L.A. Administrators Challenge Deasy and School Board on A-G

Last year, the Los Angeles School Board mandated that all students pass several A-G courses with a C or better. A-G courses are those that are accepted by the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems as prerequisites for their courses and are seen by many reformers as the minimum we should be expecting from our students under the misguided expectation that all students can and should go to college. In support of the mandate, Superintendent Deasy argued that A-G was a glowing success in other districts (e.g., San Jose).

Indeed, many districts, including my own, have also mandated that all students take A-G courses, but they do not all require a C or better for graduation. In many districts, students who fail an A-G course can pass an alternate course to meet graduation requirements. This makes sense considering there are not enough university slots for each of California’s high school graduates and many cannot afford college or prefer to go directly into the workforce. Furthermore, many students simply are not academically ready for these courses (e.g., those reading below grade level or lacking in the prerequisite skills).

Consequently, large numbers of students who take A-G courses are unable to pass them with a C or better. Indeed, Deasy’s claim that A-G was a glowing success in San Jose was based on inaccurate data. Initially, San Jose claimed that two-thirds of their students were passing their A-G courses with a C or better (hardly a glowing success). Yet after reexamining the data, San Jose is now saying their pass rate is only 36%.

The Association of Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA) is now calling for an end to the mandate, according to the 4LAKids Blog. AALA has pointed to Deasy’s politicizing of the issue and the faulty data used to support his case. However, back when the school board was still investigating the merits of the A-G requirement, AALA argued that several reforms and student supports would be necessary for the policy to succeed: more support for English Learners and students with disabilities; additional summer support programs; interdisciplinary professional development; better articulation with community colleges and vocational training for students who choose not to go to college; recruiting of more math and science teachers; increased science and technology classrooms; and better outreach to parents. To date, AALA says that none of its proposals have been implemented.

It is nice to hear about school administrators taking collective action to fight for sound educational policy, particularly in light of the near universal acceptance of (or lack of resistance to) No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and Common Core Standards). However, AALA does not go nearly far enough. It is clearly idiotic to require a C or better in in A-G classes in order to graduate, but even the less extreme (but more common) mandate that all students be required to take these classes is wrongheaded. San Jose’s 36% rate of C or better should make it obvious that large numbers of students simply are not academically ready for these classes. Forcing them to take the classes anyway is only setting them up for failure. This contributes to low self-efficacy and alienation from school and learning, which in turn can lead them to give up entirely on school and drop out.

Even for resilient students who are able to shrug off the failure and move on with their lives, they still find themselves in the position of having to make up the course (or an alternative) in order to have sufficient credits to graduate. This places an unnecessary burden on them to double up classes during the next school year, take community college or continuation school classes after school and repeat classes during the summer. This can prevent them from taking electives, or participating in athletics and extracurricular activities. Many of these students come from low income families and have to work after school and on weekends to help support their families, which may be why they failed an A-G class in the first place. Having to repeat classes only exacerbates this challenge.

Mandatory A-G for all students is also bad for those students who are academically ready for these classes. Forcing large numbers of students into classes for which they are inadequately prepared creates management problems for teachers. When some students are reading below grade level, repeatedly absent, failing to complete assignments, coming to class unprepared, and neglecting to follow instructions, it not only takes teacher attention away from helping other students, but it sometimes prevents them from covering all the required content or having the time to indulge in “teachable moments” and enrichment activities.

Perhaps most problematic with the A-G requirement is its delusional premise that all children can and should go on to college, despite the fact that there aren’t enough spaces in the UC or CSU systems for every high school senior, nor the scholarships and grants to make it affordable. Yet, even if college was free and there were enough classrooms and professors for every 18-year old in the state, students will continue to drop out or lack the prerequisites for college as long as we continue to ignore the underlying socioeconomic problems that cause the achievement gap and prevent students from being successful in A-G courses. The pipeline to college does not start at high school or with college preparatory coursework. Rather, it starts before children are born, with the health and material wellbeing of their families and children’s subsequent abilities to compete with their peers.

UC’s Secret Lover. . . Wall Street . . . Students and Employees Get Screwed

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

California voters recently approved Proposition 30, which would temporarily raise taxes slightly on the wealthiest state residents while also imposing a regressive sales tax hike on the poorest residents. The measure is expected to help close California’s current $16 billion deficit, but not to restore the tens of billions in revenues that have been slashed over the past few years.

I recently wrote that despite the increased revenues from Prop 30, both of the state’s major university systems (CSU and UC) will be increasing fees and tuition for some students. In the case of UC, tuition for certain graduate programs could increase as much as 35%.

It is not simply that Prop 30 doesn’t come close to restoring pre-recession funding levels. It doesn’t. There is a deeper, institutional problem that Prop 30 merely covers up and plays into: The tax system and the political system are both designed to maximize the profits and bolster the economic interests of the employing class. Consider that Prop 30 did not touch capital gains, inheritance, corporate or property taxes. It did nothing to bring oil royalties up to the fairly low rates charged by Texas and Alaska. It essentially left the filthy rich filthy rich and the moderately rich still comfortably rich.

Even some of the increased revenues from Prop 30 that are earmarked for education will go directly into the hands of Wall Street bankers, rather than toward tuition reductions, increased course offerings or raises for professors. According to a recent report by UC Berkeley researchers, the UC Board of regents has made risky deals with Wall Street banks over the past decade known as interest rate swaps. They supposedly did this as a hedge against rising interest rates on variable rate bonds, but the swaps turned out to be a losing bet because interest rates dropped in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown and have remained low since then.

These swap deals have already cost UC almost $57 million, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. However, another $200 million in losses are anticipated over the next 30 years (the university is currently paying Wall Street close to $750,000 per month according to the Nation). UC is expected to receive $250 million from Prop 30, which is not even enough to cover its Wall Street debts, let alone provide any financial relief for its students or employees.  Nevertheless, the university plans on spending $10 million a year from Prop 30 to service its Wall Street debt, leaving little for tuition relief, increased course offerings, student services or wage increases for employees. Tuition has tripled over the past few years, while salaries for professors and other employees have remained stagnant. Indeed, the regents are warning of more cuts and tuition increases, despite Prop 30, including a 24% across-the-board tuition hike over the next four years.

One might reasonably wonder how the regents made such a blunder. After all, it is well known among gamblers that, in the end, the House always comes out on top. But this wasn’t simply a matter of some naïve regents making a bad gamble. Rather, the regents ARE Wall Street insiders. They not only knew exactly what they were doing, but likely did it to enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of taxpayers, students and employees. For example, the regent’s chief financial officer, Peter Taylor, came from Lehman Bros, where he had been managing director for public finance at a time when Lehman Bros. had been hired to help expand UC's debt load. Taylor continued to work for Lehman Bros while he was a regent. UC’s interest rate swap with Lehman ultimately cost the university over $23 million.

Similarly, UC Regent Monica Lozano has earned $1.5 million serving on the Board of Bank of America at the same time the university negotiated interest rate swaps with BofA worth a potential $28 million in profits to the bank. UC Executive Vice President Nathan Brostrom—a former managing director for public finance at JP Morgan—worked on financing for UC at a time when his former company was hired as a bond broker and swap counterparty for the UC Davis Medical Center, a deal in which the university ultimately lost $22.5 million. And UC Regent Russell Gould, who chaired the finance committee from 2008 to 2009 and the full board from 2009 to 2010, was receiving a salary from Wachovia/Wells Fargo from 1996 to 2009. (The regents’ biographies have been excerpted from the UC report)

The UC Berkeley report notes that the university obtained the interest rate swaps in order to finance the development of medical centers on three of its campuses (UCLA, UCD and UCSF). Since the medical centers are money-making enterprises for the university and since student tuition was used as collateral for the interest rate swaps, there was a financial incentive for the regents to jack up tuition. However, the university never had a chance to win on its gambles as the interest rate swaps were all based on rates determined by LIBOR, rates that were rigged in one of the largest banking scandals in history. (BofA is one of the banks currently under investigation in the LIBOR scandal).

Some have argued that the swaps made sense at the time and that the regents, despite the conflict of interest, had the university’s best interests in mind. However, if this was true, one might expect them to re-negotiate their loans or sue the banks, as have many other large institutions that have been screwed by similar deals. So far, they have made no indication that either plan is in the works. On the contrary, some regents are arguing that the swaps are still good deals, since the bonds don’t mature until 2047.

Meanwhile, the university will continue to transfer three quarters of a million dollars per month from the taxpayers to Wall Street banks to service their loans, thus keeping the bankers comfortable and their employees and students ever more stretched.

Lack-of-School-to-Prison Pipeline

Image from Flickr, by aclu.socal

We often hear of the school-to-prison pipeline, where kids exit our public education system poorly educated and without a diploma or skills, leaving them vulnerable to unemployment and a future life of crime. While this is clearly a bombastic overstatement, it is true that prisoners tend to be less literate and educated than society at large. Indeed, some estimates indicate that as many as 66% of California’s inmates are reading below a 9^th-grade reading level, more than 50% below a 7^th-grade level, and 21% below a 3^rd-grade level, suggesting that there is a link between education and incarceration. However, the majority of inmates are also poor and, since there is also a link between wealth and educational success, it is likely that poverty is the cause of both their incarceration and illiteracy.

Even if poverty is ignored, there is another significant connection between education and incarceration: the large transfer of public resources over the past several decades from public K-12 and higher education to support the growing prison system. This has not only reduced the ability of schools to provide a decent education to all of their students, but it has also stripped away many of the extra resources necessary to support their lowest income students. Furthermore, with the defunding of the state’s prestigious UC and CSU university systems, and the concomitant skyrocketing cost of tuition, it is becoming harder and harder to afford a university education, even for those students who are reading at grade level. Since 2007, tuition at UC and CSU has more than doubled, while community college students have seen their fees increase 80%.

Lack of a college education decreases people’s earning power and their ability to obtain a job in the first place. This does not necessarily lead to criminal behavior or incarceration, but it does contribute to the growing wealth gap and to the overall decline living standards. The defunding of the universities has also made it nearly impossible for young professors to obtain tenure or to earn sufficient wages to support themselves in the expensive cities where most of the universities exist, forcing some to abandon California for other regions or to leave teaching altogether.

The problem is not purely one of insufficient tax revenues, though this is certainly a big part of it. The state also has a problem with irresponsible spending that panders to the powerful Correctional Officers union, at the expense of the general public. Consider that California spent 13% less on higher education in 2011 than it did in 1980, after adjusting for inflation, while prison funding increased by 436% in that same time period according to California Common Sense (CACS), a non-partisan policy organization. The CACS report, called “Winners and Losers: Corrections and Higher Education in California,” says that the state now covers only 25% of the costs of its universities, compared to 1980, when it paid for 66% of the costs of higher education.  

Over the past three decades, California’s population has grown by more than 57% to reach its current population of 37.3 million residents. Student population growth during this period roughly kept pace with the overall growth of the state population, yet the incarceration rate increased at more than eight times the rate of the state population. This was largely due to the “3 Strikes Law” and irrational crack cocaine sentencing laws that have led to long prison sentences for thousands of nonviolent offenders, or Proposition 21, which made it easier to try juveniles as adults. These laws were all heavily supported by the prison guards union and have provided the justification for bloated prison budgets and bloated prisons.  Despite the fact that the state’s crime rate has been declining since the early 1990s, its prison population increased by 42% since 1992.The report notes that 60% of the increase in Department of Corrections (CDCR) costs between 1980 and 2012 is due to this increase in prisoners.

Even with a massive prison construction program, the state still could not keep up with the rapid influx of inmates, resulting in prisons that were operating at up to twice their capacities. The state is now under federal mandate to reduce its prison population to a mere 137% of capacity within 2 years.  Gov. Brown has addressed the problem by releasing state prisoners into county jails, further stressing county infrastructures and budgets. In reality, the state has thousands of people incarcerated who have committed only minor nonviolent infractions and these prisoners could be released into the general public with virtually no risk to public safety, thus saving the state millions of dollars.

At the same time that California has been expanding its prison system, hiring more guards, and increasing their pay, it has been slashing programs and services for its college students. Over the past thirty years, the ratio of staff (including faculty) to students has declined. In 1980, there was one faculty member per 16 students at UC, and one faculty per 21 students at CSU. By 2010, the ratio was one faculty per 21 students at UC, and one faculty per 32 students at CSU. At the same time, middle management at UC has been growing dramatically, now comprising 20% of its budget.

In contrast to the situation at the state’s universities, the number of prison guards per adult inmate has been growing and is now roughly what it was in 1980, despite the large increase in prisoners. Services for prisoners, however, have not kept up. This means that there are fewer counselors, doctors, teachers and other support staff per prisoner, thus reducing the quality of health care, education and general safety of prisoners, as well as the chances that prisoners will be ready for life on the outside when they are released. Furthermore, the ratio of parole staff to parolees is at an all-time low (roughly 1.6 staff per 100 parolees), increasing the odds that a convict will end up back in prison. (California has a recidivism rate of 60%).

While being a college professor is generally considered more prestigious and higher status than being a prison guard, their salaries do not reflect this. In 1980, the average guard salary in California was $25,858 a year, while the average CSU faculty salary was about $29,015 annually. By 2006 the average guard salary had reached $94,518 annually, while the average CSU faculty salary was a mere $70,615. After adjusting for inflation, the average faculty salary in 2010 was less than it was in 1980.

In short, college professors, like most other members of the middle and lower classes, have seen their wages and living standards stagnate over the past thirty years. What is unique, but not surprising, is that prison guards have seen their wages increase over this same period, making them one of the only groups of wage earners to experience improvements in living standards over the past 3 decades.

From the perspective of the employing class, schools are still churning out sufficiently trained workers to keep most businesses in operation, despite the decrease in wages for educators and the overall funding cuts. In the areas where they are failing to do so (e.g., technology and science) they can always import workers from abroad, often at lower wages than they would have to pay native-born employees. Thus, slashing education budgets has not hampered their ability to make huge profits. On the contrary, the wealth gap continues to grow and California continues to gain new billionaires (currently there are more than 80 billionaires and over 600,000 millionaires in the state).

The increase in prisoners and prisons is an expense the wealthy can largely defer to the rest of us through a taxation system that allows them to pay an effective tax rate far lower than that paid by most middle-income wage earners. At the same time, many goods and services can be produced by prisoners at a cost that is competitive with the cheapest foreign labor since prisoners can be compelled to work for virtually free (the minimum wage law does not apply to prisoners).

Ultimately, the transfer of resources from higher education to incarceration is just another tool for increasing the portion of the wealth controlled by the richest members of society. Prison guards are generously rewarded for their support of this system, while poor people, who make up the majority of the prison population, pay for it with their very freedom. Professors and students pay for it with declining living standards and growing debt, and all working people pay for it in reduced services and public works.

LAUSD Raises and Then Lowers the Bar

Schools are broken, so the mantra goes: Too many students are dropping out, while those who are graduating are doing so without proficiency in math and English. Therefore, we must hold them all to higher standards!

This reasoning is irrational and the solution is doomed to failure.

If the point of raising the bar is to prevent students from graduating when they haven’t mastered the basic skills, then graduation rates will necessarily decline when the bar is raised. Simply raising the bar cannot force kids who aren’t ready to meet the expectations to suddenly meet those expectations. Kids will not suddenly be able to pass a college preparatory science class, for example, simply because it is now a graduation requirement.

The problem isn’t the schools or the teachers, but the social circumstances of the students. Academic success is overwhelmingly influenced by factors outside of school, most significantly students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. (See here, here and here). Some researchers, like conservative economist Erik Hanushek, say the teachers’ influence accounts for less than 10% of students’ academic success, which means that it will take far more than better teaching to close the achievement gap and significantly improve test scores.

Despite the irrationality of the “reform,” school districts across the country started to implement tougher graduation requirements. In some districts, like Los Angeles Unified, every student was required to pass college-prep classes with a C or better (as required by the state’s university systems) and earn at least 230 credits in order to graduate.

Recognizing that they were setting themselves up for failure (to the tune of declining graduation rates), LAUSD has backed off these requirements, proposing to allow students to graduate with a D or better in their college-prep classes, according to the Los Angeles Times. The proposal would ultimately allow students to graduate with 25% fewer or 170 credits.

Critics have lambasted LAUSD for lowering their standards. However, requiring all students to take college-prep classes is actually a higher expectation than what previously existed, regardless of the grade earned or credits required to graduate. In the past, students were allowed to graduate without ever attempting a college-prep level course.

Another important point is that many of these students would not be attending a state university in the first place. There simply aren’t enough spaces available in the state systems to accommodate every high school graduate even if they did wish to go, while the skyrocketing costs are making the state’s two university systems out of reach for more and more young people. Thus, the C requirement would only be an issue for those students who were planning on attending to a state university immediately after graduation. Anyone else could attend a community college first and earn credits there in preparation for a later transfer to one of the university systems.

Ultimately, if we really want to see more students succeeding in high level courses, we need to make sure that they are adequately prepared for these courses academically and socially. They need sufficient support structures and they need them in place well before they even enter kindergarten. This will require a substantial social investment in families and a serious reduction in poverty.

California’s Skyrocketing College Tuition

While inflation has been at a relatively low 3.6% for most goods and services, it has been skyrocketing in several key sectors, particularly healthcare and college education. Across the nation, average college and university tuition and fees have increased 8.3% this fall, according to the Los Angeles Times, while in California, the increase was 21%, nearly four times the national average.

For students considering getting their general ed requirements out of the way at cheaper community colleges, fees in California have increased 37%. While this is a dramatic hike, particularly for low income students who had carefully budgeted based on last year’s fees, the $1,119 they must now pay each year is still a discount compared to the $3,288 students pay at two-year colleges in the rest of the country.

While some argue that students can pay for much of this with grants, scholarships and loans, the fact remains that student loan debt is at record levels ($830 billion) and has now surpassed credit card debt nationally. According to the study cited in the Times article, roughly 56% of students who earned bachelor's degrees at public colleges in 2009-10 graduated with debt averaging $22,000. At private nonprofit schools, the average debt was $28,100.

Considering how few jobs there are right now, recent graduates could be in debt for a very long time. However, the jobs available to those with a bachelor’s degree are generally not the highest paying jobs. So even if they are lucky enough to get a job right out of college, they will not necessarily be able to pay back their loans any time soon. If they go onto graduate school, their debt burden upon graduation could easily be in the six-figure range, depending on the type of degree.

While California’s community colleges and Cal State University systems are still cheaper than their counterparts in other states, tuition at the elite University of California system is now considerably higher than the national average. University regents have blamed the yearly increases on budget cuts from the state and it is true that the state slashed UC’s annual budget by half a billion this year. However, as the state’s premier institution of high learning, UC has been bringing in considerable additional revenue from its research and discoveries ($128 million in patent income in 2007-2008). One might reasonably ask why this hasn’t been used to help defray costs for undergraduate education.

Additionally, while the university has been jacking up student fees and allowing faculty salaries to stagnate, it has been rapidly piling on new administrators with executive salaries. Over the past decade, the number of administrators has nearly doubled. UC was spending over $2 billion a year on their salaries back in 2008. However, according to a Faculty Association newsletter from 2008, the cost of just the superfluous administrators was $800 million. Furthermore, they have not been content with exorbitant salaries. 36 of the highest paid university executives recently demanded tens of millions of dollars in increased retirement benefits.

None of this should be surprising, when California’s more than 600,000 millionaires have demanded (and won) steadily decreasing income, property, and business taxes over the past three decades, depleting the state of revenue that could have been used to help fund public universities and K-12 education.

Small Victory for Irvine 11

The Irvine 11 won a small victory this week when an Orange County Superior Court judge ordered the district attorney's office to remove its main investigator and three top deputies from the case. The dismissal of the prosecutors came in response to the D.A.'s unauthorized use of privileged documents to build a case against the UC Irvine and UC Riverside students who are charged with conspiracy to disrupt a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.

The lead investigator, Paul Kelly had inappropriately obtained 20,000 pages of privileged communications between the students and their defense attorney, Reem Salahi, the Los Angeles Times reported today. The documents were being used to bring new charges against one of the students. Now the Orange County district attorney must prove that none its evidence was obtained through privileged information, Wilson ruled.

(For more on the Irvine 11 case, please see here and here).

California’s Assault on University Students and Teachers

The freshly signed California budget slashes $650 million each from the budgets of its two preeminent university systems, the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU), serving hundreds of thousands of state residents. The cuts are $150 million more than originally threatened earlier this year and will result in significant tuition hikes and service cuts. The new budget is dependent on predicted increases in revenue to the state. The Bay Citizen writes that if the increased revenue fails to materialize, the universities could lose another $100 million each.

Tuition for California college students has more than tripled over the last decade. With the new cuts, fees are expected to rise another 8% at CSU and 10% at UC next fall, according to the Student Activism blog.

Not only has UC tuition been skyrocketing yearly for California residents, but the university has shifted its focus from providing affordable higher education for all qualified residents to actively recruiting out of state students who must pay an additional non-residents’ tuition of $22,000 each (according to another Bay Citizen report), bringing the university much higher profits per student. The San Francisco Chronicle says that out of state students will bring the university $80 million, up from $54 million last year. As a result, the number of California residents intending to enroll in UC Berkeley's freshman class has dropped by 21% over the past two years, the Bay Citizen reports. The school admitted nearly three times as many out-of-state students this year as it did in 2009. Throughout the nine campus system, the number of out-of-state and international students has more than doubled to 12% since 2009.

At the CSU system, the chancellor is asking the trustees to increase tuition by 12%. CSU has already cut enrollment by 10,000. Students will also find fewer professors at both university systems, making classes more crowded or dropped altogether. And it is not just students who will be suffering. Universities are making it much more difficult to achieve tenure or even to get a tenure-track position, instead offering more adjunct, temporary and part-time teaching professions which many desperate job seekers are willingly accepting. Many are shuttling back and forth between two or more campuses or even university systems in order to have enough teaching assignments to make ends meet.

Universities love “contingent” employees because they are easier to fire, are paid less, and often are not eligible for benefits. Because they are much easier to fire, “contingent” employees are less likely to speak up on their own behalf, or for their students, fearful that any rocking of the boat could spell the end of their job. And it’s not just one specific job they are trying to protect. It might seem a blessing to get laid off from a low-paid, 1-section teaching job with no security or benefits at a community college. However, that lay-off and a potentially bad reference could prevent a person from securing a better full-time position at another college when such a position opens up.

According to the SF Chronicle, the number of full professors in the CSU system dropped by 13% from 1990 to 2010, and full- and part-time lecturers rose by 10%. For each lecturer who replaces a tenured professor, the university saves an average of $31,679. However, lecturers do not always participate in faculty or department meetings and are left out of academic senate meetings and decision-making. They lack the institutional support and time to mentor students the way professors can. The lack of a stable office and time means that it much harder for students to get letters of recommendation or even help with their homework. In the UC system, the number of lecturers grew by 37% between 1998 and 2010, while the number of professors grew by only 21%.