Education

March 4—the Day of Action – ONGOING UPDATES

For a good overall round-up of the SoCal March 4 protests and demonstrations, check out Neon Tommy’s package.

10:04 p.m. – Great photo essay from UC Davis protester/police clash. And just good photos generally. (Click on the photo on the right side of the site.)

5:43 p.m. – An articulate Op Ed by a CUNY grad student who explains why students across the country are protesting along with California:

5:32 p.m. – The socialist worker types are reportedly peppering the downtown LA rally, with large signs advancing their own agenda. Not helpful. Organize your own party, people. Quit trying to highjack the events organized by others.

4:25 p.m. Cool live Flikr feed from Neon Tommy.

cops-at-UC-Davis

UC-Davis-protesters

3:00 p.m. At around 2 p.m. police and students reportedly collided at UC Davis.
Above pictures show students moving down road, and then cops moving it. There was some reported student whacking on the part of the cops and possibly some tear gas pepper spray or whatever is the newer incarnation of that stuff. Something. But supposedly that has stopped.

The photos and reports are from California Aggie, the UC Davis newspaper.

1:33 p.m. – Students gathered quietly outside Geisel Library at UCSD. Inside, the info librarian tweets that he’s never seen so many people gathered together on the campus before.

1:30 p.m. – Check out the march at UC Riverside.

1:20 – BIG RALLY AT PERSHING SQUARE AT 3 P.M.. UCLA students and Community College students and faculty spreading the word that downtown is the next place to be.

1:15: Community college students complain that the UC students are taking up community college classes because of the rise in UC fees. Thus community college students are getting aced out of classes. Meanwhile, SMC is forced to cut its faculty. Meanwhile unemployed adults are going to community colleges for classes to up their skills, putting further strain on the campuses.

So what was once California’s golden college safety net for those who could not yet afford or get into the UCs or the CSUs, is now becoming disastrously weighed down by the trickle-down effect of cuts above it, then further tattered by its own cuts.

SMC-protest-photo


12:15 at Santa Monica College, photo by Christine Duong.
Community colleges are also raising their collective voices.

12:06 p.m. – Thousands at Berkeley rally—Youth Radio has photos.

11:41 – NY Times on protests for ed cuts.

Alberto Torrico, the Democratic majority leader in the State Assembly, has proposed a new 12.5 percent tax on revenue from oil and gas production in California, a measure that he says could raise $2 billion for higher education. But with any new tax in the state requiring a two-thirds majority, its prospects seemed uncertain.

Still, Mr. Torrico — who is from the city of Fremont on the east side of San Francisco Bay — said he had gathered 60,000 signatures on petitions in support of his plan.

“It’s really not a bill any more,” Mr. Torrico said of his proposed law, which is due to be debated this summer. “It has become a movement out there.”

11:06: The Daily Californian is live blogging at Berkeley. Better source of Cal Info. Very clear, neutral reporting. (Go Zach E.J. Williams and Mihir Zaveri)

Meanwhile, many Cal students and faculty leaving for Sac’to.

Rally at Sac’to starting.

11:05 : NOTE TO BERKELEY STUDENTS. Stop pulling the fire alarms. That’s just dumb. Sorry. But not helpful.

11 a.m. – A happy and pastoral-looking “teach out” among the trees at UC San Diego. Looks like a worthy activity, March 4 or no March 4.

10:50: Richie Duchon at Neon Tommy asks Where is Jerry Brown on March 4? Jerry? Any thoughts?

9:55 a.m. Pickets reportedly have been up at UC Berkeley since early morning.


9:50 a.m. Rally at UC Santa Cruz.

9:32 a.m.:Things are already underway at UC Santa Cruz. Parking enforcement was stopped on its rounds. (But in a nice way, I’m sure.)



Thursday is the nationwide “Day of Action” during which students, faculty and alumni
are expected to protest drastic cuts in education funding—and in the case of higher eduction, the drastic fee hikes.

(The LA Times has more about what is expected.)

Annenberg’s Neon Tommy is sending teams to cover events around LA County and, when possible, around the state.

During the day, I’ll cherry pick whatever coverage is the most interesting.

So stay tuned.

In the meantime, watch the Twitter thread to your right for events as they unfold.—>

And here is Neon Tommy’s nice Timeline showing the rise in fees at California universities.


A map of all planned protests and events:


View March 4 Day of Action in a larger map

38 Comments

  • I heard the illegal aliens oops undocumented are a boom to California’s economy, maybe we need millions more poor mexicans in California to help fund our schools. It must be the nativists who are responsible for the lack of funds California schools.

  • Regional Events

    UCLA
    • 10 am Pickets
    • 11:30 am Walk Out
    • 12 pm Rally @ Bruin Plaza
    (UCLA invites high schools and community colleges in the Westside area to join)

    Los Angeles Regional Rally
    • 3 pm Rally @ Pershing Square (5th & Hill) in downtown L.A.
    • 4 pm March from Pershing Square to the Governor’s office
    • 5 pm Rally @ Governor’s office (300 Spring St.)

    East Bay/Oakland Regional Rally
    • 12 pm-4 pm Rally @ Frank Ogawa Plaza (in front of Oakland City Hall, 14th & Broadway)
    • March to the Ogawa Plaza Rally from:
    -UC Berkeley: 12 pm Rally @ Bancroft & Telegraph, followed by March
    -Laney College: 11 am Rally, followed by March
    -Fruitvale BART: Assemble @ 11 am, March @ 11:30 am
    • Travel to San Francisco Regional Rally (See regional listing below)

    San Francisco Regional Rally
    • 5 pm Rally @ San Francisco Civic Center

    Sacramento/State Capitol Rally
    • 11 am-1 pm Rally @ State Capitol (North Steps of Capitol)

    San Diego Regional Rally
    • 3 pm Rally @ Balboa Park, followed by March to governor’s office
    • 4 pm Rally @ Governor’s office (downtown)

    San Fernando Valley Regional Rally
    • 3:45 pm gathering @ CSU Northridge Sierra Quad
    • 4:15 pm March
    • 5 pm Hands around CSUN
    • 5:30 pm Rally @ CSU Northridge Sierra Quad

  • What’s wrong with cutting state funds that don’t exist and which never should have been authorized in the beginning? Colleges simply gobble up money, show nothing for it, and expect more.

    Tuition hikes in America’s colleges make insurance premium increases look low in comparison. Why are universities so greedy? What’s Obama doing about that?

    (“Hands around CSUN” – How STUUUUUPID! Liberals love to “feel good” in the most useless ways.)

    P.S. As a preemptive comment, reg is a psycho.

  • If there is a significant drop-off in CA’s high school student scores, there should be a significant drop-off in college admissions. Unless of course you believe that everybody is four year university material.
    That would be nice, but it isn’t reality. When you try to pay for everybody to attend a four year college, this is what happens.
    If only the best and brightest were admitted, this problem wouldn’t exist.
    Our economy needs construction workers, waitresses, truck drivers, cooks and all other forms of “laborers”.
    You don’t need a college education for any of them.
    If we educate EVERYBODY at a four year school and they get degrees, what value does it hold in the working world?

  • Before any of you touchy feely types start ranting about how insensitive I am, ask yourself this:

    Does every high school football player belong on a college team?

  • On one hand, we are justifiably called out for failing our students. On the other hand, we are faced with the slash and burn reality of education funding.

    How am I supposed to do more with less? With a 12% pay cut and/or furlough days looming, I am not spending any more of my family’s money on classroom supplies.

    IF this state wants career and college ready young people…. we need to change the tax structure.

  • Good luck to those protesting. Thanks for taking a stand.

    I think it’s a good reminder of the truly radical and fact-free nature of Woody’s views that he thinks state colleges and universities show nothing for their efforts. For the past forty years the rest of the world has tried to replicate our college and university systems. California’s university system was typically described as “the envy of the world.” The ideological view that government institutions like our universities are doomed to fail is profoundly wrong. Spending on the education of young people is not just a moral obligation, it’s the best investment in the future of California.

  • What we get again and again from the “hands off my money” crowd are lame excuses and bad arguments about why we shouldn’t fund higher education: it’s the immigrants, the schools are wasting money, we’re spending money on hopeless cases. If the real reason is that you don’t want to be taxed, then just say that. It has the virtue of being true.

  • By the way, I don’t mean to suggest all of you are giving fake reasons for opposing proper funding of higher ed. I know Woody’s is, but others may be arguing in good faith.

  • Nice to know you’re the judge regrading who posts in good faith here and who doesn’t. While liberals never tell the whole story or omit facts constantly where people can come to an educated opinion on a subject, if conservatives speak what they believe to be the truth but do it bluntly they are the bad guys.

    Before I even comment on this I have some numbers to look up and of course Celeste some students might get lumped up a bit or O.C.’d (pepper spray) but you want to misbehave, set fires and vandalize buildings than expect some type of law enforcement reaction.

  • Would it have been pepper spray? That makes sense. I don’t know whether the cops’ action was needed or not. Nor do I pretend to.

    Those Davis kids seem to be the…uh…friskiest of all. They’re now occupying a building. Why Davis? Those ag students are evidently tough!

  • I decided to print this in whole as it’s not that long.
    It’s from George Runner’s website.

    3/27/2008
    Week In Review, March 27, 2008: Per Pupil Funding in California – What It Is and What It Means
    News of The Week

    The average per pupil funding for kindergarten-12th grade California students is more than $11,500 when factoring in local, state and federal funding, according to the Governor’s Budget.

    How does California’s investment in students compare to other states?

    It depends on who you ask. Here is a look at three different positions:

    •The National Center for Education Statistics ranks California per pupil spending 25th among the states in 2003-04, which is equal to 96 percent of the national average $9,620 per pupil. New Jersey is at the top at $14,917 per pupil, and Utah spends the least: $6,110 per pupil.

    •The National Education Association places California 33rd in the nation for 2005-06, 91 percent of the national average. (NEA also calculates the average teacher salary in California of $59,825 as the highest in the nation – 22 percent above the national average.)

    •Education Week, adjusting for regional cost differences, figures California spending is 46th in the nation.

    The non-partisan Legislative Analysts’ Office selected the National Center for Education Statistics calculation and ranking –suggesting a higher level of confidence in that organization’s figures.

    One thing is for sure though: More money and a higher rank will not improve student achievement according to numerous studies on the subject. Among the findings and conclusions are:

    •“While comparisons to the national average may have illustrative value, the analytic basis for pursuing the national average as a spending goal is unclear. . . . Research and experience suggest that how we spend available education resources is as least as important as how much we spend on education.” (LAO 2000-01 Analysis)

    •“The relationship between dollars and student achievement in California is so uncertain that it cannot be used to gauge the potential effect of resources on student outcomes. . . . [Data illustrating] API [Academic Performance Index] scores as a function of per pupil spending in 2004-2005 . . . finds essentially no relationship between the two. (“Getting Down to Facts: School Finance and Governance in California,” 2007 [GDTF])

    •”The relationship between spending per student between the ages of 6 and 15 and student outcomes as measured by PISA [Programme for International Student Achievement, an international testing system] is weak. . . . It is estimated that across OECD countries, there is a potential for increasing learning outcomes by 22% while maintaining current levels of resources.” (Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] “Education at a Glance, 2007,” an international comparison of 30 countries)

    •”Lower unit expenditure [dollars per pupil, for example] does not necessarily lead to lower achievement and it would be misleading to equate a lower unit expenditure generally with lower quality of educational services.” (OECD, “Education at a Glance”)

    •“If we do not know how to achieve a given level of student performance, we cannot estimate the cost of attaining that goal.” (GDTF)

    •“If additional dollars were inserted into the current system there is no reason to expect substantial increases in student outcomes related to state goals.” (GDTF)

    You can spend all the money in the world on K-12 education, but until we put more money in the classrooms and less in bureaucracy and act responsibly with what we have, the extra money will be for naught.

  • If liberals spent as much time working to pay their own expenses as they do in protesting to get others to pay, then there wouldn’t be any need to protest.

  • Liberals can scream all they want but illegal immigration is also a big part of the problem, anyone who denies it is an idiot. The article is interesting as is the comment below.

    http://www.scragged.com/articles/did-illegal-immigrants-sink-california.aspx

    The Times points out that the recession shows up economic issues:

    Blue-State Blues
    By ROSS DOUTHAT
    President Obama is pushing a blue-state agenda during a recession that’s exposed some of the blue-state model’s weaknesses, and some of the red-state model’s strengths.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/opinion/03douthat.html

    The article says:

    Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

    But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

    Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November. Fourteen states are facing 2010 budget gaps that exceed 20 percent of their G.D.P.; only two went for John McCain. (Strikingly, they’re McCain’s own Arizona and Sarah Palin’s Alaska.) Of the nine states that have raised taxes this year, closing deficits at the expense of growth, almost all are liberal bastions.

    The urban scholar Joel Kotkin has called this recession a blue-state “meltdown.” That overstates the case: The Deep South has been hit hard by unemployment, and some liberal regions are weathering the storm reasonably well. And clearly part of the blame for the current crisis rests with decisions made in George W. Bush’s Washington.

    But in state capital after state capital, the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class.

    And, inevitably, the tendency toward political corruption. The Republicans have their mistresses, but the Democrats are dealing with a more serious array of scandals: the Blagojevich-Burris embarrassment in Illinois, Senator Christopher Dodd’s dubious mortgage dealings in Connecticut, the expansive graft case in New Jersey, and a slew of corruption investigations featuring Democratic congressmen.

    This helps explain why the Republican Party might be competitive in the Northeast for the first time in years. Chris Christie is easily leading Jon Corzine in the race for New Jersey’s governorship. Rob Simmons might unseat Chris Dodd in Connecticut. Rudy Giuliani, who has experience with blue-state crises, is pondering a run for the statehouse in New York.

    And it also helps explain Obama’s current difficulties. The president is pushing a California-style climate-change bill at a time when businesses (and people) are fleeing the Golden State in droves. He’s pushing a health care plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts. His ballooning deficits resemble the shortfalls paralyzing state capitals from Springfield to Sacramento.

    “Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel remarked last fall. But in a crisis, all the public tends to care about are jobs and economic growth. It’s not the ideal time to pass costly social legislation that promises to reap dividends only in the long term, if at all.

  • Surefire, not that long ago you were proclaiming your fitness to singlehandedly condemn men to die. Don’t go around claiming I’ve got hubris for observing that Woody is against any service that costs money but always comes up with other reasons to cloak his selfish motives.

    I haven’t read all your links or posts, but you have confused California k-12 education (which is disastrous) and higher ed (which is very good if too expensive).

  • I have enough confidence in my own common sense to make that type of call Mavis, just like any judge does. I don’t see Woody that way so we disagree. I’m looking at education dollars spent that could off set costs, even in higher education, if it wasn’t going down the drain in other places.

  • SureFire-

    I’ll tell you what- come spend a week at my school to see how students would benefit from more funding. Here is a shortlist:

    – more computers
    – working internet
    – paper, pens
    – art supplies
    – more teachers- PE classes are at least 60 kids and most English and Math classes have at least 35
    – more counselors- the Board just passed a budget that would give 1 counselor to every 1,000 students (these are the folks who track student progress towards graduation and future plans)
    – buses to bring students off campus for events and other learning opportunities
    – summer school classes- shredded after last year’s budget crisis
    – a clean and comfortable Parent’s Center on our campus
    – more custodial staff
    – and the list could go on

    I have looked at all of those stats too. However, the anecdotal evidence suggests that California should be doing more- especially in those communities that have less. My students deserve the same opportunities and choices as the ones offered to middle class students. If we don’t provide students with equal access then we are pushing thousands of kids onto the streets, into the military or into jail.

    Trust me, I see it every day.

  • Maybe Celeste can set up a fund in which many of you can contribute to help poor students with tuition increases, rather than demand and wait on money from everyone else. Nothing is stopping any of you from giving YOUR OWN money to YOUR OWN causes.

  • “Nothing is stopping any of you from giving YOUR OWN money to YOUR OWN causes”

    Why do you always make this non-argument? Do you want a show of hands from every liberal here who gives to charities? {raises hand} Plus, I spent a year of my life helping build schools in a rural community–and since I did it through a Christian organization instead of Peace Corps/Americorp, I did not have my college loans forgiven. So right off the bat I started my professional career by sacrificing financially and working for nothing. Did you?

    Isn’t it a little silly to keep harping on this? Just accept that people can be giving and charitable regardless of their political orientation.

  • Nicolle, this is an interesting link regarding school funding and Prop.98.

    http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/19/opinion/oe-ross19

    Education, by law, is the top spending priority in this state. When those who represent us consatntly give tax breaks to certain industries (tax breaks for new pornographic shops?), some deserved but some definitely not, the general fund is diminished and education is short changed. Read how they take care of the lobbies that keep feeding them.

    When a portion of the education dollars are spent lavishly on trustee and upper management perks that are crazy, on having to provide translators for English speaking counselors who can’t talk to most parents and some students in certain school districts ( the Arcadia School District had a requirement that any new counselor speak Mandarin as of last year), on lawyers billing at rates that schools won’t even publish because of the laws that shield that information and like it or not when the state is tasked with teaching the poor from our southern neighbor someone is going to take it in the shorts.

    I respect school teachers by and large and have a high school counselor in my family. Cutting has to be done in the “education house” as well as everyone else’s so classes like yours can get what they need to educate our youth.

    I can’t say though that we have the majority of people in place that have the guts to do what’s needed. As our state becomes more business unfriendly, which is sure to happen if Jerry Brown gets elected, things will get worse and more will get less. Taxing the people more in one of the most taxed states in the union is not the way to do it.

    Good luck.

  • Good for your charitable giving, Walt! Sincerely.

    You decided which causes should get your time and money. Let me decide on mine without liberals demanding that government take it from me at the point of a gun to give to people who don’t need it or appreciate it.

  • Well, there you go: that’s a bona fide philosophical difference. Liberals and conservatives differ on how much people should contribute collectively as a function of government, and what these services should be. One of these services is a public education: most liberals agree that although public education for all children is not guaranteed by the Constitution, it is a necessity for a healthy society. You may entirely disagree with that. And there are many people, conservatives and liberals alike, who are somewhere in between. It appears we all (here, at least) agree that children, and many educators, are not seeing sufficient benefits of many of these investments. Nicole’s example is an excellent one, as are Surefire’s. What is the solution? Many liberals (again, pretty much all of them on this board) agree that the California teacher’s union has some fairly significant problems. As Mavis pointed out above, these problems are not equivalent to those at the level of higher ed. California is being hammered by a perfect storm of economic crises, not limited to the following: global recession, low property tax revenue (Prop 13–I’m not saying it needs to be revoked, but only that it’s a contributing factor), undocumented immigration, and a yet-to-drop other shoe in some major CA housing markets hiding oodles of pre-foreclosure shadow inventory. Surefire mentioned businesses fleeing, but I just don’t believe that’s accurate, at least not to the alarming degree he describes. People have been sounding California’s death knell for decades, and yet the ingenuity and technological advances keep right on humming along. A critical mass of smart people and smart businesses will always be in California. (And notice how I didn’t even mention the entertainment industry. California would do just fine without it…)

    I lost my point a little bit–it’s been a long week. Anyhoo, I guess I’m just saying that liberals (and conservatives–at least the ones I know) are all across the spectrum wrt the role of government in education. I, for one, think California’s solution will come with some belt-tightening, some thinning of bureaucracy, more magnet and charters, creativity, and time. Yeah, not much of a specific solution, I know–that’s why I’m not getting paid the big bucks to decide. But letting public schools fall apart, and/or abandoning the goal of public education in favor of supporting only private schools I think would be a grave mistake. Perhaps something in between, probably. Limited vouchers? I don’t know–ask Celeste. She’s smarter than us in this stuff. 🙂

  • Walt, while it’s true that I don’t want my money to go for the support of left-wing professors and pc colleges or books like “Heather has two mommies” in grade schools, I object, as much, to ridiculous waste by the government. Government has no respect for taxpayer money and makes little effort to do anything efficiently and effectively. So, when liberals want to expand government with other people’s money, I have to stand up and tell them that I’ll be for that right after they use up their own.

  • You bring up lots of stuff in just a paragraph, so I have to respond to them separately.

    By “left-wing professors” I’m going to assume that you are saying you don’t support either (a) the overt inclusion of a professor’s politics in the college classroom; or (b) what you view as the intended and direct relationship between public university funding and hiring of disproportionately left-wing professors. Regarding the former, surely you agree that some courses by necessity include a professor’s political bias, and perhaps all do inevitably. I took a “philosophy of being” course in a public university taught by a professor who openly stated that abortion was immoral and that the existence of a Judeo-Christian god was a necessary pre-condition to doing philosophy. I disagreed, but still got an ‘A’, because the professor was fair and graded on ideas and argument presentation. I also took a philosophy course from a professor who believed that Marxist materialist philosophy was ground zero for all philosophical endeavors. I disagreed, yet also got an ‘A’ in this course, for the same reasons. So I think the issue is not these professors’ personal or even course-related politics, but whether they necessarily encourage open investigation, regardless of whether it is consistent with their politics. I’m going to assume that you think this is not the case, and that left-wing-dominated universities are stifling right-wing voices–such as in grading students unfairly when they disagree on political questions. To the contrary, I don’t believe this is at all a significant problem, or that it is endemic to public universities.

    Regarding (b), if this was a trend at one time, I don’t believe it is anymore. I only have anecdotal evidence, but I’m in the sciences, and I just don’t see it. Every place I’ve been hires on performance alone, plain and simple. I don’t know the inner workings of the humanities as well, so you’d have to ask Celeste or Marc Cooper that question.

    What’s wrong with “Heather has two Mommies”? Whether you are happy with it or not, the fact that more and more children have same-sex parents is undeniable–it’s an observable and quantifiable fact. Teaching what is real and factual is not only permissible, but necessary. In addition, and consequently, children with opposite-sex parents are going to meet children with same-sex parents, and it’s going to be important for them to understand what this means.

    “Government has no respect for taxpayer money and makes little effort to do anything efficiently and effectively.”

    But that’s not really an argument, you realize. You believe that public services have a lot of problems, but surely you’re not claiming that nothing (besides national defense and public safety) should be publicly funded? If so, then, again, that’s fine–it’s a philosophical difference.

    “So, when liberals want to expand government with other people’s money, I have to stand up and tell them that I’ll be for that right after they use up their own.”

    I’m not sure what you mean here–I doubt you mean this literally. Take this hypothetical: person A and person B agree that fire department services should be publicly funded. Person A believes there should be an expansion of this service which requires increased taxation. If person B takes your line of argument, no increase should be allowed until person A (and everyone who agrees with person A) should pay for this increase themselves, and only if they are bankrupted would person B be willing to contribute. That’s kind of silly, no? Exchange “fire department” with military defense, or public school education, or federal border control, or the FDA, or the DEA, and it’s equally absurd. We can disagree philosophically on what programs should be funded, and to what degree they should be funded, but if we accept that a particular service should be funded, then your only-when-bankrupt argument doesn’t make sense.

  • Walt, I give you a paragraph and you give me a book.

    A problem with that is that you make assumptions for your arguments to fill in blanks that I never said or that need refining.

    I wish that I could show the respect that I have for the time that you took, but I’m overwhelmed right now with tax season and with needed attention for my elderly mom who is barely hanging on, so we’ll have to carry this discussion over to another time. (Thank goodness, though, that Obama’s death squads aren’t deciding her fate.)

    Thanks for the time that you took.

  • Also, Walt, it’s so refreshing to have a discussion with someone from the left who actually provides analyses rather than foul language. Are you really a former Republican?

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