April 9-10, 2018
Apr 09 02:33 Obama-era discipline still lingers Apr 09 09:08 Strategic Planning at MSU, Mankato and SCSU Apr 09 23:58 Where is St. Cloud State's CFO? Apr 10 00:31 Let's ditch Common Core Apr 10 17:28 Good benefits, no accountability Apr 10 18:43 A progressive vs. Alan Dershowitz
Prior Years: 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Obama-era discipline still lingers
A chill ran through me when I read this article . What's frightening is that this program is built on the theory that disparities in discipline are based in racism. This isn't just wrong. It's dangerous. It's political correctness gone too far.
Paul Sperry's investigation lies at the heart of this potential crisis. Sperry's investigation into the PROMISE Program revealed that "Nikolas Cruz was able to escape the attention of law enforcement, pass a background check and purchase the weapon he used to slaughter three staff members and 14 fellow students because of Obama administration efforts to make school discipline more lenient. Documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations and interviews show that his school district in Florida's Broward County was in the vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence."
Whether the Minnesota program is called the PROMISE Program or not, the guiding principles are virtually identical. The Minnesota Department of Human Rights "announced 43 districts have suspension and expulsion disparities that violate the state Human Rights Act 'because they deny students of color and students with disabilities educational access and negatively impact academic achievement.'"
What's required is a discipline system that outlines each district's behavioral expectations. Penalizing schools for disciplining students of color based on quotas is dangerous. Disciplining schools based on legitimate racism is one thing. Disciplining schools based on liberal fantasies like implicit bias and white privilege is dangerous. Either a student isn't behaving or he/she is. The color of their skin, their ethnic background or their country of origin is utterly irrelevant.
This statement is frightening:
"Studies have proven that higher rates of school suspensions and expulsions among students of color and students with disabilities can have lasting negative impacts in their lives and education. That is why the (department) takes seriously any allegation or evidence that indicate disciplinary measures are falling disproportionately upon children of color and students with disabilities in our schools. It is our responsibility to fully review such allegations, and work with local school officials to ensure equal treatment under the law for all kids."
According to this article , the federal directive was "issued jointly in 2014 by the US departments of Education and Justice" and "warned public school districts receiving federal funding and that they could face investigation and funding cuts if they fail to reduce statistical 'disparities' in discipline by race."
This isn't proof of racism. Again, school districts have the right to expect proper behavior. Period. If students of color are getting disciplined more often, perhaps the remedy is to insist that students of color improve their behavior. In the system described by Commissioner Lindsey, what criteria is his department using in determining who gets investigated?
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For more information on this subject, check out Heather MacDonald's article .
Posted Monday, April 9, 2018 2:33 AM
Comment 1 by Chad Q at 09-Apr-18 07:35 PM
Martin Luther King Jr said it best when he said - I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Progressives want everyone to be judged on their skin color, nationality, etc. and no longer care about how a person acts. If people are going to act like animals and disrupt class, then they should be treated like animals and be kicked out of class with no regard for skin color or nationality, so those who want to learn can do so without the disruption of those who don't care.
Strategic Planning at MSU, Mankato and SCSU
Is There Difference in Strategic Planning at MSU - Mankato and SCSU?
by Silence Dogood
On March 28th, the academic deans at St. Cloud State announced to their department chairs that they had until April 20th to finish a complete program review process that would be used to make budget reductions for FY'19, which begins on July 1st. Since SCSU has had declining enrollments since FY'10 and multimillion dollar deficits year after year, it is hard to understand the urgency of this process. That may sound crazy but at President Vaidya's open forum on February 28th, he spent more time talking about SCSU's successful athletic teams and initiatives than the budget situation. It's hard to believe but true, as evidenced by listening to the presentation!
This past Friday, April 6th - two weeks before the department reviews were even to be completed - key academic deans met with the provost to review their own draft decisions about programs that should be 'built,' 'maintained,' or 'phased out.' This was done without consideration to the rushed review process, which had not even been completed, which makes the program review process appear meaningless.
Having these reviews due the Friday before the last week of classes will certainly not allow for any appeal of the decisions that are made because the review by the administration will not be complete until the students and faculty have departed campus for the summer. True leaders are willing to explain and justify their decisions. Interim SCSU President Ashish Vaidya will be departing campus on June 30th to assume the presidency at Northern Kentucky. It's hard to believe that he will ever have to explain or justify to the faculty, staff and students the decisions he has made.
Compare this with the process MSU - Mankato is using to perform the same task.
Not only did MSU - Mankato start earlier (last August, not in the last month of the semester), their process is actually open and transparent. This fact is glaringly obvious simply by looking at MSU - Mankato's Institutional Research, Planning, and Assessment website.
No similar information about the process being used for evaluation is available for SCSU. And what information that is available seems to be only available on private (closed) servers. So much for being open and transparent.
Many universities in the Minnesota State system have recently seen significant enrollment declines and concomitant declines in revenue. However, the enrollment declines at SCSU began earlier (FY'11) and have been significantly larger than any of the other Minnesota State universities. At first, the administrative response at SCSU was that we were 'right sizing.' This was then followed by its due to 'demographics.' Followed by 'everyone is declining.' Followed by there are 'not enough resources from the state.'
A historian might look back at this and simply see a series of excuses that try to say 'it's not my fault.' However, if you dig deeper, it is very clear that SCSU has been embarrassingly slow to respond to the decline and has been completely reactive rather than proactive.
It is important to recognize that neither President Potter, President Vaidya, or Provost Malhotra were willing to establish an enrollment target for the university. Thus, 'right sizing' the university was just a fantasy or delusion. Secondly, they never established priorities of academic programs or student services. This has resulted in every unit merely fighting to live no matter what the cost is to neighboring programs. Without such guidance, it appears more like gladiator combat or dog fighting, with the 'best' gladiator (or dog) surviving to live to fight another day.
While there are certainly many issues that have led SCSU to the place it finds itself in, one of the more significant is that the senior administration at SCSU is almost entirely made up of 'interim' appointments. Although some of these individuals may be quality people, the pressure of being an interim, that perhaps wants to be appointed permanently, almost certainly means that significant decisions are put off for the permanent person to make.
At SCSU, the President is an interim, the Provost is an interim, two academic deans are interims, one associate dean is an interim, the Associate Provost for Research and the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies is an interim, the Dean of the University College is an interim, the Director of the Center for Excellence and Teaching and Learning is an interim, and the Associate Vice President for International Studies is an interim. Such a large number of interims at a university is a clear sign that there is something wrong. The following figure shows the organizational structure from the website for the Academic Affairs Office.
Perhaps even worse than having a large number of interims is that since June of 2012 there have been five Chief Financial Officers (Steve Ludwig, Len Sippel, Doug Vinzant, Rick Duffet, and Tammy McGee). Tammy McGee resigned in November of 2017. It may be hard to believe for an organization with an annual budget over $200,000,000 but an interim has yet to be named! Also, last spring the Chief Information Officer was 'promoted' (some said President Trump's favorite phase on his reality TV show) to a position in the Minnesota State central office. Since that time, Information Technology Services, which has a staff of forty-six, does not have an interim CIO although it appears that the Deputy Chief Information Officer is carrying out those duties.
It's hard to believe that whatever results come out of the current program analysis that they are going to solve the enrollment decline and resulting budget issues any time soon. So, expect the enrollment decline to continue at SCSU and retrenchment and closings of programs to follow. There are simply too many balls up in the air and the crash is inevitable.
Posted Monday, April 9, 2018 9:10 AM
Comment 1 by Crimson Trace at 09-Apr-18 02:02 PM
When it comes to Minnesota higher education issues at Minnesota State, Silence Dogood is absolutely top shelf! Silence skillfully lays out the data and makes well thought out arguments followed by reasonable conclusions. There are no emotional arguments here. After reading this post, it is abundantly clear that Mankato's administrative team is miles ahead of SCSU. No wonder Mankato has become the new flagship university in the Minnesota State system. It is great to see Silence back in the saddle again.
Where is St. Cloud State's CFO?
Does St. Cloud State University Have A CFO?
by Silence Dogood
If you wanted to inquire about the financial health of St. Cloud State University, you might expect to go to the website for the Office of Finance and Administration and mine the site for current information. On February 18, 2018, I performed this search.
The Vision Statement clearly states: 'The Office of Finance and Administration at St. Cloud State University will be a recognized leader in providing services to the university community.' I'll come back to this Vision Statement later.
Click on the link 'Contact Us/Feedback' and you are taken to the webpage:
If you search SCSU's website for McGee, you get the following:
So if you wanted to try to contact the Vice President for Finance and Administration, you're out of luck. But this is really not new news. Tammy L. H. McGee WAS the Vice President for Finance and Administration until she quit/retired as of November 13, 2017. Apparently, the website simply has not been updated in almost five months to reflect her departure.
If you click on the link for 'Financial Reports' you are taken to the webpage:
If you wanted to see an annual report from FY 2002 to FY 2014, just click on the link and voila! Unfortunately, this is FY2018, which you might not expect to find, but the annual reports for FY 2015, FY 2016 and FY 2017 are missing. While it is true that you can find SCSU's annual reports on the Minnesota State website, they should be available here. If nothing else, simply put in a link to the Minnesota State website.
If you click on the link for 'Budget Advisory Group' you are taken to the webpage:
There is no information listed for FY18. The last information in the FY17 folder is for the April 27, 2017 meeting. The Budget Advisory Group was a committee with the Vice President for Finance and Administration and a faculty member from the Faculty Budget Committee serving as co-Chairs. It seems that the university is no longer willing to share financial data, especially because much of the data shows SCSU's precarious financial situation.
If you explore the link for campus presentations you find:
This is April of 2018, it's hard to believe that no new media has become available for two years and any new documents have become available for almost three years! If you were aspiring to being 'open and transparent' organization, this would hardly be the path that any organization would take.
After looking at their website, if you were to rate the fulfillment of the Office of Finance and Administration Vision Statement to be: 'a recognized leader in providing services to the university community,' you would probably have to give the university an F.
It is interesting to note that since my email is being read by the administration (and this article was originally written back in February but not published until now), they have since removed Tammy McGee from being listed as the Vice President for Finance and Administration and now list the position as 'vacant.' It's nice to see that things change, albeit slowly. Unfortunately, the underlying issues and the lack of openness have created a level of distrust on campus that is almost palpable.
Originally posted Monday, April 9, 2018, revised 10-Apr 12:02 AM
Comment 1 by Crimson Trace at 10-Apr-18 09:11 AM
I recall the Great Place to Work survey results were disastrous. What has changed since this $49,000 study was conducted several years ago?
http://www.letfreedomringblog.com/?p=16219
Let's ditch Common Core
Ditch Common Core
By Rambling Rose
'Follow the money' is frequently sage advice if politicians are involved. That certainly is true for the Gates Foundation that since 2009 has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4 trillion in U.S. taxpayer funds towards the goal of a national curriculum and tests. This occurred under the previous Obama administration although a federal curriculum is prohibited by law, specifically by the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the General Education Provisions Act of 1970 and creation of the Department of Education in 1979.
In 2002, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed with bipartisan support as a way to close the gap in academic achievement in schools. All 50 states adopted or revised their standards to annually assess students in grades 3-8 and again in high school. Schools were to achieve 100 percent passing rates on the state tests.
The results were disastrous. Over half the nation's schools were designated 'failing,' and the rest were close behind. Forty states were granted conditional waivers from the NCLB standards if they concentrated efforts on the schools with the greatest needs AND used the test results to evaluate all teachers.
At that point, President Obama and Secretary Duncan initiated the Race to the Top program with a promise of $250 million to each participating state, plus a waiver from NCLB. While the federal government did not require states to accept Common Core, the Obama administration coerced and bribed.
Enter Common Core (Common Core States Standards - CCSS). While the rhetoric lauds the implementation of a system of standards for students to achieve, the reality was greatly different. The work of writing the standards was not done by educators as some would like to claim. It was the work of the National Governors Association, the Council for State School Officers (professional organizations; not elected representatives) and the nonprofit Achieve Inc. The group (25 persons who worked behind closed doors) was principally comprised of academics and assessment experts - six test makers from the College Board, five test publishers for ACT and four with Achieve. No teachers were included in the work groups. All work was funded with more than $200 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
At the outset, the two national teacher unions were the leading proponents of the efforts. They anticipated greater funding. However, when they realized that their students were failing in even greater numbers than with NCLB and that their own evaluations were tied to the students' results, they withdrew their support.
Yet one would have expected the teachers to remain advocates of the program since a paramount principle of Common Core is to teach to the lowest common denominator, leading to the assumption that all students would achieve the standards. Enthusiastic students could not advance beyond where the lowest achieving students were; they lost interest. Struggling students were overwhelmed, stressed, ill and missed school. Students were required to use multiple steps to achieve answers in math and to explain the process; the right answer was NOT important. In language arts, assessments did not include sentence or paragraph development, nor spelling and punctuation. The regurgitation of the leftist ideology was required and rewarded. Individual opinion was penalized.
Since all was driven by the standardized tests, textbooks, teacher training and evaluations were also aligned with the tests. That meant that private, charter and home-school programs also had to follow the standards. Parents, school districts and states lost control of the curriculum to the federal government.
In December, 2015, Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This did not replace Common Core; it just moved it to the states. It is alive and well in the state departments of education, especially in the states with a Democrat governor who appointed a like-minded commissioner of education. Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Utah decided not to use the CCSS tests. Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia never adopted the Standards.
Betsy DeVos, the current Secretary of Education in President Trump's cabinet has challenged parents and other stakeholders to answer some questions in order to reshape the educational system so that it works for the learners. "It's past time to ask some of the questions that often get labeled as 'non-negotiable' or just don't get asked at all," she said. "Why do we group students by age? Why do schools close for the summer? Why must the school day start with the rise of the sun? Why are schools assigned by your address? Why do students have to go to a school building in the first place? Why is choice only available to those who can buy their way out? Or buy their way in? Why can't a student learn at his or her own pace? Why isn't technology more widely embraced in schools? Why do we limit what a student can learn based upon the faculty and facilities available? Why? We must answer these questions. We must acknowledge what is and what is not working for students."
Peter Greene, contributor in the Huffington Post (what? where? surprise! - personal comment) wrote some scathing truths about Common Core on January 14, 2018:
When the Common Core wave passed, it had swept away the notion that actual teachers and administrators are experts in education. Teaching, it turns out, is somehow too hard for mere teachers. Instead, the standards-based school district now assumes that nobody in the school system actually knows what should be taught, and that the most they can be trusted with is to 'unpack' the standards and create a checklist-certified list of education activities that will meet the standards' demands. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the district doesn't believe that trained education professionals can be trusted with even that much, and should just be handed materials that dictate the teacher's every move, throwing aside their professional judgment and replacing it with the judgment of some bureaucrat or textbook publisher.
Worst of all for the long run, this approach has infected schools of education who prepare their few remaining future teachers to accept this, to envision for themselves a diminished role as content delivery specialists or instructional facilitators or classroom coaches.
Common Core was pitched against a definite enemy? the teachers who insisted in teaching things in their own classroom just because they thought those things were worth teaching, the teacher who insisted on using her own professional judgment, the teacher who wanted to function as an autonomous individual. Ironically, even though the Common Core did not conquer the nation's school districts as it had hoped, it did manage to deliver a serious defeat to its chosen enemy. We now understand in (too many) districts that we must adhere to the Standards, which have descended manna-like from some mysterious, magical higher power. They are not to be argued with or contradicted, nor will there be any discussion of the educational wisdom (or lack thereof) behind them. They are to be treated as our compass, our grail, our North Star. Teachers should sit down, shut up, and start aligning.
And that defeat of professional educators, that clampdown on teacher autonomy? that's the one victory that Common Core State (sic) Standards can claim. There is hope, if:
Schools need to abandon Common Core and return to proven methods of teaching. That is what Mason Classical Academy in Naples, Florida did. They went back to teaching phonics and abandoned whole word memorization demanded in Kindergarten by Common Core. (Phonics is introduced later in CCSS and confuses learners since they already learned only whole word recognition.) The test scores revealed that the third-graders were 90% proficient in language arts while the rest of the schools in the county were only 58% proficient. The third-graders were in the top 2% in the state, and the fifth-graders were in the top 1% in Florida.
Social media has examples of students' math problems earning no credit, even though the answers were correct, because the students had not included all the CCSS mandated steps and explanations. In the video 'Common Core: 3 * 4 = 11 is okay,' Amanda August explains that the process is more important than the answer.
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All stakeholders should view it and learn from a CCSS advocate what is really expected and demanded by this curriculum that is not a curriculum.
One of the goals for CCSS is to prepare students to be competitive in a global society. Let's look at the 2015 test results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Looks like students in the USA are not as competitive as some politicians and even teachers would have us believe.
Yes, Minnesota has received approval from the US Department of Education for its implementation of ESSA, that is, Common Core 2.0. This statement from the MN Department of Education website is troublesome:
'Please note it is important that all [emphasis added] students be taught and satisfactorily complete all [emphasis added] academic standards.'
Does that mean that MN continues to embrace the CCSS ideology and standards? No, that is not a rhetorical question; it needs to be answered and addressed by stakeholders: all of us.
Follow the money. Politicians frequently approve more expenditures for education with hopes for better learning. But do they or parents really understand what is taught and tested in our MN schools? Are Minnesota test scores still high or are they following the national trends?
Local teachers have shared information that the textbooks now include the scripts that they are to use to teach so that all students in all classrooms in the country will be on the same page on the same day. Is that local control or is that the Gates/Obama/Duncan federal curriculum alive and strong in central MN?
Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2018 12:31 AM
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Good benefits, no accountability
Oh, to be a government employee. Imagine a job that gives good benefits. Then imagine that job plus no accountability. Welcome to the life of Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. Try as we might to force the media to hold Sheriff Israel accountable, it hasn't happened. That's thanks in large part to the fact that the Agenda Media is intent on making David Hogg the poster child in their latest push for gun control. This fits into the category of 'the best defense is a great offense'. Specifically, the gun grabbers don't have to defend their policies because they're never questioned.
I hope that changes when people read Glenn Reynolds' latest column . It deals with how government employees aren't held accountable for their mistakes. It starts by saying "Law enforcement keeps failing, and people keep dying. Where are the consequences? Where is the accountability? Despite receiving a warning directly from the Russian government, the FBI failed to stop the Tsarnaev brothers from staging the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite having plenty of resources, the Charlottesville police failed to stop a car attack that left a woman dead. The FBI interviewed Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter, and considered criminally investigating him. They didn't, possibly because his father was an FBI informant."
These reporting omissions aren't mistakes. They're part of a pattern:
The FBI also missed numerous "red flags" before the San Bernardino shooting. And despite having lots of warning, the FBI, the Broward County schools and the Broward Sheriff's Department under Sheriff Scott Israel all failed to stop Nikolas Cruz from shooting up a high school.
But I digress. Glenn Reynolds has a partner in demolishing the Democrats' narrative. His name is Ben Shapiro:
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Reynolds continued, saying:
And yet these repeated failures, among others, keep getting swept under the rug as we look for 'solutions' to the problem of violence. No doubt Israel and the others whose incompetence made it possible for Cruz to kill his classmates were relieved to see our national discourse veer into questions of whether Laura Ingraham should lose sponsors for mocking David Hogg's college-admissions failures, instead of their own failures to do their jobs. But now comes a hero to remind us what it's really all about. Parkland student Anthony Borges, who used his body to shield 20 fellow students from the gunman, emerged from the hospital over the weekend to remind us that the shooting resulted from the failures of the sheriff and school superintendent to protect students.
Anthony Borges used his body to shield 20 students during Nikolas Cruz's murder rampage. Borges did what Deputy Scot Peterson was paid to do. It isn't lost that Peterson is a government worker who never will be held accountable.
It's time for the US to realize that Ronald Reagan was right when he said this:
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Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2018 5:28 PM
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A progressive vs. Alan Dershowitz
Progressives often get lumped in with liberals. That shouldn't happen. Progressives frequently resemble fascists. They frequently 'win' their arguments by accusing people of lying. That's the case with Maria Cardona's op-ed . Ms. Cardona wrote "Trump claims several untruths: that nothing has been found thus far in this investigation; that they have found absolutely no collusion; that the whole thing is a partisan witch hunt; and that the sacrosanct attorney-client privilege is dead."
What BS. I'd love hearing Ms. Cardona list the things Robert Mueller has found thus far that proves collusion. After all, that's what President Trump has consistently complained about. As for President Trump's statement that Mueller's probe being a partisan witch hunt, that isn't a lie. It's President Trump's opinion . It's virtually impossible to lie when stating an opinion. As for whether "the sacrosanct attorney-client privilege is dead," I'll leave that to Harvard Professor Emeritus Dershowitz, who wrote "Clients should be able to rely on confidentiality when they disclose their most intimate secrets in an effort to secure their legal rights. A highly publicized raid on the president's lawyer will surely shake the confidence of many clients in promises of confidentiality by their lawyers. They will not necessarily understand the nuances of the confidentiality rules and their exceptions. They will see a lawyer's office being raided and all his files seized."
Professor Dershowitz is a principled, old-fashioned liberal. Old-fashioned liberals frequently displayed a commitment to civil liberties. They frequently had a libertarian streak in them, too. The point is that old-fashioned liberalism isn't compatible with hardline progressivism. Often, they're opposites.
I'm happy that President Trump won but I'm not a win-at-all-costs person. I've seen enough of Professor Dershowitz to say the same thing of him. Watch his principles in this interview:
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I can't say that about Ms. Cardona.
Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2018 6:43 PM
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