• Arnold Schwarzenegger,  California,  Education,  Politics

    Arnold Schwarzenegger Watch: Governor Visits UC Merced

    The Modesto Bee has Governor gets tour of UC Merced, Campus leaders show off school’s energy efficiency.

    Gov. Schwarzenegger showed up for a short, private lesson at the new University of California at Merced on Thursday, five days before classes start.

    Led by Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey and Vice Chancellor for Administration Lindsay Desrochers, the governor took a brief tour of two buildings on the new campus.

    He saw the central plant, the energy-efficient heart of the school, and the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library, a 120,000-square-foot building that will house the majority of classes for the next few years.

    “It’s really amazing,” Schwarzenegger said, during a press conference after watching a demonstration on solar energy designed to show off the school’s environmental efficiency. “This is the future.”

    Will he be at the dedication on Monday?

    The press is happy to beat him up on whether he will attend.

    If the Governor does attend then it will be unannounced at the very last minute so the union protest stalkers don’t ruin the moment.

    But the governor said there’s still a possibility he can attend UC Merced’s opening day on Labor Day.

    “We have prior obligations on Monday, but I’m still working on it,” Schwarzenegger said. “I never say a complete no.”

    UC Merced Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey guided Schwarzenegger through the campus.

    “Without (Schwarzenegger), we couldn�t have opened on time,” Tomlinson-Keasey said to the governor. “We will reward you with an array of inventions and research.”

    As the governor walked out of the library to greet UC Merced faculty and staff members, one person asked when he’ll be back for a return visit.

    The movie star turned governor responded with his catch-phrase, “I’ll be back.”

    Technorati Tags: , ,

  • Education,  Politics

    Reform Los Angeles Unified School District

    Even the liberals are disgusted with California public schools and particularly the Los Angeles Unified School District.

    Former California Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg argues in yesterdays L.A. Daily News that the Mayor’s office needs to take control, Mayoral control key to repairing LAUSD.

    I cannot think of a public issue more compelling for our generation than the need to repair the public school system in Los Angeles.

    The evidence of failure is everywhere. The statistics damn the system on every aspect of its operation, but none provides a more telling measure of the disastrous future the LAUSD is creating than the fact that 53 percent of its ninth-grade students do not graduate from high school.

    The failure of the LAUSD affects all of us equally, from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach and South Gate. The time to act is now.

    But how do we implement fundamental education reform?

    In my run for mayor, I called for breaking up the LAUSD once and for all. But much of the current debate over reform has focused on giving the mayor control of the school system. If we cannot split up the school district, then mayoral control could just be the right fix because — just like the idea of dissolving the district — mayoral control goes to the fundamental problem of governance.

    Flap does not agree.

    Transferring control from an elected school board to an elected Mayor will do nothing except concentrate power in City Hall.

    The LAUSD needs to be broken up into smaller districts immediately with locally elected schools boards which will be accountable to the voters.

    Moreover, interdistrict vouchers should be provided California students so families can vote for their child’s education with their feet, if the schools provide inadequate services. Choice not bureaucracy.

    No more excuses, it is time to reform California schools.

    This L.A. Mayor power grab is not the answer.

  • Education,  Politics

    Tom McClintock:The Public Schools We Pay For

    Tom McClintock, Flap’s California State Senator, has an excellent piece on public school finances here:

    The multimillion-dollar campaign paid by starving teachers unions has finally placed our sadly neglected schools at the center of the budget debate.

    Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s scorched-earth budget is approved — a budget that slashes Proposition 98 public-school spending from $42.2 billion this year all the way down to $44.7 billion next year.

    That should be proof enough that our math programs are suffering.

    As a public-school parent, I have given this crisis a great deal of thought and have a modest suggestion to help weather these dark days.

    Maybe — as a temporary measure only — we should spend our school dollars on our schools. I realize that this is a radical departure from current practice, but desperate times require desperate measures.

    The governor proposed spending $10,084 per student from all sources. Devoting all of this money to the classroom would require turning tens of thousands of school bureaucrats, consultants, advisers and specialists onto the streets with no means of support or marketable job skills, something that no enlightened social democracy should allow.

    So I will begin by excluding from this discussion the entire budget of the State Department of Education, as well as the pension system, debt service, special education, child care, nutrition programs and adult education. I also propose setting aside $3 billion to pay an additional 30,000 school bureaucrats $100,000 per year with the proviso that they stay away from the classroom and pay their own hotel bills at conferences.

    This leaves a mere $6,937 per student, which, for the duration of the funding crisis, I propose devoting to the classroom….

    Read the rest here.

    What Tom doesn’t mention are the hundreds of millions being spent through bonded indebtedness to finance new construction of schools and administrative buildings in the massive Los Angeles Unified School District. Of course, most of these facilities will be used to educate the thousands of children born from illegal Mexican immigrants.

    Go figure……

  • Education,  Media,  VCCCD

    Ventura College Press Staff Members Prepare Paper’s Last Edition

    Today’s Ventura County Star (free registration required) has the story on the closure of the Ventura College Press, Ventura College’s student run newspaper:

    For Chris Martinez, it was like being back in college as he sat with a group of student journalists last week planning another edition of the Ventura College Press.

    Martinez last worked for the campus paper in the late 1960s, a turbulent era when tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in an unpopular war halfway around the world. The war, the civil rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy provided the then-young cartoonist with plenty of fodder for his college paper, then known as “The Pirate Press…”

    Nearly four decades later, grayer but no less idealistic, Martinez, 58, now a freelance cartoonist from Ventura, was compelled to put pen to paper for his old college weekly after hearing it was closing after 80 years in print.

    Flap previously reported the VCCCD Board of Trustees’ decision to close the Ventura and Oxnard College newspapers and to consolidate them at Moorpark College. Read those stories here.

    …Ventura County Community College District officials blame the paper’s closure on budget problems and low enrollment in the college’s journalism program. Officials also are closing Oxnard College’s student paper, The Campus Observer. They plan to replace both papers with a districtwide publication run out of Moorpark College.

    But many, including Lara Shapiro Snair, managing editor of the Ventura College Press, don’t think a districtwide paper will accurately reflect the issues of Oxnard and Ventura students.

    “This newspaper is the voice of the campus,” said Shapiro Snair, as she sat at the table with Martinez and others. “That voice can’t be heard from Moorpark.”

    Students protested the closures a number of times after district trustees announced the closures in March…

    The VCCCD Trustees should be more heavily criticised for their financial mismanagement of district’s resources. Flap is certain that the Ventura County Grand Jury will not have kind words for the VCCCD in July.

    …The Ventura College Press has won numerous awards over the years, including a statewide general excellence award last month from the Journalism Association of Community Colleges.

    Rob O’Neill, a member of the association and a journalism instructor at Pierce College in Los Angeles, said student papers are important because they inform everyone about events. They also serve as laboratories, training young people in the skill and craft of journalism, O’Neill said.

    “Campuses that don’t have their own newspapers are poorer places,” he said.

    O’Neill said news will travel with or without a newspaper because people’s curiosity and need to know is as old as the caves. But forced to survive as rumor, facts often become quickly distorted with little or no connection to the truth, he said.

    District officials are vowing not to let this happen at either the Ventura or Oxnard campus.

    Dennis Cabral, executive vice president for student learning at Moorpark College, has worked on the plan for a districtwide newspaper. Cabral said he knows it will be a challenge but the district is committed to making it work. One way to do that is by making sure the paper is open to students from all campuses, Cabral said.

    But students at Oxnard and Ventura remain skeptical.

    Without their own campus paper, Shapiro Snair predicted, one or more underground newspapers will soon sprout up.

    “It’s just a matter of time if we can’t keep this paper or the one at Oxnard going,” she said.

    Meanwhile, current and former staff members of the Ventura College Press will gather Thursday evening for the paper’s annual banquet. It will begin at 6:30 p.m. at Seaside Park’s Derby Club in the Ventura County Fairgrounds.

    Well that is a wrap – shameful as it is!

  • Education,  Politics,  VCCCD

    Ventura County Star Editorial: College District Must Be Open

    The Ventura County Star (free reg. req.) has this editorial today on the Ventura County Community College District:

    If Ventura County Community College District Chancellor James Meznek and the board of trustees truly want to foster mutual respect within the district and community, as they say they do, they need first to respect the public’s right to know.

    They need to make critical decisions about the colleges’ future with as much input as possible from faculty, other employees, students and members of the public.

    Respecting the public’s right to be informed means not having a secret list of proposed cuts and their rationales, as was the case prior to the March 8 meeting of the college district board of trustees. It was at that meeting trustees voted to lay off 15 full- and part-time employees March 11 and another 117 by June 30 to close a $7.5 million shortfall over the next 14 months.

    Fortunately, The Star was able to obtain and publish that list….

    Chancellor Meznek everyone know who leaked the list – one of your Trustees or College Presidents.

    If you want something to remain private keep it to yourself.

    If it is a VCCCD personnel issue or litigation keep it in closed session and number your documents so they do not wander away to the VC Star.

    Otherwise, public policy issues such as lay-offs due to budgetary short-falls and the elimination of instructional programs should be discussed in public and by the public – who by the way pays your salary.