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Poem of the Day: “Wake in Rage” by Viet Mai

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By Staff

It’s National Poetry Month. SDFP is recognizing San Diego poets this month. Viet Mai has been performing spoken word around San Diego since 2001. As a member of the 2013 ELEVATED! Slam Team, Viet represented San Diego to rank 4th place at the National Poetry Slam in Boston/Cambridge/Sommerville, MA.

Drawing upon his formal studies at UCSD in Ethnic Studies and Music as well as his interest in Hip-Hop lyrics, Viet’s mission is to collaborate with community members to educate, motivate, and inspire the youth through spoken word, art, and culture.   [Read more…]

Video: Barrio Logan College Institute

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Film by Barrio Logan College Institute
Intro by Brent E. Beltrán

With the ballot battle looming over the future of Barrio Logan, due to Maritime Industry’s refusal to accept the Barrio Logan Community Plan update, I feel it is necessary to give voters of the city of San Diego a little history of Barrio Logan and highlight the issues residents face. In June, eligible San Diego voters will go to the polls to vote on whether to approve the community plan or reject it.

Over the next few weeks I will post a video on Sundays that highlights the community of Barrio Logan and the beauty within San Diego’s most historic barrio.

This week’s video is on the Barrio Logan College Institute, an  important, educational non-profit organization that helps barrio kids, most the first in their family, go to college.   [Read more…]

Ernie McCray: Speaking Straight from the Heart

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Recipient of the Phi Delta Kappa Unsung Hero Award

By Staff

On April 3, Ernie McCray was honored by the San Diego Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa, an international association for professional educators. The Kappan awards bestowed earlier in the evening were for individuals and organizations that have made a substantive difference for those wishing to become educators and for children within the school system.

Ernie’s award came later in the evening, after the recognition of Partner in Education, Educator of the Year, and Leadership. Those of us who know Ernie would be hard pressed to sum up his presence and contributions in just one category– he is known by thousands of students, parents and colleagues as an extraordinary educator; he has been a tireless advocate for peace and justice in the streets and in our schools; you can find him from time to time on a stage, acting and reading his poetry; and he has a following on the San Diego Free Press and OBRag where he contributes essays and poetry. Unsung Hero is a pretty good fit and that was his award designation.   [Read more…]

UCSD Graduate Students Protest Controversial Employment Policy

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Doctoral students rally against the 18 Quarter Limit

By Daniel Gutiérrez

La Jolla, California — Students at the University of California, San Diego stormed the Office of Graduate Studies Tuesday, April 1, to protest a controversial employment policy implemented across the University of California. The “18 Quarter Limit” restricts doctoral students by only allotting them 18 quarters to be teaching assistants, readers, or graduate student researchers. Such positions, if secured, reduce a graduate student’s tuition from roughly $5,200 a quarter to a mere $196. The action came on the eve of the two-day strike that will be held April 2nd and 3rd at UCSD.

The 18 Quarter Limit greatly affects graduate students who begin their studies in MA programs and then transfer to doctoral programs. This is because their access to funding begins to expire after their first quarter in the university as Master’s students.   [Read more…]

Big Data Renders College Diplomas Worthless; Billionaires Nonplussed

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By John Lawrence

It used to be accepted without question that a college degree was necessary to get a good job, and over the course of a lifetime, you would make more money with a college degree than without one. But not so fast. Despite the propaganda put out by colleges who hope to profit off your matriculation, it turns out that the latest thing in hiring practices is to disregard the college degree altogether.

Companies like Xerox are hiring not based on your resume, which includes your degrees and work experience, but on a test they’ve devised which they claim is a better predictor of job performance. Xerox runs 175 call centers around the world. In all, the centers employ more than 50,000 customer service agents who deal with questions about everything from cellphone bills to health insurance.

Xerox was having a problem hiring the right people for the jobs and reducing turnover. So they hired a company to help them do a better job of finding the right people. This company studied the characteristics of those people already at Xerox who were successful at their jobs and came up with a test whose aim was to find new applicants with exactly those same characteristics.   [Read more…]

Understanding the Propaganda Campaign Against Public Education

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By Diane Ravitch / Diane Ravitch’s Blog

A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia.

FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.

This insight inspired me to write “Reign of Error,” to show that the “reform” narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point.

Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation’s most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition.   [Read more…]

Mesa College Chicana/o Studies to Dedicate Gracia Molina de Pick Glass Gallery

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Third Annual Feminist Lecture Series to Follow

By Brent E. Beltrán

On Thursday, March 20 the Mesa College Chicana/o Studies Department will unveil and dedicate the Gracia Molina de Pick Glass Gallery and present their third annual Gracia Molina de Pick Feminist Lecture Series. The glass gallery and lecture series are named after the co-founder of Mesa’s Chicana/o Studies Department.

In 2013 Mrs. Molina de Pick donated $80,000 to Mesa to create the Gracia Molina de Pick Endowment Fund in support of advancing the campus’ Chicana/o Studies Department. Since then the department has created the lecture series in her honor and will now dedicate the glass gallery in the G-Building Rotunda in her name.   [Read more…]

UCSD Graduate Student Workers Call Strike

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By Daniel Gutiérrez

Graduate students affiliated with United Auto Workers Local 2865 at UC San Diego have announced a two-day strike for Wednesday, April 3, and Thursday, April 4. The dates selected for the strike fall on the first week of the school’s Spring Quarter.

The UAW Local 2865, which represents over 12,000 graduate student workers across the campuses of the University of California, voted and passed the strike. UAW Local 2865 has been in contract negotiations with the University of California for nearly a year. Union representatives have been meeting with labor-relations delegates for months trying to secure better wages for graduate student workers and improve work-place conditions.

The University has been hostile towards any advancement in workers’ rights, despite ever-growing expenditures on management. Despite the fact that many of the school’s graduate student-workers receive poverty wages, the UC administration continues to treat its own like royalty.   [Read more…]

San Diego Charter Teachers: Bullying Contributed to Death of Colleague

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School Board meeting not ‘the time or place’ to discuss confidential personnel matter of a Teach for America instructor, says Harriet Tubman Principal

By Doug Porter

I didn’t write the headline for today’s column. It’s a headline at Education Week, a nationally recognized print and digital (edweek.org) publication. With a staff of over 70 and budget of over $13 million annually, it’s hardly the product of some basement blogger. Amazingly, it’s about a story nobody else in the San Diego media seems to have covered.

The EdWeek story is about a meeting of the San Diego Unified School Board on Tuesday, March 11th. The charter for the Harriet Tubman Village Charter School was up for renewal. A group of  parents, teachers and students wearing blue bravely stood up before the Trustees and proceeded to raise serious questions about the way the school is operated.

Accusations were made suggesting violations of both the Education Code and State Law by the school’s administration. And the suggestion was made that the bullying tactics and leadership style at Harriet Tubman contributed to the death of Sarah Jenkins, “a young, bright, dedicated, caring first year teacher at Tubman.”   [Read more…]

An Update on the Billionaire Lawsuit to Destroy Teachers Unions

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by David Atkins/Hullabaloo

Regular readers here will remember that I wrote a while back about the Vergara v. California trial, which is essentially an attempt by the billionaire education “reform” crowd to achieve through a ridiculous lawsuit what they have not been able to accomplish by convincing voters. The gist of the suit is that union provisions to protect teachers hurt students, thereby harming their civil rights.

It sounds ridiculous, and it is. The plaintiffs picked a few underperforming students as their “victims” in the case, and have argued that because these particular students were allegedly somehow harmed by protections for teachers, therefore all students in California are hamed and that almost the entirety of public employee union contract law in the teaching profession should be dissolved. Even more ridiculous, right?   [Read more…]

A Great Divide: The Election Fight for California’s Schools

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By Gary Cohn /California Expose

An election campaign now being fought almost completely out of public view could radically alter the way California’s school children are taught. If Marshall Tuck unseats incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, the state’s public education system could become a laboratory for a movement that prizes privatization and places a high value on student test scores over traditional instruction. The contrasts between the two top contenders in the nonpartisan race could not be more dramatic – nor could the stakes for the country’s largest education system.

The 40-year-old Tuck is a Harvard Business School graduate who has worked  as an investment banker for Salomon Brothers and as an executive at Model N, a revenue-management software company. He is a former president of Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school operation in Los Angeles, and later served as the first head of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools — former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s controversial education nonprofit that tried to improve 17 low-performing public schools, with mixed results. 

Tuck’s candidacy is supported by the same mix of wealthy education privatizers, Silicon Valley and entertainment money, hedge fund and real estate interests that backed privatization candidates in the 2013 Los Angeles Unified School District school board election — when billionaire businessmen such as Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg gave large campaign contributions to an unsuccessful effort to defeat board member Steve Zimmer. (The Broad Residency, an education management program operated by the Broad Foundation, lists Tuck as an alumnus.)   [Read more…]

Honoring Academic Legacies of Diversity Panel at Mesa College

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Discussion on understanding and value of Chicana, Chicano and Black Studies

By Dr. César López, Ph.D.

The San Diego Mesa College Chicana/o Studies Department and the Black Studies Department are hosting a panel discussion on student equity and diversity on campus this Friday, March 14, from 9AM-12PM in room H-117/118.  The event is entitled “Honoring Academic Legacies of Diversity at San Diego Mesa College and Beyond: Equity and Valuing Critical Contributions of Chicana/o Studies and Black Studies Departments.”  The campus community and the general public is invited to attend this important discussion.

The goal of the panel is to recognize the over 40 year histories of each of these departments on the San Diego Mesa College campus; educate the campus and community about issues related to understanding and valuing the critical contributions of Chicana/o Studies and Black Studies Departments in Higher Education; and highlight local, state and national legislative educational policies that have and will impact the future success of all students, with a focus on students of color and first generation students.   [Read more…]

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