Tuesday, August 28, 2007

University heads and interior decorators

What is it about being appointed to run a major university campus that causes the appointee to hire an expensive interior decorator? A trial just begun in Houston exposes yet another case of a senior administrator in state-funded higher education feathering her nest with lavish appointments courtesy of taxpayers. The New York Times reports:
With Texas Southern University struggling to survive as one of the nation's largest historically black colleges, the former president once hailed as its savior faced a state jury here Friday, charged with misspending hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal luxuries.

A $1,000 silk canopy for a four-poster bed, $138,000 for landscaping and $61,600 for a security system are among the items that prosecutors say the former president, Priscilla Slade, fraudulently billed the public for and kept secret from trustees from 1999 to 2005. The charges being considered in Harris County District Court carry penalties from probation up to life in prison.

This is awfully reminiscent of the notorious wish list handed to the University of California by the late Denice Denton when she became Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Denton most notoriously got a $30,000 dog run in the backyard, but also other luxury goodies for the mansion she inhabited, plus a $192,000 job for her lesbian partner, plus a $60,000 housing allowance for said partner, plus other perks totaling about $600k.

Denton faced no legal liability because she went through channels to get her perks, whereas Priscilla Slade, the former head of TSU is alleged to have spent the money on herself without proper authorization. Denton, however, later killed herself by leaping from the roof of a skyscraper apartment building.

The mess at the University of California system, where a culture of top management helping itself to lavish salary and perks while obscuring responsibility and accountability for spending the university's $20 billion annual budget, has gotten so bad that Richard Blum, gazillionaire husband of Sen. Diane Feinstein and chair of the Board of Regents, has issued a scathing denunciation of mismanagement at the top, calling for seerious reform.

Face it: higher education is one of the biggest industries in the country, and it is one heavily subsidized by taxpayers, directly through state schools, and indirectly through federal loans, grants, contracts, and other payments. Over the four decades I have spent studying at, working in, and observing higher education, the field has grown fat, all the while mercilessly squeezing out tuition increases at double the rate of inflation, pushing higher education into a luxury category, requiring deep sacrifices from all but the wealthiest.

Reform is long overdue. But with the professorate heavily contributing to Democrats, they have a defender class of politicians. It is too bad that indictments are necessary to send a signal of the need for reform. University administrators deserve adequate compensation, but they cannot treat the public coffers as a personal windfall to be tapped for all the luxuries of their dreams. It is time for the gravy train to be halted.

Source





Can socioeconomic mixing fix schools?

The article below by a California educrat is more realistic than most

Once viewed largely as a strategy to avoid legal challenges to the use of race for integrating schools, socioeconomic factors are getting a fresh look in California and elsewhere as the next focus for providing equitable opportunities for learning. While the impetus for this approach existed before the recent Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in the Seattle and Louisville cases, it was limited to about 40 school districts, with some 2.5 million students. Now, however, the lessons learned from these pioneers are taking on greater relevance for schools in California and those across the country.

In 2000, the Wake County School Board in North Carolina voted to implement a plan to assure that no school in the district would have more than 40 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, and no school would have more than 25 percent of its students performing below grade level. Based on the evidence to date, the plan is working to raise achievement of all students and narrow the gap between groups. Low-income and minority students in Wake County have achieved better academic results than those in other North Carolina districts that have failed to break up pockets of poverty. In 2005, for example, more than 80 percent of black elementary students were reading at or above grade level, up from 57 percent in 1998.

But before concluding that the Wake County model, which takes in Raleigh and its extended suburbs, is applicable to districts in California, it's important to bear in mind that a set of unusual conditions have made the task of socioeconomic integration possible there. The school district is countywide, making it relatively easy to combine students from the city and the suburbs. Wake County also has a 32-year history of busing, so that parents are accustomed to long rides to schools. Finally, the local economy is prosperous, with no signs of cooling in sight.

In the absence of any of Wake County's factors, it's unclear how the strategy would fare in California. Research has shown that schools must be at least 50 percent middle class in order to produce the expected benefits. This is known as the tipping point because educational quality begins to decline when a school becomes more than half low income. What would happen, therefore, if a particular district had a large low-income Hispanic or white population? Where would those students, whose enrollment is necessary to carry out socioeconomic integration, come from?

According to the Children's Defense Fund, nearly 18 percent of the nation's children live in poverty, and the number is rapidly growing. Contrary to popular belief, the phenomenon is not limited to urban areas. Thirty rural counties in 11 states have poverty rates higher than those in the poorest inner cities. Exacerbating the problem are undocumented immigrants, half of whose children live in low-income neighborhoods, compared with 35 percent of children of native-born families.

But even if the demographics were ideal, there is always the possibility that attempts to promote socioeconomic integration would exacerbate the flight of middle-class families to private and religious schools. According to Robert Reich, former labor secretary, the top 20 percent of families by income and education nationwide are already in the process of seceding from public schools. If socioeconomic integration of schools were adopted as policy, more of these same families might be tempted to follow suit. In that case, the number of middle-class students would be insufficient to create the desired socioeconomic balance.

If studies going back more than 40 years are any consolation, a school's socioeconomic composition -- second only to a family's socioeconomic status -- is the most reliable predictor of academic achievement.

Source





Attempting To Prevent Diversity in Debate Over "Diversity"

Post lifted from Discriminations. It's always rather hilarious when the Left and the Greens try to withhold data. That clearly conveys as nothing else could that they know the facts don't support them. If the facts did support their claims, they would be delighted to give them maximum exposure

Most readers are familiar with the pioneering work UCLA law professor Richard Sander has produced on the effects (they are not good) of "diversity" of law school admissions, especially his "mismatch" theory that preferences have actually reduced the number of minority lawyers. (Not familiar? Become so quickly by looking here, here, here, here, and here.)

Even though Sander has no ideological or partisan ax to grind, his studies have gotten under the skins of diversiphiles, some of whose reactions to his work have resembled tantrums more than scholarship. Now comes Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a new member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, with a powerful, and powerfully depressing, OpEd today in the Wall Street Journal with disturbing evidence of various attempts to block Sander's continuing investigation of how preferences actually operate.
Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don't want you -- or anyone else -- to know.

Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.

Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for this data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens - university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders - have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.

If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know.
If the policy of racial preference worked even remotely as well as its supporters argue you'd think they would be begging serious scholars like Prof. Sander to examine all the available data. Instead, they act like those prissy librarians who live in constant fear that some child will actually touch a book in their care.

UPDATE: Kidder Must Be Kidding

As Prof. Heriot indicated, one of Sander's most vociferous critics is William Kidder, who is also a leader in the effort to block Sander's access to bar association data that he needs to pursue his research. As she noted, "Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure `risks stigmatizing African American attorneys.'"

But what Prof. Heriot doesn't say, perhaps because she is too polite, is that Kidder's position not only violates any reasonable notion of honest and open scholarly debate; it is also blatantly hypocritical.

Kidder is identified, accurately, as "a University of California staff advisor." For a number of years, however, he was closely associated with the Equal Justice Society, a pro-preferences organization. Most of the articles he wrote criticizing Prof. Sander, and others, identified him as a researcher with the Equal Justice Society. (See, for examples, here, here, here, here, and here.)

So what? you ask. Why, you ask, do I bring up Kidder's long association with the Equal Justice Society? For a very good reason: to support my charge of rank hypocrisy. Since Kidder is so concerned now that release of data such as bar passage rates by race "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys," even though no names would be released, perhaps he can point to examples that show when and where he disagreed with his former colleagues and employers who led the fight to defeat Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative (Proposition 54) in 2003 and jumped with joy when it was defeated.

Equal Justice Society Cheers Overwhelming Defeat of Proposition 54

Organization Played Key Role in Coalition that Downed Divisive Measure

SAN FRANCISCO (October 8, 2003) - The Equal Justice Society played a pivotal role in the broad coalition that decisively defeated Ward Connerly's Proposition 54 on October 7, 2003. The dangerous, divisive measure would have banned the collection of racial and ethnic data by any state agency, thus making it virtually impossible to track and document race discrimination or to bring civil rights suits to court...

EJS Executive Director Eva Paterson was a leading spokesperson for the No on 54 Campaign. More than two years prior to the election, Paterson was part of the core group that launched the Coalition for an Informed California, the official opposition campaign organization. The coalition was an extraordinarily broad and diverse network of supporters including health professionals, classroom teachers, law enforcement, trade unionists, civil rights activists, lawyers, academics and students.

"Connerly's Proposition 54 was about burying information about race that could be used to track racial profiling, challenge discrimination in housing, target effective programs to keep kids in school, and - most importantly, perhaps - provide vital health research and treatment," said Paterson, who debated Connerly numerous times during the campaign, including on National Public Radio.

Even aside from the hypocrisy of supporting the collection of racial data so that it can be used to "challenge discrimination," etc., but opposing access to it by scholars they deem unfriendly, Kidder and friends' objection to Prof. Sander's access to state bar data makes little sense since, as a commenter to this post has pointed out, the California State Bar has already released a good deal of racial data on bar passage rates.

But wait. It gets even better. In trying, without success, to find other examples of Kidder's opposition to the use of personally anonymous racial data in research, I found that he himself has used the very sort of data that he now wishes to deny to Prof. Sander.

The following is from the trial transcript of Grutter v. Bollinger in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Miranda Massie, an attorney for and one of the leaders of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), the group that has instigated high school students to riot in favor of preferences, among other offenses (see here, here, here, and here), was examining a testing expert, David White, the founder of a group in Berkeley called Testing For the Public ("Strategies For Standardized Tests In A Diverse World") that believes standardized tests are racist in their effect and that offers LSAT test preparation courses. After White discussed the earlier studies by Joseph Gannon finding racial gaps in LSAT scores, the following exchange occurs (Trial Transcript, pp. 146-147):
Q Have you - has Testing for the Public recently undertaken to update this research?

A ... So it so happened that one of my students, William Kidder, who I was happy he took my LSAT course, then I was happy that he decided he was going to teach the LSAT course for me, I was happy for him that he got into Boalt Hall. I was flattered that he read all my old law review articles, and I was amazed that he took on the burden of actually trying to reproduce Dr. Gannon's study.

He asked Boalt Hall to give him anonymous data from their applicant pool and he reproduced the study that Dr. Joseph Gannon had done twenty years ago. He did the very same matching process, and this time we had the identities of the school available to us, and you can see, Your Honor, they are very famous schools, it's the top five feeder schools to Boalt Hall, UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and Yale.

This data was personally anonymous, but it was less anonymous than the data Prof. Sander has requested from the State Bar of California because it identifies the undergraduate colleges of the otherwise anonymous applicants to Boalt Hall.

Obviously Kidder and friends want racial data collected, but apparently they want it released only to those they can trust to cook it so that it supports their own devotion to racial preferences.

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