutions (HEIs) were expanding. Since then numerous systems of higher education (including Singapore, Malaysia, China) have seen expansion going hand in hand with rapid increases in funding, along with enhanced flexibility with respect to governance. Implementation problems exist, of course, and autonomy and flexibility mean different things to different people, but this was and still is the broad tenor of change.

It’s surely a sign of the times in America that we have also seen an expansion of the use of the concept of flexibility, though linked not to increased levels of funding, but to striking budget cuts. Given this, the concept of flexibility needs to be interrogated. This entry does that, though only in a very exploratory manner.

As noted above, flexibility is emerging as a keyword in some ongoing higher education debates in the US. For example, it is frequently used in in association with the ‘Charter University’ agenda in several states (e.g., Ohio). Closer to home (for me), flexibility was a mantra in deliberations and communications about the proposed ‘New Badger Partnership‘ (NBP) initiative put forward by the recently departed Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Carolyn ‘Biddy’ Martin) as well as the University of Wisconsin System alternative known as the ‘Wisconsin Idea Partnership‘ (WIP). If realized, the NBP would have led to the separation of UW-Madison from the UW System, along with numerous flexibilities and enhanced autonomy (from the System & the State). See here for an April 2011 summary of key elements of the NBP (vs the WIP), including proposed ‘flexibilities’ with respect to:

• Budgeting
• Tuition/Pricing
• Human Resources
• Capital Planning/Construction
• Financial Management
• Purchasing/Procurement
• Governance
• Accountability

In the end, the NBP was not supported by the State Government due to a complicated array of political factors, as well as a problematic planning process that generated ineffectual support on our campus.

Now, while the NBP is unlikely to be resurrected, some elements of it have been incorporated into the unfolding governance agendas reshaping both the future of the UW System and UW-Madison itself.  A state-appointed “Special Task Force on UW Restructuring and Operational Flexibilities” was recently established to consider the future of the UW System (it will report back by January 2013).

Given the debates about the NBP to date, and the announcement of even more budget cuts last week, it is inevitable that the  ‘flexibility’ mantra will continue to exist. Indeed last week we witnessed one Wisconsin politician (Alberta Darling) state that:

“[U]niversities could use budget flexibilities passed by lawmakers in June as part of the budget. ‘It’s not going to be easy, but it can work out,’ Darling said.”

But what is the full meaning and significance of flexibility with respect to higher education? I’m not 100% sure, to be honest, but what I have noted is that there is more missing from the debate about ‘flexibility as solution’ than there is present. In short, there is a surprising absence of information about what flexibility is and can be defined as, what it can help achieve, and what its costs and limitations are.

There is also an absence of discussion about the long-term implications of relying on ‘flexibility’ to play a significant role in resolving what are in reality structural problems including the steady decline of state support for higher education, as well as the absence of a compact about optimal and necessary levels of support for public higher education. In other words the flexibility debate is a problematically truncated one.

In the interest of helping myself sort things out, I’ve put together a few thoughts and questions about flexibility. Please feel free to disagree with them, and/or add more to the list:

• Flexibility as legitimacy vehicle: The discourse of ‘flexibility’ masks the scale of budget cuts by tying painful cuts to a hoped-for (and unbudgeted, see below) mediating factor. The chance of new flexibilities generating enough savings or new revenue streams to significantly cover the costs of proposed and actual budget cuts cannot be anything but marginal. The language of new forms of flexibility can let politicians off the hook in that they do not need to accept, in public and in private, responsibility for the full scale of the cuts they themselves are proposing.

• Flexibility as reward: US politicians seem to be putting forth new flexibilities as a defacto reward of sorts if HEIs accept deep budget reductions. But why were these flexibilities held back for such a long time, including by politicians (Democrats as well as Republicans) who are ideologically predisposed to a constrained role for the state in the development process? And are these rewards indeed rewards for all? For example, flexibility on tuition can generate enhanced costs for students, or flexibility on governance can weaken the ability of some key stakeholders to participate in governance.

• Flexibility as a means to enhanced governance: The offer of flexibility usually comes in association with significant budget cuts and new found demands regarding ‘accountability,’ ‘efficiency’, ‘transparency,’ and the like.  In most cases enhanced flexibilities come with enhanced forms of governance by Government, not less. These forms of governance can entail an attempt to reshape curricula, course offerings, program funding, faculty practices, etc. Agreements about some forms of flexibility have the capacity to enable Government to burrow more deeply, not less, into what happens within higher education institutions. The irony is that there is no correlation between declining levels of public funding and the desire to govern public HEIs.

• Flexibility unbudgeted: Flexibilities are often put forward as a key solution to coping with budget cuts, but the potential cost savings associated with proposed changes are rarely (if ever) modeled in detail, nor in a transparent manner. This is arguably a politically-based ‘wish and a prayer’ approach to strategic planning.

• Flexibility costs vis a vis implementation capabilities: The provision of many forms of flexibility involves shifts in the nature of governance, not its erasure. The recalibration process — pushing responsibilities up, or down (which is usually the case) — puts additional demands on the other units and officials. It is important to determine if these HEIs and officials have the capabilities to take on new responsibilities. If flexibility is distributed more widely, downwards, is there a ripple effect generated such that multiple units are now responsible versus the one before? Are proposed flexibilities more or less costly (in terms of labor costs) to implement in aggregate (e.g., across the campuses of a system)?

• Flexibility’s power geometries: the application of ‘flexibilities’ in most institutional contexts involves the realignment of power relations at a state-HEI scale, and at an intra-institutional scale, with a planned breakdown of the status quo for good and bad. The realignment outcome often increases the power of some parties, and decreases the power of other parties. It is worth reflecting if this inevitable outcome is an implicit or explicit objective of proffered flexibilities, with an eye to the developmental agendas of various parties.

These are but six aspects I see associated with the emerging ‘flexibility’ agenda for public higher education in the US.

Who could be against flexibility? No one, really, and certainly not me (having worked in some very rigid systems of higher education)! But surely we need to be more critical about what the concept of flexibility really means given how frequently it is thrown around in this era of austerity. Given the nearly 200 years of building up a world class public higher education system in the US, the stakes are simply too high to allow concepts like flexibility be accepted at face value, especially if they mask agendas that are facilitating the decline of said system. This is the era of the ‘knowledge economy,’ after all, and higher education is a critically important dimension of the systems of innovation we are dependent upon for future prosperity.

Reposted on December 18, 2011 with permission by the author: http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/unpacking-the-flexibility-mantra-in-us-higher-education/  (October 23, 2011)

Court Rules That Florida Politicians Must Justify Their Actions

Just before Thanksgiving, the First District Court of Appeals told Florida politicians “no.”  In a rare move, the entire panel of 15 judges voted 8/7 to deny the writ of prohibition and certify the suit as a “question of public importance,” sending it directly to the Florida Supreme Court.

Attorneys representing Senate President Mike Haridopolos, House Speaker Dean Cannon and the state used an obscure writ to try to stop the suit and deny the courts the right to consider whether the Florida Legislature meets its “paramount duty” to the people as described in Article IX, section 1 of the state constitution.

State attorneys called the funding of Florida public education a “political matter.”

Have Florida politicians forgotten that we, the taxpayers, are the reason they have any money at all to send back to our school districts?  The explosion of “education adequacy” lawsuits springing up in states from Texas to Maine means that people everywhere are weighing the same question.

Each and every year we spend our hard-earned money building public education for our children.  We pay our property taxes to fund public education only to see billions cut from education budgets.   Wanting the best for our children, we send in hundreds of millions of dollars in crayons and paper.  We sell enough wrapping paper to cover the earth three times.  We use that money to pay for direct classroom needs like books, smart-boards and computers.  This asset belongs to us.

Despite these facts, Florida politicians continue to make high art out of subverting the will of the people.  They do not value our state constitution as the purest expression of the peoples’ will.   Article IX, section 1 of the Florida Constitution clearly instructs the Florida Legislature that their “paramount duty” is to fund a free high-quality system of public education for every child.

Instead, Florida politicians, coached by Jeb Bush and the American Legislative Exchange Council, are laser-focused on showing the whole country the most expedient way to sell public education off to the highest bidder.  Clearly, a majority of Florida politicians, tempted by special interest dollars, now ignore their official oath to uphold the state constitution.   Our public servants refuse to serve us.

The court did its job.  The 8 judges who solidly rejected the State’s move to silence the voice of the court have brought hope to every classroom in this country.  Their decision says that the court believes it can decide whether Florida public education fails the high-quality test.  It says this case is not just about funding:

DOES ARTICLE IX, SECTION 1(A), FLORIDA CONSTITUTION, SET FORTH JUDICIALLY ASCERTAINABLE STANDARDS THAT CAN BE USED TO DETERMINE THE ADEQUACY, EFFICIENCY, SAFETY, SECURITY, AND HIGH QUALITY OF PUBLIC EDUCATION ON A STATEWIDE BASIS, SO AS TO PERMIT A COURT TO DECIDE CLAIMS FOR DECLARATORY JUDGMENT (AND SUPPLEMENTAL RELIEF) ALLEGING NONCOMPLIANCE WITH ARTICLE IX, SECTION 1(A) OF THE FLORIDA CONSTITUTION?

This is Florida’s chance at redemption.  Instead of providing outrageous supermarket headlines, Florida just may be the place where the whole country learns the truth behind the “education reform agenda.”   The court action will force an unvarnished discussion.  It won’t take long for average citizens to see that these unwanted, unfunded “reforms” are a shameless scheme to rob public tax dollars from the education pot of gold meant for our children.  Maybe then, the word “no” will be on everyone’s lips.

Kathleen Oropeza is co-founder of FundEducationNow.org.  She and her partners Christine Bramuchi and Linda Kobert are plaintiffs in the lawsuit mentioned in this article.  Contact her at Kathleen@fundeducationnow.org

Link to Florida First District Court Decision:

http://opinions.1dca.org/written/opinions2011/11-23-2011/10-6285.pdf

Guest blogger Deborah Keisch Polin is a parent, graduate student and education activist in Western Massachusetts. She is a member of the Education Radio Collective, a radio program that features interviews, testimony and analysis on issues facing public education in the U.S. through voices of teachers, parents, students, community members, education activists and education scholars, found at: Education-radio.blogspot.com. Please check out Ed Radio’s show on education and the 99% movement – We Are the 99%, Fighting for the “Public” in Education – at: http://education-radio.blogspot.com/2011/10/we-are-99-fighting-for-public-in.html

Reflections from UMASS-Amherst: The Occupy Campus Movement

As I sit down to write this post, I have several different tabs open on my browser that I keep compulsively checking – each keeping track of the happenings at various Occupy Movement/99% locations around the country on this International Day of Action. Just a few days after Zucotti Park was aggressively cleared, and thousands of dollars of supplies and personal possessions were destroyed, those who have been residents there for the past two months are undeterred by these intimidation tactics and are back at it, with overwhelming support from across the country as Occupy camps and actions emerge in more spaces daily.

I am particularly inspired by how this movement— in the streets, parks and on university grounds— is increasingly making the connection between the issues of the 99% and the fight for equity in public k-12 and higher education, and how it exposes the efforts to transform education – at all levels – into a profit-making enterprise. Teach-ins —by students, by faculty, and by community members -—are becoming just as commonplace and expected in these spaces as the use of the human microphone and the people’s libraries. Higher education students, staff, instructors and faculty are fighting back—demonstrating that we are fed up with increasing tuition and fees, overwhelming debt (student debt in this country now exceeds total credit card debt), unaffordable health care costs, curriculum driven by private research interests and classrooms that are increasingly surveilled. The connections between these and the Occupy Movement are obvious, and the opportunity to point that out  is one we cannot afford to pass up.

There is no tolerance for dissent in the current climate of privatized attitudes shaping public education. Berkeley professor Celeste Langon, aggressively arrested during a recent Occupy Cal event at Berkeley, notes this in a post she wrote upon her release for the blog Remaking the University. In the following excerpt from that post, she writes about the university justification for breaking up the Berkeley encampment containing a language of corporate efficiency. She begins with a quote from Berkeley’s Chancellor Robert Birgeneau: (Read the whole post here: http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-i-got-arrested-with-occupy-cal-and.html)

We simply cannot afford to spend our precious resources and, in particular, student tuition, on costly and avoidable expenses associated with violence or vandalism. No one wishes to “waste” resources in this climate. Yet if one follows this logic one can see the looming threat: lawful assembly, peaceful dissent, and free inquiry—even so-called “breadth requirements”—can all entail some cost. They interfere with “getting and spending.” Dissent, like free inquiry, is sometimes inefficient. Dissent doesn’t always have a “deliverable.” But it takes time to determine a just answer to “What is to be done?”.

This attitude is contrary to the core of what higher education should ideally represent— an environment of critical inquiry, which includes an examination of the conditions of working and learning at a public university.  Celeste Langon serves as a model for academics to resist this co-opting of their profession by corporate and elite interests. But she can’t stand alone. Not everyone is in a position to get arrested, but we each must ask ourselves what can I do – what does my dissent look like? Because inaction equals complicity in the destruction of academic freedom and of schooling as we know it.

My own state of Massachusetts ranks 46 out of the 50 states in per capita appropriations for higher education (See the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts for more data: http://phenomonline.org/). This is not a time for compromise with the university. At UMass-Amherst we have tried that, and conditions have not changed. Our graduate student union has successfully negotiated raises for graduate employees, only to have the university counter these raises with increased fees (by 7.5% this year alone). The health care benefits that the union has fought for have just been cut with a 17% increase in premiums and a 15% co-insurance requirement for any off-campus care, which includes Ob/Gyn services. This prompted panic among pregnant graduate students who suddenly have to come up with thousands of dollars in labor and delivery costs that they hadn’t budgeted for. These are just a few of the examples that push access to a public university education further out of reach for many students.

The encampment and rallies at Occupy Cal are an inspiration. On my own campus, Occupy UMass is off to a slow but steady start, with more of a presence each day. And I am struck by the flicker of hope and excitement I feel at the immense possibility this moment has opened. Access to quality education for all people must be at the center of this fight – and that fight must be now – there is no time left for negotiation.

Comments from the Editor:

Several excellent essays, written over the past few weeks, reflect Polin’s concern about protecting the intellectual space of the  pubic university or college campus from corporatized violence and repression.  See Henry Giroux’s Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals  and Juan Cole’s How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class Wars.

Blog report by Teri Yamada

“Enough is Enough!”  Reporting on the  CFA Nov. 17 Strike at CSU DH

The California Faculty Association, union friends, and concerned students successfully shut down two CSU campuses today with the clear message “Enough is Enough!”  The flawed management of the CSU needs some careful scrutiny as executives get bonuses and students get tuition increases.  Chancellor Reed, who professed to the media this week that no faculty would participate in  the strike actions at CSU Dominguez Hills  and CSU East Bay, was in for a big surprise today as hundreds of strikers picketed the entrances to two campuses.  This is the day after the CSU Board of Trustees voted to raise student tuition fees  again — this time 9%— even before the California legislature  cut the CSU budget.

Today’s message —Enough is enough— reflects more than anger at  Chancellor Reed’s refusal to grant a quarter percent raise out of a $4.5 billion CSU state budget.  It is anger at being called ‘greedy and irresponsible’ by executives who give themselves significant bonuses, equity increases and raises rather than support courses for students and the faculty who teach them.   It is time for CSU management to get its priorities straight.  Enough is enough!

Since becoming the head of the CSU in 1998, Chancellor Reed has overseen an increase in student tuition of over 263%.   In fact, since 1998 (adjusting for inflation) student fees have increased 106% while faculty salaries have fallen 10%.  Meanwhile, administrators have enjoyed a 23% pay increase.  One egregious example of management’s misplaced priorities is the recent $100,000 bonus given to the new San Diego State president on the same day the CSU Board of Trustees voted to increase student tuition by 12%.    In fact, the CSU spent $75 million less on faculty pay last year than in 2007 due to layoffs—while the student-faculty ratio continues to increase.

So enough is enough!  Selfish management priorities are costing Californians access to quality public higher education.  Buildings are crumbling, technology infrastructure in the classroom needs updating, faculty need support to improve their courses and to maintain their expertise, students need mentoring.  Instead, the Chancellor  uses his Executive Order power, without any state legislative oversight, to enact new and expensive programs with questionable efficacy.  Mandatory Early Start, for example, is a new program that requires all entering freshman who need remedial education courses to take a 1-unit summer course before they can ‘start’ in fall 2012.  This is an example of an absurd waste of taxpayer money.  Another new plan, CSU Online, may set up a new corporation to sell the ‘CSU brand’ to foreign students and the military, funneling needed resources away from campuses to a virtual CSU.  And the Chancellor just hired yet another administrator, this time for the new CSU Online initiative, at a time when costly experimental programs siphon money from courses that students need to graduate.

These facts and others have led members of the California Faculty Association to vote 93% in favor of going on strike. We are not going to stand for continued disrespect and erosion of our rights and the quality of the CSU.  Faculty, librarians, counselors and coaches — their knowledge and dedication to students —are the value in the CSU, not new experimental programs of dubious merit or expensive executives.    The question now is will our elected representatives in Sacramento and the good citizens of California decide to exercise some oversight over a Chancellor who has failed the CSU.

Power Grab in the California Community College System

The California Community College Chancellor’s Office spent the last year convening a task force to examine how student success might be improved within the 112 colleges comprising the entire statewide system.  In October, they published their results and are currently providing forums throughout the state soliciting comments, recommendations, and any other feedback from selected audiences.  The Community College Association, CCA, had a presentation by the Chancellor himself, Dr. Jack Scott, and immediate past president of the Statewide Academic Senate, Jane Patton.  We found not only these initial eight (8) overriding concerns with the content of the 22 recommendations outlined in their publication dated October 201, but proposed 42 responses, and 14 data collection inquiries.

1.     It appears that the Board of Governors (BOG) would become an overriding agency with similar powers and directive capability similar to those of the University of California Regents.

2.     The recommendations outline a program that if initiated, would place the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office with similar powers that the California State University Chancellor’s Office maintains, as it would relate to the 112 community colleges within the system. The CSU system has one collective bargaining contract. The California community colleges have at least 72 different collective bargaining contracts. Both faculty and students are not supportive of the outcomes that have been secured with the CSU Chancellor’s Office.

3.     If the 22 recommendations were to be finalized, Prop 98 funds would be redistributed in a manner inconsistent with current law and damaging for students. Funding decision mandates would be taken away from faculty and students and replaced by those exclusively decided by the BOG, Local administration, and the Chancellor’s Office.

4.     A program designed to provide additional power to both the BOG and the Chancellor’s Office would take autonomy away from the local districts and their Boards of Trustees. This would be a fundamental shift away from the Master Plan for Higher Education in California. This would significantly alter the California Community College Mission Statement and it would betray the concept of local control.

5.     There is no consistent and dedicated enforcement mechanism established to make the recommendations feasible.

6.     There is no clear source identified for the substantial increase in funding which would be needed to implement these recommendations. There is a hope that the legislators would provide additional funding, but in these hard economic times, it seems nearly impossible.

7.     A highly volatile definition of “student success” as defined by this group does not meet the same definition that many within the community colleges believe to be the most acceptable.

8.     A temporary economic downturn has allowed for a response that significantly changes the role or core mission of the community college by losing community services and lifelong learning.

To view our entire response to the task force recommendations, visit our website cca4me.org.

Real post date: Nov. 27, 2011.

“The Momentum is Gaining: Enough Is Enough!”

On November 9, I walked an information picket line at California State University East Bay ( CSUEB) in support of the California Faculty Association’s fight to defend public higher education.  “Enough is enough” is the rallying cry for faculty in a system whose management–despite fact finders’ discoveries–refuses to face the facts, honor the contract, and allocate salary monies to faculty.  Enough is enough in a system that, despite dramatic increases in class size and profound challenges in remediation and graduation rates, continues to reduce the share of instructional expenditures, now at 35%.  Enough is enough in a system in which, despite tens of thousands of students being turned away and thousands of others for whom affordable higher education has slipped away, the chancellor identifies alleged low executive compensation as a key problem.  That is Wall Street thinking: satiate the insatiable 1% at the public trough and starve the 99%, while blaming public employees for the system’s problems.  Enough is enough.

The momentum is gaining.  On November 8, in a landslide, the people of Ohio also said enough is enough.  They voted to repeal SB 5.  They voted overwhelmingly to reject the initiative of Governor Kasich, a former Lehman Brothers executive who helped  the state pension fund lose hundreds of millions of dollars (invested in Lehman Brothers) and yet who blamed public employees for the state’s economic woes (after passing tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy).  The people of Ohio voted to repeal a bill that gutted, and for full-time faculty eliminated, longstanding rights to collectively bargain.  They voted in support of public employees.

SB 5 is part of a national assault on working people.  In state after state, Tea Party governors and legislators have sought to eliminate collective bargaining for public employees.  In statement after statement, public employees are denigrated and union workers are demonized, though they are the people who save, nurture, and teach us.

In Ohio, a broad coalition was formed of blue and white collar, public and private sector unions, of community groups, of grandmothers and students, and more, under the umbrella, We are Ohio.  It formed to reverse the assault on public employees and public institutions.  It formed in support of the idea that teachers and firefighters, first responders and professors, police and nurses, and other public employees are key to our future.  And the coalition, We are Ohio, won.  By a mile.  By working together.

So it is on the information picket line at the East Bay campus.  Students called out support, schoolteachers walked with signs calling for a fair contract, and teamsters honked their truck horns in solidarity with professors.  The 99% are seeing they have common cause, and they are speaking out in support of one another.

“We are all Badgers!” was the rallying cry in Wisconsin’s battle over public employees’ collective bargaining rights.  The response to the assault led to the recall of two state senators, and now to a recall drive on Governor Walker.  The tens of thousands of people in Wisconsin who took to the streets and the Democratic legislators who took to neighboring states gave strength to their compatriots in Ohio and beyond.

So, now, as the rallying cry “We are ALL Ohio!” takes hold, the staggeringly successful struggle of this broad coalition is giving hope to and strengthening the resolve of public employees across the country.  It is possible, together, to reverse the tide. To those whose political platform is to eliminate the civil rights of workers, women, same sex couples, immigrants, and the voting rights of citizens, to those who wish to eliminate the advances of the 20^th century that have strengthened our country, it is possible to not just say, enough is enough, but to successfully challenge and change public policy.

Step by step, day by day, battle by battle, the momentum is building.  Not only in these state struggles but also in the (inter)national OccupyWallStreet (OWS) movement that is creating space and foregrounding the dramatically sharpened, inequitable, and unhealthy stratification in our society in ways that have reshaped public discourse and public policy proposals.  OWS has tapped into and catalyzed a powerful national sentiment that is repainting our social and political landscape.  It has helped rekindle a sense that not just resistance but also change is possible.  It has fed on the hunger for and fostered the momentum for a social movement to change our country’s path.

The momentum, and sense of being part of something larger, was evident in the information picket line on Loop Drive into the CSU East Bay campus, where California professors under fire took heart from the victory in Ohio and the sense of a growing pushback.  It was evident in the energy of an event that is a precursor to a November 17 strike on two California State University campuses.  It was evident in professors’ understanding that this is a first step in fostering political pressure on administration to honor the contract and bargain in good faith.  Enough is enough.

The CFA’s choice of East Bay and Dominguez Hills as the sites for November 17 action is significant.  These are two of the campuses with the most diverse student bodies in the system.  They represent the historic mission of the CSU as the people’s university, the university of the 99%.  They also represent the best future and hope for the state and the country in which the growth demographics of 18-21 year-olds are lower income students, students of color and immigrants.  And yet in another shameful statement of misplaced priorities, these two campuses are among the most underfunded in the system.

Enough is enough.  As the California Faculty Association continues its battle to ensure that the CSU be driven more by a commitment to the people who educate and who are the 99%, than by a continued catering to the desires of the 1%, we are all the CFA.  The momentum is building.  It is time for us all to support our colleagues in California and to help continue and build the momentum nationally to change our course from the policies of recent decades that further stratify our society and that favor and further enrich the 1%.  It is time for us all to demand that we support and invest in our future, in the public institutions and public employees who serve and who are the 99%.

The second national gathering of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE) is taking place at UMass in a warm and welcoming Boston this weekend.   Over seventy participants from 18 states  are meeting to continue the discussion on the future of higher education that began in Los Angeles on January 11, 2011.   Representatives  from the initial L.A. gathering ultimately ratified seven guiding principles  “Quality Higher Education for the 21st Century.“  These focus on access, equity, affordability, and quality as core principles  in CHFE’s effort to maintain public higher education as a right for everyone in the United States.

The UMass gathering is structured around a series of workshops and discussions that address issues facing a national grassroots movement with the intent  to preserve public higher education.  These include the importance of overcoming challenges to unity and solidarity by strengthening ties among  college sectors, between adjunct and tenure-line professors, students and faculty.  One workshop explores how to engage the media about the real crisis in higher education: a political issue regarding public policy priorities.

The meeting began on Friday evening with opening remarks, including information from students associated with Occupy Boston,  who encouraged the development of stronger student-faculty alliances across the nation.   Some participants also gave short reports on current concerns and trends in privatization occurring in their state and campus system.  A similar pattern emerges across the United States:  restructuring through disinvestment, sharp tuition increases, and the undermining of collective bargaining agreements.  This pattern of restructuring reveals  the intent to eradicate faculty governance as power is consolidated at the top management level of public colleges and universities.  New York is currently on the list of  extreme examples illustrating this privatization trend, although faculty in many states — Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Oregon, to name a few—are facing a range of challenges around  restructuring.  Prof. Gary Rhoades  (ASU) encouraged the participants to re-imagine public higher education according to their values.

The highlight of Saturday morning was the launch of CHFE’s Think Tank  under the direction of Rhoades and an advisory panel.  This think tank is established to support sound public policy on issues in higher education while  developing research that will serve as the basis for constructive change.  Three reports are imminent: “100s Not Served: Who’s Not Going Back to Community College;”  “Who Is Professor Staff And How Can S/he Teach So Many Classes?”;  Misplaced Priorities: Refocusing Resources on the Core Academic Mission.”  These inaugural reports will provide a counter-narrative to the current national framing of privatization as the sole choice for public higher education. They will foreground the flaws in the current rhetoric of student success in  new management’s  “efficiency” agenda to graduate large numbers of students as quickly as possible while downsizing faculty and weakening quality.  The report by Maria Maisto, Esther Merves and other scholars associated with the New Faculty Majority— “Who Is Professor Staff And How Can S/he Teach So Many Classes?” —will examine the serious issue of contingent faculty work life, including a  lack of academic rights and job security, factors that also undermine student success.

The event will conclude on Sunday with a discussion on the future direction of  CFHE.