Sunday, June 04, 2006

BUREAUCRATS GET THE CREAM AT UCD

Ari Kelman is a 37-year-old history professor at UC Davis, a hotshot new hire who had written a prescient book about building in flood-prone New Orleans. During his first semester on campus last year -- as Hurricane Katrina hit -- Kelman's expert opinion was sought by U.S. News and World Report, the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," the New York Times and reporters across the country. Buoyed by his heightened profile, Kelman said he believes moving to Davis with his wife and toddler son is the best career move he's made. But for his pocketbook, it's turned out to be his worst.

University of California administrators have been under fire for giving millions of dollars in unauthorized perks to fellow executives, justifying it as critical to retain and recruit top-tier staff. But Kelman didn't get any of it, although he did try. Instead he's fretting about replacing his busted washing machine. "The executive pay stuff was tough to swallow," said Kelman, who earns $77,600 a year.

When he was lured from the University of Denver last year, he asked for $25,000 to help buy a house in Davis. He was told no. He tried being creative, asking for no-strings-attached "research" money. He was told no. His wife even had to pay her own way on a house-hunting trip. "My perception was, 'This is the University of California . the big leagues -- surely they can be competitive,'" he said. But a job with the noted history department at UC Davis was too good to pass up, although he and his wife did give up a lot.

In Denver, they owned a 4,000-square-foot-house and land in the Rockies on which they planned to build a cabin one day. The Kelmans sold it all and stretched to buy a 1,800-square-foot house in Davis. The three-bedroom home cost $700,000 and is the same size as the first house the couple bought in 1998, when Kelman was just out of graduate school and took a job as an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma. The Davis home cost 10 times more than the one in Norman, Okla. "The only thing that almost kept us from coming here was the cost of living," Kelman said. "We came out and looked for houses and our heads exploded." The university did provide Kelman a routine benefit for faculty that ultimately made the move possible. The UC helped him secure a below-market home loan that he will be repaying until mid-century. It's $575,000 over 40 years, at a 3.7 percent variable interest rate.

Kelman said he didn't get into the business to make a lot of money. But he didn't figure that as a midcareer history professor at a major institution he would be worried about paying basic bills. At the same time, he considers himself lucky. He was able to purchase property. Kelman is already a top earner in his field for his experience level -- he prodded UC Davis to give him a pay bump above scale, about $12,800 more. And he's better off than faculty in liberal arts who can start a first job at under $60,000. (Top scale for liberal arts faculty is $130,900.)

As Kelman was adjusting to the costly California housing market this past year, auditors were poring over the books at UC headquarters, prodded by legislators and critics demanding an accounting of the full salary packages for executives. One theme emerged from the pay flap -- padded housing allowances and beefed up relocation payments for top administrators and campus leaders, such as chancellors and deans, that violated UC compensation policies. UC offers a maximum $53,300 housing allowance to UC executives and top administrators -- generally not to faculty -- parceled out over several years to defray higher living costs when moving from outside California. UC's internal auditor suggested market pressures led to bending the rules to help executives buy houses, turning benefits -- several were more than $100,000 -- into signing bonuses. Auditors also found the housing bonuses were routinely given to administrators who moved from one UC campus to another.

But Kelman, like other professors, was not eligible. "Rank-and-file professors of Serbian poetry are not going to get a housing bonus to come to Santa Cruz," said John Oakley, chairman of the UC systemwide Academic Senate. "For rank-and-file members we have to live in a world that makes it difficult to recruit people when housing costs are so high." Oakley, a UC Davis law professor, said the UC's low-interest home loan program is the best recruitment incentive but he warns of a "simmering crisis" as faculty salaries fall behind comparable public and private universities.

The university's faculty salaries are now about 13 percent below the national average, according to a study commissioned last year by UC regents. Adding in UC's health and retirement benefits put UC faculty at about 3 percent above average, but the study did not factor in housing costs. The UC Board of Regents acknowledges the discrepancy. Regents have pledged to keep faculty salaries competitive and boost them over 10 years, but funding remains limited.

Kelman saw the recruitment challenges from the other side when he served on a search committee for another new history professor at Davis this past year. He said the academic prestige and collegiality at Davis are played up. Job candidates are told about the low-interest home loan program, and that getting into the local housing market is better in the long term. "They have to say to themselves, 'Will I ever be able to live what most people consider a middle-class existence?'" Kelman said. "I took the job because this was the job I want to have for the rest of my career. I could say, 'OK, we're going to really, really feel this squeeze for five or 10 years. . Eventually it's not going to hurt that much.'"

Source






Gradeless curriculum 'the way of the future'

Or so says the crazy Yugoslav in charge of Western Australian education. All students must be made equal! Tito would approve. Press report below:

The Education Minister in charge of implementing a gradeless curriculum in West Australian schools has come out fighting in defence of the new courses. Ljiljanna Ravlich conceded that the courses, described by John Howard as gobbledegook, "could have been more clear". She admitted it was wrong to name the new literature course Texts, Traditions and Cultures. And she said she did not agree with the Curriculum Council that a turntable was a musical instrument of equal merit to a violin. Yet she argued that the curriculum, developed on the principles of outcomes-based education, was the way of the future. "I know it's the right thing to do and I know it's for the right reason, and I can tell you it's a view that is shared by 30 other OECD nations, all of whom are moving towards an outcomes-based education," she said.

Under the new curriculum, all subjects are equal, meaning a top performance in cooking and dance could help a student into a university law degree, ahead of those who studied physics and chemistry.

Ms Ravlich admitted to problems in how the curriculum had been presented. "I do agree that (the language) could have been more simple and to the point," she said. "It is probably partly responsible for, I guess, feeding some of the misconceptions." But she insisted the courses would be implemented. "This has been a debate where there's been more of a focus from a small number of teachers, a minority of teachers who, for a variety of reasons, may be resistant to change," she said. Teachers have raised concerns a draft exam for the new English course did not require students to have read a novel, though one question required them to have read a book of some kind.

Ms Ravlich said she was satisfied that students had to read a book to pass the English course and said that, because the first Year 12 exams were 18 months away, there was time for changes to exams where needed. While a marking key for the draft English sample exam stated "student responses should not be penalised for poor spelling, punctuation, grammar or handwriting, unless these are elements ... specifically being assessed", Ms Ravlich said students must learn grammar, punctuation and sentence construction in the new course.

Ms Ravlich was yesterday enjoying a victory over the State School Teachers Union over the plan to roll out 17 of the new courses into Year 11 next year. While the union last week ordered teachers to treat the courses as voluntary, it has since learned that those who do so will deprive students of the opportunity to attend university, as the old courses will not be recognised.

Rather than dictating what students should know and grading them, outcomes-based education focuses on what students are able to do. It aims to shift the emphasis from teaching to learning and provide tools to pinpoint students' strengths and weaknesses. Teacher lobby group People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes claims the courses, in which students will be assessed on eight outcomes, lack detail, are too open to interpretation and make assessment subjective. But Ms Ravlich, 48, a Croatian-born former social studies teacher who has been the partner of state Treasurer Eric Ripper, 54, for more than a decade, though they maintain separate homes, said she believed firmly in the principles.

Source






RACIST HISPANICS IN TROUBLE

Police were investigating a KABC-AM reporter's accusations that a man assaulted him and grabbed his tape recorder after he attempted to interview the principal of a charter school that a host at his radio station said was "openly segregationist." Reporter Sandy Wells was chased and tackled by the man Thursday after a school employee told him to leave Academia Semillas Del Pueblo campus east of downtown, said station spokesman Steve Sheldon.

Wells was not injured, but "very shaken," Sheldon said, adding that the station believes that Wells was targeted because he was investigating the school's academic program. "We are very concerned about the alleged incident that reportedly occurred at Academia Semillas del Pueblo charter school and police authorities are investigating," the Los Angeles Unified School District said in a statement.

The school district, which issued the charter license to Academia Semillas Del Pueblo, said it was reviewing the school's academic programs to determine whether to renew its charter operations. The school came under scrutiny by KABC host Doug McIntyre after he received a tip from a listener that the school didn't fly the American flag on May Day, Sheldon said. The Web site for the school described it as a kindergarten through eighth grade public school "dedicated to providing urban children of immigrant native families an excellent education founded upon their own language, cultural values and global realities." Students learn English, Spanish, Mandarin and Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico. "It's exclusionary, it's separatist, it's openly segregationist," McIntyre told KABC-TV.

A call to the school's principal, Marcos Aguilar, was not immediately returned Thursday. Aguilar issued a statement contending that while most of the school's pupils are Hispanic, it does not discriminate against students on the basis of their ethnicity or national origin. He noted that the school's curriculum was approved by the district's and state's school boards. "The perception has been made that our school exercises racist policies and that our curriculum ... is contrary to a quality education," Aguilar said. "Academia is in fact committed to providing a high-quality, public school education to all students, but most notably the underserved kids in our local community."

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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