Why City College Is Important To San Francisco

City CollegeThe first die has been cast and now City College must appeal and appeal the decisions to hold there own as a community college. To be perfectly honest I can’t tell you why they have lost their accreditation, but I can tell you why City College is important to San Francisco.

I attended City College. I hadn’t planned to, but I was kind of lazy in High School and didn’t have the best GPA to get into State College so I chose the route so many other people did. You go to City College first and then transfer after you’ve done your core courses to a real college. I highlighted real because nobody gives a damn where you did your core courses you just have to do them to get out of college. What’s important is the final name on your degree when you finish.

After attending City College and transferring to San Francisco State I realized that I made a good choice. While I wasn’t broke going to college I took the courses everyone is required to take and realized why did I have to be paying more money for the same course at SF State than I did at City College [note: City College was free when I went]. This was a good reason why a lot of people went to City College was to save money.

While I was at City College I happened to run into my cousin who was in the Fire Department. Apparently, City College has the only courses locally that workers in the Fire and Police Department can take to advance themselves. I even learned that City College had a Fire Science department. Being a guy who liked to play with fire I thought this was cool.

Then you have many people that don’t necessarily need a four year degree but do need training in the job they want to do. City College has an excellent Hotel and Restaurant Management Department as well as an excellent Environmental Horticultural and Floristry department. You don’t need a bachelor’s degree for these, but you do need training to get a job and this is where you get those skills.

There are three reasons that should be good enough for just about anyone. If City College goes away we won’t have an affordable route to start college for many or training for those people in our Fire and Police Departments or just job training for those who don’t need a degree. This will affect the job market in San Francisco in that there will be a lot of local people who won’t be able to afford the necessary time in college to advance themselves. Local jobs will start to go to people outside the City because people won’t have the training because they’re on a restricted budget or simply because they can’t find the necessary classes elsewhere.

If City College’s administration has created a problem they need to fix it or the local government needs to step in and fix it, but the one thing that the City doesn’t need is for City College to close.

Sometimes Teacher’s Have To Strike

Members of United Educators of San Francisco on the march

The following is an article I was forwarded about the SFUSD Teachers that are planning a strike. Most of the news seems to focus on teachers wanting a pay increase, but aren’t looking at the full effects of what will happen. I have bolded and italicized a particular section because as many of you know my autistic daughter is in a SDC or Special Day Class. When she started there were only about 8 kids in the class [this was for pre-school] when she starts kindergarten in the fall there will be 12 kids in the class. The increases they want are unthinkable for special needs kids let alone non-special needs kids.

My daughter’s current pre-school teacher had her students raised to 12 this year and it was maddening for her at times. She did not have enough materials or aides to help her out and was only given a funding of $5/student for the entire school year. I am reposting this because sometimes teachers need to put their foot down. These aren’t teachers in the six figure range, but teachers who are lucky to get $50k/year and they’re investing their own money in purchasing school supplies because the SFUSD isn’t providing them enough to use to teach their classes.

Why I’m voting to strike

David Russitano, a member of United Educators of San Francisco and Educators for a Democratic Union, explains why he plans to vote for a teachers’ strike.

May 10, 2012

Members of United Educators of San Francisco on the march

UNITED EDUCATORS of San Francisco (UESF) is mobilizing for the first of two strike votes on May 10. The union was pushed to organize a membership meeting because of a massive assault on educators and public schools.

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) opened contract negotiations by sending out over 500 layoff notices. It tried to split the union by attacking seniority, and then proceeded to demand even larger concessions by, for example, asking to raise class size in K-3 from 22 to 25 stuents.

We already rank highest in the number of K-12 students per teacher, with an estimated 20.5 students per teacher–the rest of the country averages 13.8, according to the California Budget Project. This will make things worse for students and educators trying to work in an already underfunded system.

Not content with raising class size in the early primary grades, SFUSD is also proposing to increase special day class limits from 12 to 17. Special day classes serve students who, because of a disability, can’t function in a standard classroom.

They also want to remove many of the protections for special education teachers to get help from the principal in case of an emergency and limit the ability of regular classroom teachers to give input about students with high needs. Finally, the district wishes to remove the teacher position from a committee that makes decisions about special education.

As Matt Bello, a special day class teacher, noted, “The district is trying to convince us that the proposed special education reforms will be a step forward. How could increased caseloads and class sizes along with the removal of teacher input in district decision making be looked at as progress?”

SFUSD is also asking educators to cover the same material in fewer days by proposing eight furlough days over the next two years if Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax measure passes. If the tax measure doesn’t pass, they want to increase that number to 18 furlough days.

For early childhood education centers, the attack is even more brutal. Regardless of what happens in November’s’ election, 27 days are to be cut from each year. Students at their youngest will be denied some of the basic educational foundations that could help make them successful and ready for kindergarten.

In addition to affecting students, these cuts will bring a huge cost to educators. For paraprofessionals, in particular, the cuts to early childhood education will cost thousands of dollars and take away valuable jobs during the summer when paraprofessionals are unemployed.

Further, the district is going to unilaterally change all of the paraprofessional hours to standardize them at 5.5 hours each day. This is disastrous, as right now, they don’t make a living wage. It means that many will have to give up their second job, while many will also have to scale back their hours. Even worse, these decisions won’t be based on fulfilling students’ needs at a particular school, but rather to meet an arbitrary time requirement.

As Robin Horne, a paraprofessional at Marina Middle School, summed up:

The attacks on paraprofessionals will be devastating to us. We barely make enough money to survive in this city, and we are unemployed during the summer. Many of us are also losing hours, which is a partial layoff. Others will be forced to take on more hours, which will prevent some from holding down a second job. Still other paraprofessionals will be losing their jobs outright.

Paraprofessionals often have a stronger connection to working class communities in San Francisco than teachers, as they are more likely to be San Francisco natives from working class areas in this city. Losing these people will not only be devastating for them, but will also be an attack on working people in San Francisco in general.

Financially, we are looking at a cut in compensation of $10,391 for certificated staff (teachers, psychologists, social workers, nurses and counselors) and up to $3,206 for classified staff (special education assistants, instructional aides, community relations). Substitutes will lose up to $6,983. Those hit the hardest will be early education teachers, who stand to lose $16,307 in compensation.

By any standard, this is the largest attack on our union in the last 20 years. It’s clear that the district is making a major push toward school “reform” at the expense of teachers, students, and communities these schools serve.

To accomplish its goals, SFUSD will stoop to any level, pitting educators against each other by using social justice language as they did around seniority. They are willing to break the law by throwing out whole sections of the contract around special education. It is obvious that they are also going to sidestep collective bargaining, because on May 3, the SFUSD declared an impasse, moving one step closer to imposing these cuts unilaterally.

The district feels confident about pushing its agenda now partially because the union has given into concessions before. Two years ago, UESF took a contract that gave back $39 million during the deepest point of the economic crisis. Most of the money came from eight furlough days and layoffs.

Unfortunately, the union has shown that it is more than willing to share the sacrifice during a recession. However, the district now has enough in reserve to save people’s jobs. It isn’t a question of money; now, it’s a question of will and intention.

To fight against cuts, UESF has taken halting steps towards organizing the membership. It was clear from the start of bargaining that the district was going after a lot. Yet the current leadership hesitated for months in calling for a strike vote.

They continued to rely on their “skills” at the negotiation table to try to beat back the attack long after it became clear that SFUSD was not giving in. The membership was asked to trust that the bargaining team was doing the right thing and to wait until our activity was needed.

Unfortunately, our union leadership seems to be more afraid of active membership than SFUSD. For two months, at each bargaining session, UESF was asked for more and more. Yet the leadership was unclear about organizing for a strike vote until after the April 24 bargaining session.

Now that they are backed into a corner, they finally organized a strike vote for May 10. They are scrambling to make the membership meeting successful–we must have at least 900 people at it for a quorum. We have lost valuable time in preparations.

An Answer to Prop 13

Many people [including #SFMayor candidates] who haven’t owned a home for more than 10 years are against Proposition 13 that capped property taxes for home owners in California and took money from the schools. There are lots of people who want it repealed either because either they don’t like the the fact that people who have owned homes for a long time don’t have to pay as much taxes as new homeowners or because they’re parents with kids that see them suffering in the school system. I think I’ve come up with an answer and I hope at least one person besides myself will forward this on the our Governor Jerry Brown.

I have a friend who lives in New York and his mother recently died leaving him with a house in upstate New York. It’s not a big house, two bedrooms I believe, but it’s on 12 acres of property. He pays $8000 per year in property taxes and he asked me when we were talking recently how much I paid in school taxes. School taxes? I don’t pay school taxes. He pays $4000 per year in taxes used solely to benefit their schools. This started my mind thinking and as I usually do I started to run the numbers. Here’s the formula if California started collecting taxes for schools and I’m going easy on y’all. I’m rounding down numbers.

California has a population of 38,000,000 people [rounded down]. The median income adjusted for cost of living is $44,000 per year [rounded down]. If California charged every person  a 1/2% tax off the top before everything else was taken out of their paychecks that would give the State of California 7,357,000,00 per year just for the schools [amount adjusted for 12% unemployment]. For those who have trouble reading numbers that is 7.357 billion dollars per year. There are 9324 public schools within California. I’ll let the private schools fend for themselves since they charge parents to send their kids there. If you divide the income by the number of public schools each school would receive $789,000 per year [rounded down]. Think about what the schools could do with that money.

Say I’m Joe SixPack who wants to be able to make $250,000 per year without getting taxed too much. If you were making that much per year how bad would it hurt to lose $24 per week when you’re bringing in $4800 per week [rounded down]? California is the 8th largest economy in the world. Don’t you think we could put into effect a tiny tax that would help our schools immensely? I know I am simplifying the allocation of funds incorrectly as say Los Angeles County has more students than say Bell County, but still, it would better serve our students educational needs.

If you pull Prop 13 it won’t drop prices on homes in California. We’re called the Golden State for a reason. Everyone wants to come here. If anything it might actually raise the property taxes for new home buyers and that new income isn’t guaranteed to go to the schools. It would probably go into more pork barrel politics where the politicians are trying to get the biggest piece of pork out of the barrel [yes that is where the term comes from for you young whippersnappers]. If we had what I call a polite tax to benefit our schools, no one would go hungry for it. Schools wouldn’t have to keep asking parents to purchase supplies and our own state and local governments wouldn’t have to worry about why our great state has schools that are in such need and cannot supply a decent education to our children.

PLEASE! I urge you to think about this and pass this article along to your friends, neighbors and especially politicians. I know I am going to. We might just change the quality of education in our state and step forward to show other states how to do it right. We are the most populous state in the Union so we should be able to convince everyone regardless of part that a polite tax like this would help give California the leading edge in education it needs. Besides, it will also mean that everyone you interact with at the businesses you interact with will be better educated.

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Ejumication doesn’t happen in skools anymore

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this one for some time now and I think I finally have got it. Granted it’s been a few years since I’ve been in school learning things that were supposed to help me fit into society [e.g. social brainwashing] and teaching me skills to land me a job [vocational training].

Well, I do fit into society as I don’t walk out of the house in the morning naked mumbling nonsense and expect people to accept me as being normal, but as far as what I learned through college let me break it down for you.

Amount I paid for college at San Francisco State University to graduate in 1987: ±$3000

Amount earned from said skills earned: ±$1000

Amount paid to learn new skills outside of college: $0 [self taught]

Amount earned from skills learned outside of college: $73,000/year

Basically, everything I learned is college has become useless to me now. When I was in college only very well off people had cell phones, not everyone had a home computer, there was no texting, you had to go to a video store and seek out their back room behind curtains to find porn and the cloud was something you walked outside and saw overhead. The world has changed significantly because of technology. My first computer cost me $800 and had 16k of RAM and no storage. If you wanted to store material you had to buy a cassette drive which would cost you another $200 [ok, I got started with computers early] For that same amount of money today I can get a computer with 4Gb’s of ram, a terabyte of storage and a processor that is over 1000 times as fast. Five years ago no one used the term smartphone or iPad [yeah, there are other tablets, but let’s face it in the past year there have been millions of iPads sold and you’d be lucky to find a million of the other tablets sold combined].

The computers that launched and landed the first astronauts on the moon were not as sophisticated as your cell phone that we all have today. So what am I trying to say? Well a good friend of mine Fitz who I so via an iPhone video conference this weekend turned me on to a lecture given at TED where the speaker stated that the top ten in demand jobs of 2010 didn’t exist in 2004 and then he dropped the shocker line that brought it all together:

We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented.

Looking back I realized this is very much a true thing. We used to block out change by decades. Now if you look back ten years it’s hard to remember what it was like in 2001. We didn’t have any where near the abilities that we have today. There was no social networking which is a requirement for most of the jobs I apply for. There were no mobile apps. WiFi was new and 3g didn’t exist. Sure we had doctors back then, but DNA identification was in its infancy back then. OK, people still bake bread the same way and pump gas and bag groceries, but none of us have a child and hope that one day they will be a successful grocery clerk.

My mother wanted me to grow up, get a college degree and become a world class [what Mom would want world class in there] scientist or musician. Most of my college years in science were spent dissecting animals or mixing chemicals together to create nice smelling compounds [that was learning about esters] and blowing shit up [nothing more impressive than dropping pure sodium into a glass of water]. Today we have tons of videos on youtube that teach you all that and now we have mentos being dropped in coke as a form of art, not science. Musically, I had 10 years of private piano lessons by a former concert pianist for the San Francisco Symphony. I was trained in the recording arts and sciences and when I graduated there was no studio that would hire me and I couldn’t open my own studio because it would have cost me over half a million dollars. Today, you can spend $499 for an iPad and then $4.99 for Garage Band and even if you don’t have any musical talent you’ve got an eight track recording studio with virtual instruments that will do the playing for you at the cost of a few taps. The music isn’t very original, but if you turn on the radio today you aren’t going to find very much that is and you’ll probably be hearing some of the riffs from garage band in the songs.

So what good is a college degree today? Well apparently not much according to people of the Thiel Foundation, not much. They have given away 24 grants to the tune of $100,000 to high school grads with good ideas so that they can skip college altogether and have a funded start up company. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook when he was 20 and today is a billionaire. It took him seven years to do that and he’s had a movie made about it, guest hosted Saturday Night Live and has been on the cover of Time magazine while being loved and hated by people around the world. What degree did Zuckerberg earn at Harvard? He didn’t. I can’t find it anywhere. He started Facebook at Harvard, but was forced to stop because it overloaded their servers so he left and moved to Palo Alto with his friends and set in step actions that caused him to become a billionaire today.

So how do these things affect schooling today? Well, schools need to get on top of things faster. When Adobe Creative Suite was released there weren’t any college courses available to learn the programs. Today there are, over ten years after it was release. Photoshop which is a part of Creative Suite was release long before the rest and now you’ll find more videos on youtube that you’ll see in a classroom teaching Photoshop. I know this because I was tutoring an autistic college student in Photoshop because he wasn’t learning fast enough in his class. The biggest problem is that after he’s learned what I and his teacher have taught him he’ll still have to compete with people like me who’ve been using the programs from day one and have more experience than what you’ll ever get in a classroom.

This is something I’ll have to keep in mind as I raise my daughter. Yes, at the elementary level everything she learns she’ll be able to use later in life. Reading, writing and arithmetic won’t go away, but when it comes to college and choosing a major, that might not happen. Very few of the skills taught today are useful five years after you learned them. Technology causes change and the change is being adopted more quickly and those are the people who are getting ahead. The iPhone is less than five years old and the iPad will turn one next month, yet there are people who have built careers on these platforms and there’s nothing you can learn in a college to help you get into this field. There are kids who have pulled down six figure salaries while in high school writing and selling iPhone and iPad apps. How will a college convince a child that he needs a college degree to be a productive member o society when they’re already earning more money that person telling them that who works for the college?

Skool Daze

A few days ago I was talking about my daughter and pre-school and how she had a great teacher. Well, that’s all still true, but I’ve had an experience with higher education that’s really appalled me. I was asked by someone to tutor their son in Adobe Creative Suite. He attends City College and was having a little trouble with a couple of programs so I offered to go into the lab with him and help him out.

Part of this is because I’m an expert with these programs and another was in part because I went to City College close to thirty years ago. I was cheap (cheap meaning free) back then and the teachers were decent but a bit quirky. In the end it turned out to work out for me because I got to get all my core courses under my belt and then I transferred to SF State where I could focus on my core courses in Broadcasting. I think my entire college experience which lasted 6 years cost me less than five grand back in those days. Honestly, while it gave me a few skills to use in the outside world, most of those skills are useless today except for the writing and communication skills.

I was referred to a speaker at TED who said something that was very important to me. I can’t remember his name, but I’m sure my friend Fitz will remind me after reading this. The speaker said: We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented. Well then, what’s the point of college? There was no photoshop classes when I was in college. The computer courses were all about programming in languages that only came into use again during the Y2K scare and we were using punch cards to store our data not floppy disks, CD or the now ubiquitous thumb drives. Nothing was on the cutting edge back then and none of us had cell phones.

Now going back to my student. We were working last night in photoshop and the course was basically a book of exercises that said, do this, then this, then this. The problem was that this was a class teaching you how to use photoshop in which you needed to know photoshop to pass the course and if you knew photoshop you could see that they were teaching it wrong. I’ve worked previously in the print industry for over twenty years and I know what formats you use to output files. I was going over the test with my student and started making notes to take back to his teacher. One of the questions was: What is the proper format for outputting graphic files to print from photoshop. He answered TIFF and JPEG. Which is correct. For offset print work you always want to use the TIFF format because it gives you the highest resolution with no loss in compression. JPEG’s used to be problematic with some digital print servers, but the new servers handle them better, but TIFF is always the best choice.

The teacher told him he was wrong and deducted two points from his score. Two points doesn’t seem like much, but you need twenty-five points to pass the class. The correct answer according to the teacher was PNG or GIF. I wrote down that this was the wrong answer. While PNG is technically correct some print servers that the print houses use still can’t handle them, though most can. It does have some loss during compression, but the majority is unnoticeable. Many on demand print houses actually like PNG because the smaller size aids in faster rasterization getting the final product out faster. GIF is as outdated as my college education because it only allows for up to 256 colors which is far from the color range you normal see with the naked eye. OK, sorry if I’m getting a bit techie for some of my readers so I’ll try to make it easier to understand.

Essentially, this course doesn’t need a teacher. All it needs is a student that can read and follow instructions which they hopefully learned in High School. The writing wasn’t very good in the manual either because there were some steps that it just told the student to perform a task without telling them how to do it. The course book was a cheaply printed low quality book that looks like it was printed on a laser printer and tape bound and then sold to the students for about $50 if not more.

You could do better by purchasing one of the O’Reilly books from Amazon that has links to downloadable files to work with that would give you far better instruction than this course would. The unfortunate part is that an O’Reilly book doesn’t give you Adobe Authorized Certification™ when you finish it and this class did even though you’re probably not taught well enough to satisfy the needs of a company who’s looking for someone with that kind of certification.

I had to learn all of what I do from magazine articles, a few books and now YouTube videos that kids in elementary school are sometimes putting together. Some of my schooling came from the school of hard knocks which I’m sure I’ve earned a Ph.D. by now. When you have kids who are going to college trying to learn a programs that were written by high school kids who didn’t go to college so they could spend more time with their multi-billion dollar start up company it makes you wonder sometimes if there still is much value in college today because as I mentioned earlier, We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented.

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