Students rebel against hostage-taking in California's higher ed war

I stopped by Wheeler Hall this evening, crossing from the NW corner of the Berkeley campus where I work to look in on the building occupation that began yesterday evening, following a UC Regents committee vote to hold students hostage in a war between California Governor Jerry Brown and UC President Janet Napolitano (who is also a former governor of Arizona, 2003-2009; and former head of the Department of Homeland Security, 2009-2013). It's a war of Titans (remember Cronus, the leader of the Titans? the one who ate his children?).

Here's how the L.A. Times told the story on Tuesday, in an editorial titled A battle for UC's soul:

At issue is whether the 10-campus system will continue to rank among the nation's premier research universities, drawing top students and the best professors from throughout the world, or whether it will slowly shrink its ambitions, becoming a more utilitarian institution that concentrates narrowly on moving students to their bachelor's degrees and into the workforce quickly and efficiently.

UC President Janet Napolitano says that she will ask the Board of Regents to approve the tuition increases Wednesday, although they would not have to go into effect if the the state provides better funding. Gov.  Jerry Brown, who opposes the tuition hikes, points out that he is already planning on increasing the state's contribution 4% a year over the next two years, though he wants to tie those increases to some major changes. Among his suggestions: more online courses, heavier teaching loads for professors, reductions in nonessential research, the admission of a smaller proportion of freshmen and more community college transfers, so that the state can educate college students more inexpensively for their first two years.

The editorial goes on to lay out:

• the economic case for investment in the University of California (for every dollar invested, California's gross state product increases $10, according to a 2011 report commissioned by the UC Regents);
• the precipitous drop in state contribution to the UC budget, without adequate restoration of funding as the economy has recovered from the crash of 2008;
• a finding by the Public Policy Institute of California that the university's tuition increases have not been driven by inappropriate or lavish spending, but by state disinvestment in higher ed;

It then concludes with support for UC President Napolitano's plan to hold students feet to the fire until the state coughs up funding to maintain its preeminent public university system.

Ouch.

Students bussed in from all ten UC campuses to protest adoption of this plan to hold them hostage, but the UC Regents committee charged with making the decision voted on Wednesday to make Napolitano's threat real (the full board ratified the committee's decision today). Last night, seeing the writing on the wall, Berkeley students began an ongoing occupation of Wheeler Hall in the heart of the campus; students at UC Santa Cruz are occupying the Humanities 2 building; CNN is also reporting protests at UC Davis and UCLA. Photos are being tweeted from around the state hashtagged #fightthehike.

My read: this is going to be a complicated conflict to narrate through the filter of mainstream media. There are no clear heroes or villains. Governor Brown wants to fight tuition hikes, but he wants to do it by turning California's higher ed treasure into a diploma mill. UC Pres. Napolitano wants to preserve the value of the university she heads, but she's prepared to throw students off the cliff to get her way (not to mention that her moral authority to lead UC is worse than questionable, as students across the state have been arguing since her appointment to the role).

In the wake of Germany's decision to offer free university education to all -- even international students -- I'd like to see UC students call for the same here in California. Do I think that's an achievable demand? Not in the near term. But it calls for a remaking of the world as we have come to know it, and that's what these times call for.

Longtime Daily Kossack Don Mikulecky quoted Peter Kropotkin in a thoughtfully angry (and underappreciated) diary yesterday:

Think about what kind of society you want to live in and then demand that your teachers teach you how to build that society.

Right on the mark...



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
UC Berkeley's anti-apartheid movement: setting the record straight
The Occupy Movement and UC Berkeley's Free Speech Monument
When authorities equate disobedience with violence
Chancellor Katehi, Athens Polytechnic, and ... Janet Jackson?
Paying what things cost



Thanks to Brittany M. (@belitebrite) for her image of the Wheeler Hall occupation at Berkeley on 20 Nov 2014. Thanks also to Falcorian for the image of Wheeler Hall: "Wheeler Hall--UC Berkeley--Panoramic". Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wheeler_Hall--UC_Berkeley--Panoramic.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Wheeler_Hall--UC_Berkeley--Panoramic.jpg

Graduations at UC Berkeley, Class of 2012

The middle of May is among the best times of year in Berkeley, especially for those with a relationship to the UC campus here (I'm an alumnus and an employee). Sitting in a favorite cafe this weekend, just across the street from Sproul Hall, I watched a parade of begowned graduates and their loved ones enjoying a celebratory pre- or post-ceremony meal or drink. Call me a sentimental fool, but the evident pride of families and friends of the graduates makes my eyes well up.

You never know in particular cases, but we who work on the campus are keenly aware that more than one in four of our undergrads are the first in their families to earn a four-year college degree. That's a big deal when those first-in-families are attending a university that stands among the most highly ranked in the nation by all manner of measures, an R1 institution whose faculty win well over a half-billion dollars in research funding year after year.

Being a part of a world-class campus that each year launches thousands of smart and hard-working students into the rest of their lives is arguably the most profound reward of working at UC Berkeley. It's the reason many of us work at Cal. Even among staff who don't teach classes, what they say about teachers holds true for many, perhaps for most of us: we're not in it for the income, we're in it for the outcome.

This year a member of my own family is graduating from UC Berkeley; I'll attend her department's ceremony on Friday. My first-cousin once removed -- the daughter of my first-cousin -- she is not the first in her immediate family to graduate from a four-year college ... but I'm here to tell you, in words that don't capture the half of it: she's smart, talented, and energetic. I am just about bursting with pride for this poised young woman's accomplishment, and I have it on good authority that her parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents are too.

Congratulations to every one of UC Berkeley's Class of 2012. We're counting on each and all of you to help lead the way, however uncertain, to a better world.

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Paying what things cost

I'm going tell some stories. They're not long enough to have titles, I don't think, so let's just call these their headings:

• Grocery bags
• A top-tier university's e-mail system goes kaput
• Dirt
• Black Friday, or the Ghost of Christmas Futures

What these stories have in common is their bottom line: paying what things cost.


Grocery bags

San Francisco passed a law in 2007 that prohibits large supermarkets from using plastic grocery bags. The idea was to encourage folks to bring reusable bags to the store with them. This would help the city to do its share to reduce the resource-costs inherent in manufacturing plastic bags, and reduce the environmental damage plastic bags cause. But instead of bringing their own reusables from home, a lot of people who shop at large supermarkets have chosen to let the supermarkets pack their groceries in paper bags.

So San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi proposed another law -- set to be voted up or down this week, but in the event deferred until early next year -- to prohibit all retailers from using plastic bags (with a few exceptions for raw and fresh food), and to charge customers at all retail outlets in San Francisco a small fee for bags of any kind. Again, the idea is to reduce environmental damage caused by plastic bags, and encourage customers to use and reuse shopping bags.

As Dave Lewis, Executive Director of Save The Bay, wrote in Sunday's SF Chronicle:

These changes are good for businesses, which will no longer be expected to give away a product for free; bags will become an item for sale, just like a carton of milk.

Why is it a good idea for bags to be an item for sale? Lewis argues:

Bay Area residents use an estimated 3.8 billion plastic bags per year and discard more than 100 plastic bags per second. The average use time of a bag is only 12 minutes, but once in the environment, plastic lasts for years. Plastic trash entangles, suffocates and poisons fish and wildlife, including sea turtles, birds and marine mammals. It smothers the bay's wetlands. These bags are one of the most common items retrieved at coastal cleanup events on the bay and ocean shoreline.

So there's a cost to using plastic bags. Similarly there are costs to using disposable paper bags (costs to retailers who supply them, and in terms of wood, water, toxic chemicals, and energy used to manufacture them). These costs are obscured by the illusion to retail-customers that they're free. Mirkarimi and Lewis want to get the illusion out of the picture, and for people to pay what bags cost.

Not everyone agrees with this line of reasoning. The shrillest windbag who publishes regularly in the SF Chronicle wrote an op-ed on Sunday titled "Where windbags dare to outlaw plastic bags." Unfortunately, and as is often the case, there's nothing in Debra Saunders' piece that rises to the level of reasoned argument. It's all spinning in circles ... there would be little point to quoting Saunders. But if you're looking for an alternate opinion, have a read. It's a free country, or so they tell us.


A top-tier university's e-mail system goes kaput

UC Berkeley has been suffering a relentless series of e-mail system outages for about a month. I know, not the end of the world in the grand scheme of things, but you wouldn't know it working in the campus central IT department (which is, as it happens, where I work). The UC Berkeley e-mail system, CalMail, hosts 70,000 e-mail accounts, and forwards messages for twice that many more alumni. Faculty, staff, and more than a few of the institution's 35,000-or-so currently enrolled students depend on CalMail every ding dang day.

How did it come to pass that an enterprise IT organization of some hundreds of employees at (arguably) the top-ranking public university in the nation let it's e-mail system go kaput? Here's my boss's boss's boss's boss, Associate Vice Chancellor & Chief Information Officer Shel Waggener, on this topic, from his update to the campus of 30 November:

CalMail supports 70,000 accounts over 100 subdomains for students, faculty, staff, emeriti, and retirees, and also provides forwarding services for 140,000 alumni, handling more than 3 million messages a day. The current environment is five-years old and is reaching its normal end of life. The hardware was scheduled to be replaced this year during a normal refresh cycle; however the replacement is expensive (over $1M) and with the acceptance of the OE Productivity Suite project, as well as the strong interest in external services such as Google and Microsoft, the decision was made to pursue those options rather than investing in a platform we would only be shutting down in the near future.

"OE" is "Operational Excellence" a fix-your-budget product that Berkeley (and other campuses and for-profit companies) bought into on the advice of consulting firm Bain & Co, at a cost that substantially exceeds the replacement cost of hardware referenced above. Part of what "Operational Excellence" decision makers are recommending to mitigate campus budget woes is that we outsource e-mail. This idea has been in the works for a while, and I'm betting it's going to happen. The company to whom we will eventually outsource this critical bit of infrastructure has not yet been selected, as far as I'm aware.

Translating from spin-speak, what the excerpted quote boils down to is the following: we figured we'd operate e-mail for tens of thousands of users on a wing and a prayer while we figure out what's next, in order to save a million bucks.

How long will what's next take to come about? Factor in negotiation, selection, and contract review. Then there's the transition, which will not be a flip-the-switch kind of an operation. I'm guessing a year or two. So if the hardware on which CalMail runs "was scheduled to be replaced this year" and we've got 1-2 more years to go, we're talking two or three years on a wing and a prayer. And, as we know from the message excerpted above, five years is "normal end of life" for equipment of this sort.

Gulp.

Was it necessary to take the risk our IT organization took? To run a core service that everyone at UCB depends on to accomplish their work, on hardware 50% beyond its normal lifecycle, to save a million dollars? (For reference, the total campus budget -- not just IT but the whole shebang -- is $1.8 billion annually.)

So was taking that risk a poor decision?

Well, you know, the buck stops where the buck stops, and I'm sad to say that no matter how many executives were involved in the decision to squeeze the life out of CalMail hardware, our IT organization is going to be explaining and apologizing for some while to come. In the meantime, we look like cr*p.

But ... hang on a minute ... that business about the buck stopping? That's the core problem, isn't it?

With state contributions to higher ed dropping to historic lows as a percentage of operating budget, the bucks are stopping in California when it comes to supporting universities. And skyrocketing tuition being charged students and their families isn't making up the shortfall.

What's an Associate Vice Chancellor & CIO to do if he can't afford to pay what it actually costs to run e-mail for 70,000 people at a top-tier university?


Dirt

Among the deepest observations I've come across about paying what things cost comes from Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Jackson wrote an essay in a book called Nature's Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies, a volume I've blogged about recently (in relation to Occupy Wall Street) and will undoubtedly cite again. Jackson's essay is titled "Think Like a Prairie: Solving the 10,000-Year-Old Problem of Agriculture." The author takes the long view, you see. Like many others in this slim volume, this single essay is worth the price of the book.

Here's a summary of Jackson's essay in a few short paragraphs:

Topsoil is the medium in which plants grow, including plants that humans cultivate (a.k.a. agriculture). Topsoil includes elements like calcium, phosphorus, potassium, manganese, and trace minerals that are essential nutrients for plants. These are, in Jackson's phrase, "ecological capital." The elements that comprise "ecological capital" are gradually and naturally leached further and further underground by the flow of water, through topsoil and into aquifer and oceans; over time, the elements and minerals are leached out of the reach of the roots of plants that need them.

How does this perfectly natural process get 'reversed' so that plants can continue to live here on Planet Earth? Wes Jackson quotes Arnold Schultz, emeritus professor in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley, on the topic: "Well, this is a dynamic planet. It keeps recharging itself through geologic activity." That is to say, what goes down gets spit up ... by volcanos and earthquakes and the like.

That's well and good, but we humans, who have been growing plants for about 100 centuries (a blink in time on a geological scale), are using up topsoil faster than it is being recharged through geologic activity. The biggest environmental problem associated with agriculture is, Jackson asserts, the loss of topsoil: "except in major valley systems such as the Indus and the Nile, soils soon wear out [...] [I]n North America's upper Midwest, the largest region of the world's best land, many areas have lost half of their topsoil in just a century and a half of farming."

Wes Jackson doesn't just identify problems, he identifies solutions.

What his solutions boil down to is farming organized around bioequilibrium, which means recognizing that the energy input into agriculture (to make up for the loss of topsoil, generally by importing soil and minerals from elsewhere) has a significant cost ... and if you put that cost on the books, it makes sense to invest in modes of agriculture that don't deplete topsoil nearly so quickly. Jackson's organization, The Land Institute, is all about figuring out how to make agriculture work in bioequilibrium -- socially, economically, and politically.

That is, Jackson and his colleagues are trying to figure out how we can pay, season by season, what it actually costs to grow and consume what we humans grow and consume.


Black Friday, or the Ghost of Christmas Futures

On 25 November 2011, the outdoor clothing company Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the NY Times. The whole ad is available as a PDF linked from the company's blog post of the same date.

It was a smart piece of advertising, and told some important truths. Excerpting:

Black Friday, and the culture of consumption it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that support all life firmly in the red. We’re now using the resources of one-and-a-half planets on our one and only planet. [...]

Environmental bankruptcy, as with corporate bankruptcy, can happen very slowly, then all of a sudden. This is what we face unless we slow down, then reverse the damage. We’re running short on fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, wetlands – all our planet’s natural systems and resources that support business, and life, including our own. [...]

There is much to be done and plenty for us all to do. Don’t buy what you don’t need. Think twice before you buy anything. [A]nd join us in [...] reimagin[ing] a world where we take only what nature can replace.

It's an ad, right? These people are out to sell product?

And yet.................


A last word from my grandteacher

I've studied Tai Chi Ch'uan for some years. Back in the late 1980s, when I was new to the practice, I attended summer workshops with my teacher's teacher, Lo Pang Jeng, or "Ben Lo" as he encourages Americans to call him.

Ben worked us hard. You wouldn't necessarily think all those graceful, flowing movements you see people performing in parks are physically demanding, but the practice in Ben's lineage is oriented toward the martial aspects of the art and it's grueling. In his day, Ben was a taskmaster. Especially at those weeklong summer workshops.

In his mid-eighties now, Ben is still going strong, his posture upright, physically vigorous and mentally sharp. This is a very good advertisement for something he has told students over and over and over again after making us work until we ached.

We'd be gasping at the end of thirty or forty minutes of holding difficult postures, sweat streaming, trying to massage the burning cramps out of our legs. Ben would survey the tormented objects of his instruction, laugh, then do his best impersonation of a man broken by age: hunched over, making painful, halting progress as he pushed an (imaginary) walker. Then Ben would stand erect, and look around at we suffering young folk. Merrily, in his thick Chinese accent, he'd admonish us:

You can pay now. Or you can pay later.

Those are the choices.




Thanks to Akshay Mahajan for the image of a garbage dump in Phnom Penh; to Amber Case for the image of a server room after a fire at Western Washington University; and to Matthew Felix Sun for the image of his painting At Home.



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Bioneers and Occupy Wall Street
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Facing things we'd rather weren't so

Chancellor Katehi, Athens Polytechnic, and ... Janet Jackson?

In a post of Tuesday titled Athens Polytechnic comes to UC Davis, John Quiggin cites a report published in February of this year that became the basis to abolish a law establishing "university asylum" in Greece. Until it was abolished, university asylum restricted the ability of police to enter university campuses in that nation.

No matter what an American thinks of such a law, or its abolition -- whether or not said American knows much about the social and political context in which a "university asylum" law was established in Greece (I don't) -- it's got to catch your eye that one of the authors of this report from the International Advisory Committee on Greek Higher Education was Linda Katehi, currently the Chancellor at UC Davis.

Yes, that UC Davis, the campus on which police doused sitting, unarmed, non-violent students with pepper spray late last week.



This came to my attention Tuesday via Facebook posts from people with whom I am or have been associated at UC Berkeley, as colleagues and/or as fellow-activists. I've seen it a few places since, but not in mainstream media. Co-authorship of the report is not listed on Chancellor Katehi's on-line CV, but that document appears to predate publication of the report. Blackout? Could people who care about news possibly think this is unimportant? Is the story a hoax? I'm guessing no, yes, & no, respectively, but YMMV.

Katehi's co-authorship of the report on Greek universities takes on startling significance when considered beside her tearful apology on Monday for UC Davis police officers' shocking misuse of this "defensive weapon" (a description of pepper spray given by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, according to yesterday's SF Chronicle).

Look at what the report to which Chancellor Katehi contributed, says:

The politicizing of universities -- and in particular, of students -- represents participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic. This contributes to the rapid deterioration of tertiary education.

I don't read Greek, so I didn't even open the MS-Word document copy of the original report linked from Quiggin's blog. The translated excerpt given above was provided by "a Greek friend" of Mr. Quiggin.

Another translation, also linked by Quiggin, was posted in April to Blogspot. The presentation in that post is poor, with some of the letters blacked-out by what looks like a wonky Blogspot theme, but the same sentence translated by Quiggin's friend can be recovered. I recovered it (just a bit of copy paste, nothing sneaky). The two data points, combined, give me some confidence that the translation is accurate. On notthemajorityopinion.blogspot.com, the sentence is translated as follows:

The politicization of the campuses -- and specifically the politicization of students -- represents a beyond-reasonable involvement in the political process. This is contributing to an accelerated degradation of higher education.

So.

Wow.

Politicization of students, citizens of their own nation, degrades higher education?

Really? In Greece? The cradle of democracy?

In Athens? Where Socrates held forth to his students, one of whom was Plato?

Should the students known as "The Greensboro Four" from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina have stayed in their dorms studying in 1964 rather than sit at a Woolworth's lunch counter where they were 'forbidden' to sit so that their courage could give a critical boost to the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement? Would the authors of this report have had students sit out protest against the Vietnam War? Would they have had the South African high-school students who rebelled against that nation's apartheid regime in 1976 remain at their desks? Would they have had Chinese students who turned out by the tens of thousands in Tienanmen Square in 1989 remain docile in their classrooms?

The politicizing of universities -- and in particular, of students -- represents participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic. This contributes to the rapid deterioration of tertiary education.

And this from a Chancellor whose tearful apology of Monday referred to the Athens Polytechnic uprising of 17 Nov 1973 -- with apparent respect, as a bid for cred to her university's students, it seemed? A university-based uprising that resulted in a military junta piloting tanks -- tanks! -- onto campus to enforce the junta's rule ... when Katehi was a student at that university???

Okay, I've never even visited the country as a tourist, but I'm willing to allow for the possibility that my media-filtered perception could be true. Maybe it is the case that Greek politics get really volatile really quickly ... but still. Was Chancellor Katehi leaking crocodile tears on Monday? Or was she realizing how far she'd fallen from where she'd once been?



This is a campus leader whose co-authorship of the report of the International Advisory Committee on Greek Higher Education suggests pretty clearly that she doesn't believe students on a university campus have any business mixing education and engaged citizenship (a.k.a., political involvement). Not any longer she doesn't, whatever her position might have been in 1973.

How far is it from Katehi's current political position to setting campus policy that directs campus police to meet campus protest with disproportionate force?

It's almost enough to lead a person to theorize conspiracies.

Is she the Chancellor her tearful speech suggests? Or is she a reincarnation of Janet Jackson? Not the Janet Jackson who was the victim of wardrobe malfunction. I'm talking about the Janet Jackson of 1986. The Janet Jackson who sang I wanna be the one in control...






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Henry IV and Berkeley G.O.P.'s 'diversity bake sale'

I was out of town last week when the student group Berkeley College Republicans (BCR) hosted their so-called "Diversity Bake Sale." You might have heard about it via Reuters, the NY Times, FoxNews, the LA Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the U.K.'s Telegraph, or NPR ... or just about any other media vehicle you might track. If you missed the story, the gist is this:

To protest California's SB 185, currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown's signature or veto now that it has passed both the state Assembly's and Senate's scrutiny, the BCR sold cupcakes and cookies priced on a sliding scale. As the NY Times reported the Facebook announcement of the event, "the group listed the price for a pastry at $2 for white students, $1.50 for Asian students, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans. Women of all races were promised a 25-cent discount."

The intention, say campus Republicans, was to satirize differential treatment (cupcake prices, university admission criteria) based on race. Get it?

As one student put it in an Associated Press video posted to YouTube, "I think they're kind of missing the point."

SB 185 amends Section 66205 of California's Education Code such that "the University of California may, and the California State University may, consider race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin, and household income, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions, so long as no preference is given." The purpose, as the bill states, is to "enroll a student body that meets high academic standards and reflects the cultural, racial, geographic, economic, and social diversity of California."

For more, follow the links given above ... there's little need to repeat last week's news blitz.

I'd heard rumor of BCR's planned event before I headed north to Ashland, Oregon, where I'd reserved tickets for an adaptation of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid, followed by Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV and Julius Caesar. (I blogged about the two Shakespeare plays in advance of seeing them, in Shakespeare, power, theme in literature a couple weeks ago.)

The news went national on my way up Interstate 5, and caught up to me at the breakfast table at the McCloud River Inn, a sweet B&B at the foot of Mt. Shasta. I mentioned to other guests at the inn that I hail from Berkeley, and conversation turned to that morning's NY Times article on the bake sale brouhaha. (It's the 21st century. There's no such thing as "getting away," am I right? The fellow who'd read the article was an alum, and lives in Marin. He and his father were up north to fish for trout.)

I caught up with a fraction of the story's coverage after returning home, and am a little amazed at the extent to which, as that unnamed student on Sproul Plaza said, "they're kind of missing the point."

Yammerers who rail against consideration of factors aimed at balancing "high academic standards" with selection of a student body that "reflects the cultural, racial, geographic, economic, and social diversity of California" ignore fundamental truths that have a great deal to do with university admissions, including these two:

(1) there's no such thing as an objective assessment of merit; and,
(2) the present is the leading edge of what's gone before, a.k.a. "history"

Does the first need explaining? Does anybody out there really believe that high school GPAs and standardized tests are anything but a crude measure of a narrow subset of the constellation of skills, strengths, and motivations that qualify a person to engage in a course of post-secondary study, or that predict success in the endeavor?

Limits inherent in these quantitative measures is the reason that selective institutions of higher ed consider other factors than the numbers on a transcript or a College Board scorecard. By way of example, let's take a look at Harvard University, a selective institution of higher ed if ever there was one. On Harvard's admissions site, as many ambitious high school students and their parents already know, are a few paragraphs describing "What We Seek." Here it is, as it appeared on Harvard's web site yesterday afternoon:

Applicants can distinguish themselves for admission in a number of ways. Some show unusual academic promise through experience or achievements in study or research. Many are "well rounded" and have contributed in various ways to the lives of their schools or communities. Others are "well lopsided" with demonstrated excellence in a particular endeavor—academic, extracurricular or otherwise. Still others bring perspectives formed by unusual personal circumstances or experiences.

Academic accomplishment in high school is important, but we also seek people with enthusiasm, creativity and strength of character.

Most admitted students rank in the top 10–15 percent of their graduating classes, having taken the most rigorous secondary school curriculum available to them.

A lot of wiggle room there, eh? And why is that? Because the folks at Harvard University know better than to rely on narrow, fantastical conceits like objective measures of merit. In the real world it's complicated, as a wealthy and well-known Harvard alum put it on his social networking platform once upon a time.

As for the second fundamental truth? History?

Here's a passage from one of Shakespeare's history plays, 2 Henry IV, one of the works I happened to see performed last week. In the Elizabethan theatre at Ashland this passage struck me as a dead-on description of why it's ridiculous to pretend that an applicant for college admission exists in a social and historical vacuum. From OpenShakespeare.org, this is Henry IV speaking on his deathbed to the soon-to-be-crowned Henry V, his son. Apologies to the Bard for paring his poetry in order to make a point:

God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head.
To thee it shall descend with bitter quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth.
[...] and now my death
Changes the mode; for what in me was purchased,
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort;
So thou the garland wear'st successively.

Nobody succeeds solely on individual merit. Not Prince Harry, nor any of the 142,235 Fall 2011 applicants to the University of California. We exist -- and are nourished, or not -- in a social milieu. In the quoted passage, Henry IV, who deposed his predecessor in order to ascend to the throne of England, explains to Hank, Jr. that possession of the crown for which Henry IV cast aside, imprisoned, and (it is thought) starved Richard II, will appear to be the new normal when it passes in peaceful lineal succession to his son.

The prince replies to his father:

My gracious liege,
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my possession be [...]

Um. Really? Daddy stole the crown, passes it to his son, and now Junior owns it 'honestly'? Sure, Harry.....

It's a messier and less precise business to weigh the lives of young commoners than it is to study and cite the much-told histories of monarchs. But that's the messy, imprecise task of university admissions officers. And those admissions officers would be making less-informed decisions if they were not allowed to consider applicants' origins in a culture that has accrued centuries of advantage to individual members of social groups based on factors that have nothing to do with intrinsic, individual merit but everything to do with social milieu -- "race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin, and household income" would be some of these factors.

"Indeed," says Harvard's admissions web site, "the Admissions Committee may respond favorably to evidence that a candidate has overcome significant obstacles, financial or otherwise."

It's complicated.

Whatever the intentions of the yammerers, reductive demands to narrow university admissions criteria boil down to maintaining historical advantages conferred on or seized by groups, not earned by individual merit.

Elizabeth Warren, candidate for the U.S. Senate in the state of Massachusetts, spoke brilliantly on the absurdity of G.O.P. 'gimme, it's mine, I earned it' politics -- of which this diversity bake sale kerfuffle is but a sad and pathetic variant -- a couple of weeks ago. Here's the quote, or watch the video below:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody! You built a factory out there -- good for you! But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory [...] because of work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific [...] God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Whether it's wealth or it's great grades in high school, the BCR and the party with which they are affiliated are missing the point in a big, big way. Sorry, Republikidz: you can't sell your cupcake and eat it too.







Thanks to Lobsterthermidor via WikiMedia Commons, for the contemporary image of Henry of Bolingbroke (Henry IV) as he claims the throne of England in 1399.

Moral turpitude at the University of California

Thirty-six executives of the University of California "believe it is the University's legal, moral and ethical obligation" to implement changes to the system's pension plan that would allow them to retire with pensions calculated on their actual, exceptionally high pay levels rather than the (lower) federal limit for such pension calculations -- the federal limit is $245,000/year.

This change, if it goes forward, would give some of these executives a post-retirement raise of more than sixty percent -- from a pension worth $183,750 annually to pension pay at $300,000 per year for an exec whose working salary is $400,000.

The Whinging 36 are threatening legal action if they don't get their pensions plumped.

These executives claim in their letter and attached position paper (from which the foregoing quote was drawn) that the changes they demand were promised by the University's governing Board of Regents and other executives. This is actually pretty important, and I'm inclined to believe them on that point. I'm not qualified to debate signatory and Whinging 36 leader Christopher J. Edley, the dean of UC Berkeley's law school, on questions to do with the legal obligations in play.

I do note, however, that it was apparently legal for the princes of Wall St. to slurp down bonuses that make UC executive compensation look like couch-cushion change, even after financial firms accepted billions of taxpayer dollars in bailouts for the mess they made of the economy. Never mind that the "recovery" that this bailout effected has yet to return millions of people to work at real-world wages.

So it's not so surprising that some executives at the University of California feel entitled to demand exceptional pensions to wash down their exceptional pay, even though the state's and university's budgets are in crisis, layoffs are rampant, belts are tightening, employee pension plans are requiring greater contributions from staff and faculty, retirement age is being pushed back, new-employee benefits will be offered on lesser terms, and ...

Well, if you're reading this you probably know the story, or one just like it from an economic sector near you.

There has been plenty of outrage at Dean Edley & company's letter voiced by the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board, by that paper's four letter-to-editor writers who sounded off on 30 Dec and eight more who weighed in on 1 Jan. I can't wait to hear what my colleagues say when I return to work today, the first our campus has been open for business since news of the execs' threatening letter to the Regents broke.

But with the mud still flying, here's what this UC Berkeley employee does feel qualified to say to Edley and his gang of grasping execs: the assertion that a public university, in major fiscal crisis, has a moral obligation to spend scarce resources on exceptionally high executive pensions is a gross misapplication of the concept of morality. The University of California has a public mission. We operate on a (shrinking) public budget. We struggle to serve a constituency drawn from all walks of society -- not only a privileged, overcompensated elite.

When a public university's leadership throws tantrums about wanting to be paid like administrators at Harvard and Princeton and Goldman-Sachs, they stain the work and reputation of faculty and staff who have been working for years and decades at below-market wages.

(In case readers are drinking the jihad-against-the-public-sector kool-aid peddled by Tea Party leadership, and therefore imagine that public-sector employees are, on average, making out like bandits, read the evidence that the NY Times attested to yesterday: "A raft of recent studies found that public salaries, even with benefits included, are equivalent to or lag slightly behind those of private sector workers. The Manhattan Institute, which is not terribly sympathetic to unions, studied New Jersey and concluded that teachers earned wages roughly comparable to people in the private sector with a similar education." Why do public sector employees accept below-market wages? Judging from a long-term, completely unscientific study of my colleagues across lines of work and areas of the UC Berkeley campus, most of us chose our careers because we are more committed to public service than we are to feathering our own nests.)

So if, by "moral [...] obligation" the Whinging 36 mean a morality based on principles like "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is your problem but I might take that too" -- well ... that sounds a lot like class war to me, so at least I know how to understand what they're after. But if morality refers to a notion of right conduct that is grounded in common good and social obligation ... well ... sorry, highly-paid UC execs, you're way off base.

Let's look at some numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau pegged median earnings for an individual (2009 stats) at $35,285. At the University of California, where the demographics skew high due to an above-average workforce share of highly-educated faculty, medical doctors, and professionals, average compensation was $68,089 in October 2009.

So, for an exec earning $400,000, what the Whinging 36 are whinging about is a pension worth over five times the median working income in the United States, or over 2.5x the average income of working University of California colleagues. What do they demand instead? A pension worth 8.5x median U.S. income, or 4.4x average income of UC colleagues for the example given. As a post-retirement benefit, mind you. This is after taking home pay, in this example, at a rate more than eleven times higher than the U.S. median, for years and years.

I don't know about you, but that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

A vast majority of workers in the United States won't get pensions. Instead, people are expected to manage saving and investment for retirement themselves to augment our national retirement pension program, a.k.a. Social Security. Is that good? Is that bad? There are arguments to be made every-which-way, and they have been and continue to be made at length. I'm not going to make an argument in this post, it's long enough as written.

But I will note that Dean Edley and company are walking a cleverly thin line, standing on ground they can claim to share with, as the NY Times put it yesterday, "[u]nion chiefs, who sometimes persuaded members to take pension sweeteners in lieu of raises" over the course of recent years and decades. The Whinging 36 are claiming that at least some of them were dissuaded from taking other (higher paying) jobs elsewhere by the promise and expectation that pension rules were going to be changed to inflate their retirement income. That's a powerful argument if claims are true that their employers made promises that materially affected their employment, and are now breaking those promises.

At the same time, it's remarkable that university elites not only demand the stars as their due for lopping away jobs and benefits of the employees they manage; but simultaneously argue like union negotiators against the raging "class war on public workers," as friend and fellow-blogger katinsf put it in October.

It's a weird, weird world.

However you crunch the numbers, the Whinging 36 are demanding a very sweet deal ... one to which, in my moral universe, they really have no moral right at all ... however the legalities are sorted out.

If you want to do some digging into details about the Whinging 36, the SF Chronicle's posted copy of their letter to the UC Regents gives each signer's name, title, and campus. Then you might hop over to the Sacramento Bee's State Worker Salary Search, which permits anyone to look up the salaries of public employees. For example, you can learn that Dean Edley was paid a fraction of that mythical $400,000 salary in 2009 (the fraction, roughly 27/32, works out more accurately to 84.13%).

Here's how J.J. Lamb, of Novato, summed it all up in the lead letter to the SF Chronicle on New Year's Day: "Of course, greed is greed. The UC justification for outlandish staff compensation has always been 'We must compete with the private sector.' I say, release every one of these people to the private sector. Immediately."

That's one way of looking at it. And in the heat of reaction to Dean Edley and his buddies claiming pensions that could dwarf the lifetime earnings of most Americans, it might feel like the right way to think of the Whinging 36: if these guys want to make rapacious salaries as big shot executives, the private sector is where that's rampant.

But a more considered analysis -- in which that morality thing, you know, about common good and social obligation, carries some weight -- might lead one to conclude that certain degrees of differential in compensation ain't right no matter where it happens. There's enough; there's reward & incentive for extraordinary skill or initiative; and there's too bloody much. The Whinging 36's efforts to tilt high-end compensation further toward too bloody much doesn't look attractive to me as a blueprint for the future, whether that future is in the public or private sectors.

What do you think?





Thanks to Adrian van Leen for the photo.

Making a world where queer kids thrive

A lot of words have been written since Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, and Tyler Clementi took their own lives after being subjected to callous humiliation and, in most cases, outright hostility by their peers. These young men ranged in age from 13 to 18, and lived in Minnesota, Indiana, Texas, California, and New Jersey, respectively. Justin Aaberg took his own life in July; the other young men committed suicide in September. Each of them identified himself as or was perceived by others to be gay.

I haven't attempted a real analysis, but I'd say most of what I saw and read about this harrowing series of suicides focused on the bad behavior of those who humiliated and tormented these five young men.

Let's not beat around the bush: that behavior was bad. It was awful. Those who humiliated and tortured Justin, Billy, Asher, Seth, and Tyler will have blood on their hands for the rest of their lives. Should they be legally punished for this bad behavior? I don't know, and I haven't got much riding on cookie-cutter answers to such a crude (as in not-nuanced) question. Whether or not or how severely they are punished doesn't change the fact that they must now and for decades to come bear responsibility for the fatal consequences of their actions, which cannot be undone.

But bad behavior is not what I want to focus on. I want to focus on three good things.

First good thing: cultural change can strengthen kids against the inevitable predation of bullies. Second: parents can help to better proof their kids against a culture in which those changes have not yet been realized. And third: kids can and do actively claim their right to be who they are.

None of the ideas in this blog post are original. In fact, I'm going to render what I think needs to be said in other people's words. This post is not about being the first to come up with an idea; it's about recognizing what's essential amid all the hullabaloo -- about separating the wheat from the chaff.

Cultural change

Richard Kim blogged on The Nation's site on October 6th. He eloquently separated wheat from chaff and needed fewer than 1500 words to do the job.

The chaff, with respect to Rutgers University students Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei (who used a webcam to spy on Tyler Clementi having sex with another man days before he jumped from the George Washington Bridge): "What Ravi and Wei did was immature, prurient and thoughtless; it undoubtedly played some role in what became an awful, awful tragedy. That they acted with homophobic malice, that they understood what the consequences of their actions might be, or that their prank alone, or even chiefly, triggered Clementi's suicide is far less clear."

And the wheat: "So when faced with something so painful and complicated as gay teen suicide, it's easier to go down the familiar path, to invoke the wrath of law and order, to create scapegoats out of child bullies who ape the denials and anxieties of adults, to blame it on technology or to pare down homophobia into a social menace called "anti-gay bullying" and then confine it to the borders of the schoolyard. It's tougher, more uncertain work creating a world that loves queer kids, that wants them to live and thrive. But try -- try as if someone's life depended on it. Imagine saying I really wish my son turns out to be gay. Imagine hoping that your 2-year-old daughter grows up to be transgendered. Imagine not assuming the gender of your child's future prom date or spouse; imagine keeping that space blank or occupied by boys and girls of all types. Imagine petitioning your local board of education to hire more gay elementary school teachers."

There will always be people -- kids and adults -- who commit cruel acts against children and youth. Some of these acts will be deliberate and conscious. Others will be thoughtless, callow, inadvertent, stupid, or fueled by antediluvian cultural values. What can be done? To the extent possible, we can each help to build a world in which kids understand that cruel acts committed by cruel and callow people are exceptional and wrong. That these acts are not the whole of the known universe. That the world is better than that, and they can be part of it. That's what Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project has been about. If you haven't heard of it, follow the link (and ask yourself: where have I been?). By speaking person-to-person across the internet through the medium of videos, the project does an end run around isolationists, reaching kids who need to know that queer people grow up to live satisfied, productive, emotionally rich lives in communities of their own choosing.

If there's a heaven, Dan Savage has secured a place in it, make no mistake.

Speaking of heaven, let's not pretend for a moment that cultural change will go down easy. This weekend, the NY Times published an article In Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda. As they have since time immemorial, social conservatives -- a.k.a. people who try to isolate kids from truths they need to know -- are whipping out scripture and ferreting out the hateful passages. In Helena, Montana, school officials proposed "new guidelines for teaching about sexuality and tolerance. They proposed teaching first graders that 'human beings can love people of the same gender,' and fifth graders that sexual intercourse can involve 'vaginal, oral or anal penetration.'" In the actual real world that human beings inhabit, these are facts. The guidelines propose teaching about things that happen. Indeed, these are things that happen with significant frequency, often between people who make considered moral choices about them.

So what does one mother quoted in the NY Times story think about teaching facts to children? "'Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,' one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September." And Pastor Rick DeMato explains: "Of course we’re all against bullying. But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don’t want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values."

Well -- leaving aside the further evidence that socially conservative Christians have a deceitful habit of pretending they speak for all Christians, which is absurd on its face but not the topic of this post -- there's the rub.

Anybody can say they're against bullying. But in communities that actively refuse to teach or accept that it takes all kinds to make a world -- communities that refuse to pull difference out from under what Richard Kim called "the denials and anxieties of adults" -- humiliation and torment breed like sewer rats. History has taught that lesson over and over again.

Being a good parent

A week ago today, a Midwestern mother of three who blogs as "Nerdy Apple Bottom," posted a blog titled My son is gay. If I were put in charge of assigning required reading for parents of young children, I would assign this blog post.

The post begins, starting with the title: "My son is gay. Or he’s not. I don’t care. He is still my son. And he is 5. And I am his mother. And if you have a problem with anything mentioned above, I don’t want to know you."

In short, an adorable boy, age five, chose to dress up as a cartoon character for Halloween this year. The cartoon character is female. When the blogger escorted her adorable five year old to preschool on Halloween, dressed as he chose, a number of other mothers whose children attend the preschool tried to make the boy and his mother feel very very icky because they are so positively certain it's wrong for a boy to choose to dress as a girl. On Halloween, mind you.

(Is it worth noting, as the blogger does, that her child's preschool is a church-hosted program? I'm not sure. As implied above, I am not one of those who thinks all religion is tainted with hatred and conservatism, or that all religious people are, at bottom, haters. I think ideas like that are ridiculous and patently false. And, indeed, Nerdy Apple Bottom proves this in her post: both she, who loves her child as he is, and the mothers who spew denial and anxiety as though possessed all send their kids to the same church preschool. It ain't about religion. It's about bigotry.)

Here's how Nerdy Apple Bottom ended her blog post: "If he wants to carry a purse, or marry a man, or paint fingernails with his best girlfriend, then ok. My job as his mother is not to stifle that man that he will be, but to help him along his way. Mine is not to dictate what is 'normal' and what is not, but to help him become a good person. I hope I am doing that. And my little man worked that costume like no other. He rocked that wig, and I wouldn't want it any other way."

'Nuff said.

Claiming a place in the world

Sayre Quevedo is a 17 year old who lives in the same city I do: Berkeley, California. (I do not know him.) He's a reporter with Youth Radio, and published an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on October 26th. Sayre was nine years old when he came out to his mother. She asked him if he was sure, Sayre wrote, then said, "Well, I'm happy for you, honey. Now get ready for bed."

(Word to the wise: that's not the way it goes down for most kids who come out to their parents. Heck, I waited until I was 23 years old and it wasn't that way for me.)

Sayre wrote about supportive experience in his life, and also about tough times, when other kids screamed at him that he was "sick" and was "going to hell." He wrote that he likes Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" campaign, because it's something that can make a difference during those tough times. Most importantly, he wrote about what he has found and made to claim his place in the world: "But what made the difference was the support system that had my back. My friends, my family, my Gay-Straight Alliance and the staff at my school who I knew would enforce rules regarding homophobia."

Sayre Quevedo doesn't live in a perfect world. Kids in his school scream hate and scorn in his face. But he's got the support at home (see previous section) and in his community (see the section before that) to understand that hate and scorn do not define the borders of his world. In fact, while Sayre has to wade through hate and scorn and other forms of human idiocy -- because he's human like the rest of us -- he does not accept that hate and scorn have any rightful place at all in his world.

This is a lesson to all of us.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Toxic fundamentalism here at home

Thanks to jglsongs for the photo of the Gay-Straight Alliance school bus from Seattle Pride, 2008.

Evolution of the college textbook, redux

There was a lot of buzz in late February about a publishing platform called Dynamic Books that Macmillan was rolling out, timed to launch with about 100 titles students would be able purchase for Fall term of this year, according to a Publisher's Weekly article.

If you go to the Dynamic Books catalog page today, you'll find two Economics textbooks listed, one each in Life Sciences and Math / Statistics, and a dozen in the Physical sciences. That's a total of sixteen. And guess what? Well into Fall term 2010, only one of these books is for sale -- the rest are "coming soon."

No surprise, right? Things take longer than Marketing VPs might hope before they actually gain traction.

Since last week the blogosphere has been lighting up over a new new development in the world of wishing universities and the students who are their raison d'être would help e-books make inroads into a market worth something on the order of $7-12 billion (depending whose numbers you trust). The brave new idea? How 'bout if "colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them" -- to quote a 24 October article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And why would such a measure be necessary? Because "students tend to be more conservative when choosing required materials for their studies. For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change."

Wow.

I work as a staff member at UC Berkelely, and have a cousin who is currently an undergraduate at Cal. That means I have an up-close view of the pain students and their families are feeling due to an unrelenting series of tuition increases over the past several years (32% last year alone), as state support for higher ed has dwindled. The California State University system was in the news (again) just last week: its trustees are considering increases of 15.5% this year and next, just as they warned was likely when the last increase was announced in this past June.

Part of my up-close view of students' pain comes via Facebook's Questions feature. Because I'm FB-friends with my Cal-enrolled cousin, I see questions stream by from her friends who are desperately seeking copies of a textbook someone else might have from a prior semester so that they can share or buy or rent or something as they study for exams in a class whose books they can't afford to purchase. Ouch.

I think it's pretty certain that students who are "forced to change" to a system that charges mandatory course-materials fees on top of rapidly escalating tuition costs are going to be ... unhappy, let's say. I think this is probably so even though the administrators who are experimenting with such models are aiming at lowering textbook costs for students, which is a very good thing.

It'll be interesting watching this one play out.

E-textbooks are certainly coming. Whether it's textbook publishing platforms that make it easier for professors to contribute to and pick-and-choose from available textbook material; or professors who choose books students can opt to purchase in electronic form; or administrators who ram e-texts down impoverished students' throats, ready or not ... one way or another, the future is nigh.

But university administrators are going to have to make a very clear case -- to students -- for near-term savings for students who are subjected to course-materials fees or similar mandatory schemes. Otherwise you can bet the building take-overs won't be reported from the Berkeley campus alone...




Thanks to Janne Huttunen for making her photo of the November 2009 occupation of Berkeley's Wheeler Hall available on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Public education and dumb analogies

In Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle, C.W. Nevius authored a column titled Schools need to do a lot better for their customers. Those who follow the link will notice that the column is titled differently in its web incarnation: Extreme volunteering not the answer for schools. I don't care what you call it. The columnist's argument is full of holes.

He starts out with a story about a family who contribute extraordinary time and effort to their child's San Francisco school. Nevius reports that a fund-raising effort the parents helped to organize "brought in a mind-boggling $125,000 last year" to augment the school budget. The family's father estimates that the family's mother, who is president of the PTA, "works 40 hours a week on the school."

That's a lot of volunteer hours, by any reasonable measure, and the Hsieh family is to be commended for commitment to their child and community. But the columnist's next paragraph, in which he sets up an allegory that takes up fully 30% of word count, heads right off the rails:

The district needs to keep [the Hseih family's story] in mind when they launch the happy chat about parents making a difference. That's a massive commitment, especially for couples working two jobs. If the schools are a business, this is no way to treat your potential best customers.

The allegory that takes up fully 30% of Nevius' column? Imagine your kids' school were a neighborhood restaurant... Over to you, Cookie Monster:



Let's leave this ... rather silly allegory aside for now. The much more important tidbit has already been quoted: "If the schools are a business..."

The analogy in this column is silly (and doesn't belong) because schools are not a business. They're a public investment.

The school the Hsieh family's child attends is the Chinese Immersion School at De Avila Elementary. The 2010-11 SF Unified School District budget shows that 85 students were enrolled in the school last year, when the Hsieh family helped to raise $125,000. If I understand correctly, last year was the school's first year of operation. Projected enrollment for the coming year is 154. The budget allocation for 85 students last year, according to the district's budget for 2009-10, was $634,120 (for 154 students in the coming year the allocation is $865,161; the difference in the per-student funding seems to imply that it takes some juice to get a new school off the ground ... fair enough). I don't know whether the volunteer fundraisers' bucks were counted as part of what the district allocated to the school, or whether the raised funds augmented the district's contribution. Count one way, and you conclude that volunteers raised 19.7% of the school's annual budget; could the other, and they raised 16.5% of the budget for 2009-10.

Why all the fussing about numbers? Because what we've deduced is that the school district -- funded by federal, state, and local taxes -- kicked in 80.3 to 83.5% of this school's expenses last year.

Nevius wrote in his column on Saturday that "public education isn't a charity."

Is he sure? The numbers given above don't sound like "a business." They sound to me a lot more like a public works project.

Indeed, public education is a public investment in maintaining a competent citizenry and work force. The 'customers' of a school are not only its students and parents. In fact the term 'customers' doesn't apply very well at all. The term 'community' applies, because the beneficiaries of public education include the community -- neighborhood, city, county, state, nation, planet -- in which that school's students live and will live. Indeed, that's why communities fund public education in the first place.

Doh!

And yet, when the public doesn't kick in enough funding to operate a school at a level of competence and effectiveness deemed appropriate by the most immediately interested adult segment of its community -- the parents of its students -- those parents either pitch in to make the school better, or they settle for Plan B. What's Plan B? Under Plan B, your kids get an education that fits within the limited resources allocated by the public.

When I grew up, this was called "life." One dealt with it, both politically and practically.

Now, to put my perspective in perspective, when our family came to California in 1970 we attended schools in one of the top districts in the state, in an affluent Bay Area suburb. We lived in student housing on a university campus (my father was in graduate school), and benefited from the fact that many students in our school were the sons and daughters of parents affiliated with the university, parents who had high scholastic ambitions and expectations for their progeny.

My family was pretty darn happy with the education my siblings and I received as a public investment. And yet it wasn't easy for schools to make ends meet then either. On the wall in the Social Studies department of my middle school someone posted a sign with what is now, nearly forty years on, a used-to-death slogan: "It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need, and the military has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." (Hasn't happened yet.)

If there wasn't enough to make ends meet, even in privileged circumstances, how did our community deal with it? Oodles of parents pitched in to help -- as playground monitors, as field trip chaperones, as guest speakers/teachers, as costume makers for school plays, as classroom helpers, as bake sale bakers, and so on.

And then what happened?

The year after I graduated from high school, the state of California was led off the cliff by anti-tax lunatics Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, whose inane reasoning -- we want it, but we don't want to pay for it -- has led directly to California's current budget crisis. Yes, I'm talking about the infamous Proposition 13. Public education in the state has been on a downhill slide since 1978, and Prop 13 is a huge part of the problem.

Back to C.W. Nevius, who started Saturday's column with this:

[...] a frustrated parent wrote to say that they'd tried to make it work, but were resigned to moving to the suburbs. 'We love San Francisco,' he said. 'But we love our kids more.'

Later in his column, Nevius ended his silly restaurant allegory by making an analogy of the "product" of San Francisco's public education.

What was that analogy? Public education in San Francisco is:

A meal. Almost as good as the one you can get for free in Danville. [...]

Well, guess again, C.W. In Danville, as in other affluent suburbs, parents help schools too. (Why? Because they're not inane enough to think, like anti-tax lunatics, that society can get something for nothing.)

There's nothing "free" about education in Danville, other than the free-association that led a certain columnist to a certain, absurd allegory.

If there are more parents "free" to put more hours into helping out their kids' schools there, I'm going to take a wild guess that it's because there are a greater percentage of families in Danville able to pay their bills on one parent's salary, or on two jobs instead of three or four or five (census data shows per capita income in 1999 was $50,773 in Danville, compared to $34,556 in San Francisco). Or because there is a greater share of people who understand from their own experience, and that of their families' prior generations, that investment in education for one's children is among the most determinative of future quality of life that a parent can make (the same census pages show 59.4% of people age 25+ hold Bachelor's degrees or higher in Danville; in San Francisco the figure is 45.0%).

Are disparities in capability and drive to help kids navigate their education a problem? Of course they are! But that's nothing a little redistribution of wealth and privilege wouldn't fix over the course of some decades.

(Okay, 'me-first' conservatives, stop barking. I'll put away the red meat.)

No honest person claims these are easy problems to solve, and parents who can give their kids a leg up will. That's reality, by and large. Nevius is right that schools have to get better to keep children of interested parents -- especially interested parents with options -- enrolled. And some of the suggestions he makes about rewarding parents for their contributions toward helping San Francisco schools seem reasonable to me, so long as there are counterbalancing factors to the "preference" system he sketches out that might easily turn out to be, to use the columnist's own word, "exclusionary."

But. Simplistic, stupefying analogies won't help. So ... how about we give that populist hysteria a rest, eh?

On the topic of wild guesses? I'm sure that a careful fact-checker who digs more deeply into the numbers than I did -- like, say, a paid journalist ought to -- could quibble with the figures cited in this post ... but I'd wager more than a little that my approximations aren't far off, and substantively support this post's core arguments.

It will be a great day when newspaper pundits become responsible for making sense and telling the truth in the column-inches their subscribers subsidize.







(Full disclosure: I don't have kids. I do volunteer in my city's public schools. I have no problem paying taxes for the education of other people's kids, and vote to pay more when the opportunity presents itself. And I also have a conflict of interest: not only do I yearn deeply for a nation of competent, engaged citizens and an educated work force; I'm also on the staff at UC Berkeley, which means I'm paid a salary to help keep public education running. People who know tell me I could make better money in the private sector. But a person's got to stick to what he believes is important.)