Archive Search:

CLAREMONT,CA - The Claremont McKenna College has met the accreditation team that was not welcome on campus. That became clear during a campus dispute, earlier this term, over whether the academy, a Washington-based accreditor, should be invited to put its stamp of approval on the college's liberal-arts curriculum. In the process, the debate has shed light on the nature of both institutions. Claremont McKenna is in the process of renewing its accreditation this week from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

Claremont McKenna has a conservative faculty that is well balanced politically aginf gracefully from its meagre beginnings in 1946 as a liberal-arts mens' college with a special emphasis on public affairs and leadership training.

"At most good liberal-arts colleges, the faculty are 85 per cent liberal Democrat," says Steve Smith, a professor of philosophy who opposed the accreditation. "At Claremeont, the real strength of the college is this tension between right and left..."

The academy has also evolved politically, after starting out in 1992 with a $100,000 grant from the conservative John M. Olin Foundation. For a fledgling accreditor to have a reputation as conservative has not exactly been good for business, given the liberal leanings of the professoriate. But academy officials insist their only cause is undergraduate education.

"I think the organization is trying very hard to distance itself from its reputation," Mr. Smith says. "They have a strong stake in proving to the educational public that they are reasonable and balanced."

Colleges and universities must be accredited before their students can receive federal financial aid. The academy just last year won final approval from the U.S. Education Department to accredit entire institutions and individual liberal-arts programs. Six other accreditors, including the Western association, have the authority to review entire institutions, but they operate within specific geographic regions, while the academy works with colleges nationwide. The academy is also the only accreditor in the country that focuses exclusively on the undergraduate core curriculum -- or the general-education requirements that all students must fulfill outside of their majors.

Claremont had already decided to renew its accreditation with the Western association, when the issue of whether to also seek A.A.L.E. approval arose. A joint accreditation was proposed, with the Western association conducting a full review and the academy performing a "programmatic" evaluation focused on the core curriculum.

The academy has faced an uphill battle persuading colleges to abandon their regional accreditors. "A lot of colleges are not at all sure they want to give that up, but they'd also like to be accredited by us," says Jeffrey D. Wallin, A.A.L.E.'s president. His is the only group that the Education Department has approved to accredit general-education curricula: "We've been thinking of moving more in that direction."

Accreditation by the academy, Mr. Wallin says, is a way for institutions to demonstrate that they truly care about undergraduate education. The academy uses a list of "education standards" to evaluate core curricula, such as making sure colleges require the study of mathematics, foreign languages, and Western Civilization.

At Claremont McKenna, some officials saw A.A.L.E. accreditation as a way to break the monopoly of the regional accreditors. The college's leader, Jack L. Stark, was one of several campus presidents to attack the Western association in the early '90s as overly prescriptive on issues of cultural diversity. "In the name of diversity," Mr. Stark says, "Western wanted to make all colleges alike." Since then, he says, the accreditor has backed down, and adopted reforms that made the college willing to seek its accreditation again.

Still, President Stark favored the idea of also seeking the academy's stamp of approval, in part to hedge his bet about Western. "There's a lot to be said for an accreditor that doesn't think one size fits all, and that focuses on the liberal arts," he says.

Some faculty members agree. "It has a set of education standards that are much more rigorous than Western's," says Joseph M. Bessette, a professor of government and chairman of the campus steering committee on re-accreditation. "We'd learn something useful by having the academy come and review our program. There would be some substantive benefit."

Traditionally, campus administrators make decisions about accreditation. But President Stark says he thought it important to put the question of academy accreditation to a vote before the faculty.

It never came to that. The proposal was set aside last month, when the intensity of faculty members' opposition became clear. Had the Claremont professors agreed to seek accreditation from the academy, it would have been a major coup for the accreditor. It currently accredits only five institutions, although the list is expected to grow: Baylor University, the James Madison College of Michigan State University, Rhodes College, Thomas Aquinas College, and the University of Dallas. Signing up Claremont McKenna might have helped the academy to persuade other small, prestigious liberal-arts colleges to come on board.

And that's partly what bothered Claremont professors, who say they didn't want their campus to be the guinea pig. "I think it's a fact that A.A.L.E. had much more to gain from this than us," says John K. Roth, a professor of philosophy and religious studies. "Accrediting us would be a feather in their cap."

Many professors were suspicious of the proposal's timing. The college is in the midst of a presidential search for only its fourth chief executive in its 52-year history. "It's more than routine," Mr. Roth says. "Jack Stark, who is retiring this year, has been president for 25 years. Some faculty members have feared that A.A.L.E. accreditation is a kind of signal about the direction of the college that would be sent to whoever becomes president."

Mr. Stark, whose successor is expected to be named in January, says the convergence of the presidential search and the accreditation issue is pure coincidence. Rejecting the academy is as much of a signal to the next president as accepting it would have been, he notes. "This isn't one side trying to send a signal and the other not."

The college's public image was very much on the minds of professors this fall, because of events unrelated to accreditation. In September, Insight magazine, published by The Washington Times, printed a list of the "Top 10 Politically Incorrect Colleges." Claremont McKenna ranked third. Three of the five A.A.L.E.-accredited institutions were also on the list: Michigan State's James Madison College, Rhodes, and Thomas Aquinas.

Some Claremont professors were troubled by the company they would appear to be keeping. "None of the A.A.L.E.-accredited institutions are our peer institutions -- not even close," says Edward Haley, a professor of government. And he notes: "A.A.L.E. comes trailing ideological baggage. It seems to me desperately trying to find its way to the middle."

Politics aside, some professors opposed academy accreditation because they saw it as more paperwork. "For me, this is not about left and right," says Robert Faggen, head of the literature department. "For me, this is about keeping the amount of attention directed away from teaching and scholarship to a minimum." Still, he adds: "It's a bit amusing that some people who tend to argue for less government interference were making the argument that the government is offering us another accrediting option, so therefore we should take it."

That, essentially, is the pitch that the academy has been making. Both Mr. Wallin and George R. Lucas, the academy's new executive director and a well-known liberal academic who worked in the Carter and Clinton administrations, insist that it has no conservative agenda, and never had one. What has changed, they say, is the national debate -- it's more acceptable now to talk about educational standards.

Mr. Wallin acknowledges that the academy's initial grants were secured with the help of the National Association of Scholars, a tradition-minded group known for attacking political correctness on campuses. But he says the academy's agenda is politically neutral.

Many observers say the group looks a lot more independent today than in its start-up years. In 1992, most of its $300,000 budget came from conservative foundations. While a quarter of the academy's $800,000 budget this year comes from foundations like Olin, most of its money is now awarded by such grant makers as the Pew Charitable Trusts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Education Department's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, or FIPSE.

Besides offering its accrediting programs, the academy has become a research center for projects that rethink accreditation and liberal-arts education. It recently won a $303,000 FIPSE grant to finance a three-year project, involving 60 colleges, to examine liberal-arts requirements.

Mr. Lucas says Claremont is not the only major liberal-arts college with cold feet regarding the academy. That's why the academy met with officials from 25 top liberal-arts colleges last May, and plans to do so again. "It's hard to figure out a way for everyone to join at once," Mr. Wallin says. "It's new, and no one wants to be out front."

Many at Claremont certainly didn't. Eager to avoid further strife, the opposing sides hammered out a compromise in recent weeks. While the academy will not be invited to accredit the college, it probably will be asked to advise professors on ways to measure the effectiveness of the institution's general-education program. Faculty members overwhelmingly approved that concept in a straw poll on November 20. The official vote by mail ballot was due last week, and the compromise was expected to pass handily.

Supporters of academy accreditation deny that they blinked in the face of faculty opposition. "I'm not sure anyone knew who would win or lose on an up or down vote," says Charles Lofgren, a professor of American history and politics. "Now, my guess is we will agree to a relationship that will bring us into contact with A.A.L.E. and let those suspicious of them see them in operation."

Mr. Roth says professors wanted to avoid insulting the academy by publicly rejecting it. "A.A.L.E. is out of the accreditation process," he says. "We're inviting them to have a fairly limited role. We can take or leave what they say." Campus supporters of the academy "are going to put a spin on this that makes it sound like they didn't lose, but they did," Mr. Roth says. "There was no chance it was going to get to come in here and accredit us."

The compromise is fine with Mr. Wallin, he says.

Archive Search:

PALO ALTO - In the wake of public outcry, California State University officials have started reducing the number of remedial courses they teach every semester. The legislature has made it clear that they do not want to pay colleges to teach what public high schools and community colleges already received tax dollars to teach.

Claims about the number of students who enroll in remedial courses seem to escalate constantly. We hear that "75 per cent of colleges offer remedial courses," "80 per cent of the students at my college need remediation," or "85 per cent of minority students will be shut out if we don't have remedial courses."

When exaggeration rules, the public discussion rarely focuses on what actually is meant by the term "remedial course," and whether one kind of educational deficiency is more serious than another. But now, the National Center for Education Statistics has published important data that allow us to sort out the numbers and describe some patterns in the ultimate educational attainment of students who enroll in remedial classes. Puncturing the overblown rhetoric also can lead to some principles for handling remediation in the future.

When you read that your local college is offering "remedial" classes, form now on you will know exactly what that means. It means, simply and completely this - learning how to read words in sentences. To those who learned to read from their mothers, it may come as a surprise to find out just how lucky they are. Older children and adults can never master the linguistic code of their native language so well as those who have learned to read well in grades K thru 3.

This is the knowledge base that millions of would-be college students lack. Some say, they will never become fluent in their own written language, if they have not mastered basic sight words by the end of Third Grade. Those are the magic words containing the indispensable sound [phoneme] and meaning [morpheme] correspondence of the necessary for basic literacy and intellectual development.

It takes nearly five years of intense reading, writing, and speaking practice and drill, for the average American child to master this phonetic code which is contained within the linguistic structure of the English Language.

As part of "High School and Beyond," a longitudinal study based on a national sample of the high-school graduating class of 1982, the center in 1993 gathered the college transcripts of students in a sample to assess how public school students have progressed as they moved from elementary schools to secondary schools and into public and private higher education institutions. From this data base, we know precisely when and where people enrolled in college, what they studied, how well they performed, and whether they had earned degrees by 1993. The data on degree completion and remediation were recently published in The Condition of Education, 1996.

Looking at the Report on the academic careers of 2.45 million students in more than 2,500 institutions, it is clear just what qualifies a course as "remedial." For example, in math, remedial means any course through the level of what high schools call "intermediate algebra." In the area of English, remedial courses typically are labeled deceptively "developmental" [code word for non-reader] and for students who do not read or write fluently in their own English Language. Then, a course labeled "English-as-a-second-language" offers more of the same to students who may be illiterate in another language in addition to English. Such college and university courses carry no academic credit.

The first thing you notice in the Report is that the bulk of remedial [learning how to read, write,compute] work takes place in community colleges, which account for 56 per cent of the post secondary enrollments in remedial reading, 80 per cent of those in pre-algebra mathematics (such as decimals and fractions), and 61 per cent of those in pre-college algebra.

The second thing that jumps out at the reader of the Report is that the extent of a student's lack of foundation for doing any academic work in the University. Ironically, students seem to be in the colleges and universities to finally, once and for all, to learn to read. They are not there for completion of a degree. Of the students in the study who had earned more than a semester of college credits by 1993, 55 per cent of those who took no remedial courses, and 47 per cent of those who took only one remedial course, had earned a bachelor's. Making my point, only 24 per cent of those who took three or more remedial courses had earned a bachelor's.

And here is what shocked me. For students who take only one remedial course, it was a course in writing. Deficiencies in writing one's native language generally are easily handled. But, since writing is generally the last of the language skills to be mastered in public schools, it is assumed that one has the tools to develop writing skills, if one has reading skill. What holds for a second language holds for one's native tongue.

Reading ability, however, is often the major underlying factor preventing students from earning the bachelor's degree. Deficiencies in reading skill development indicate comprehensive intellectual problems, and they significantly lower the odds of a student's completing any degree. The stunning reality of this fact come home to me when I read that one out of eight students in the national transcript study took at least one remedial reading class. Sixty-five per cent of those people found themselves in at least three other remedial courses, as well. Even in basic math, you can't cut it if you are a poor reader.

The Report data from the high-school class of 1982, reveals the presence in the public elementary schools of a needed renovation in reading instruction for a wide range racial and ethnic groups.

The urgent need for remediation in reading certainly presents a bleak picture for the mothers of American school children. For the sake of the children and the future of this nation, mothers are going to have to dust off their old phonics readers and set their children down for a long and serious reading-thinking lesson. These kids are not going to get it anywhere else.

© Copyright 1998 HTML Graphics By The Fresno Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Comment

Archive Search:

---

Thursday December 3, 1998

Gift of public funds for private ballpark
Council members will be hounded from public office for irresponsible votes.

By Howard Hobbs, Editors' Desk

PALO ALTO - After years of wrangling with City Hall officials over the want of a private ballpark the owners can't finance themselves, the spokesman for the Fresno Diamond Group, agreed to keep the Fresno Grizzlies Triple-A baseball team in Fresno. This came following the Fresno City Council's 5-2 vote committing, in principle, a City Coincil grant of $8.5 million to team owners to help them finance private ballpark construction costs.

But should the Fresno City Council be making a grant of public funds to private investors for construction of a ballpark for team owners? No, say three courageous Fresno officials. Fresno Mayor, Jim Patterson, and City Council members Ken Steitz, and Chris Mathys made it clear on Tuesday that City Council action to proceed with preparation of legal papers on the ballpark deal is a dereliction of public duty.

Fresno City Council member Dan Ronquillo, Henry Perea, Sal Quintero, Mike Briggs, and Garry Bredefeld thought it made sense to them to give away public funds to construct a new home for the privately owned minor league pro team. They hold the odd belief that construction of the private ballpark may produce sufficient incremental tax revenue to justify their votes to advance unsecured public funds to Fresno Diamond group investors.

If a strategically located stadium in downtown Fresno could attract visitors from out of town, the purchase of tickets, trinkets, concessions and lodging might or might not make any significant difference to Fresno's economic base.

A significant portion of the Grizzly fan base will come from the immediate area. And there is no evidence of any sizable fan base or business commitment to fill the stadium, when completed. If the numbers can't maintain a franchise as a viable competitor, the team's owner will soon be tempted to depart for another venue, leaving an empty monument to the Build it and they will come mantra.

Demographics of the Fresno MSA demonstrate that while the population within reasonable driving distance is comparable to other cities in the Pacific Coast League, the per capita income in the Fresno region is among the lowest in the nation, and unemployment has stalled in the double digits for several years. Local businesses are not committed to buy enough suites to make up for lost ticket sales.

The economic conditions now and in the foreseeable future are not present for the needed amalgamation of fan enthusiasm and team profitability. Construction of the privately owned ballpark with public funds will also serve as the catalyst for wide spread continued criticism and disaffection with the Grizzlies team, for decades to come.

Under attack and criticized from all sides, it is likely that the downtown Fresno address chosen for the isolated site of the private ballpark runs the very real additional risk of becoming a game day Cony Island generating traffic gridlock, requiring the expenditure of dwindling City economic resources for major parking and law enforcement administration.

Any foreseeable public benefits of the privately owned ballpark cannot offset opportunity costs of using public funds to assist the team's investors in offsetting construction costs of such a ballpark will irresponsibly divert public funds from routine functions of local government, including safety, streets, and sanitation.

The psychological effect that a minor league ballpark has on local residents is relatively minor does not add, substantially, to the stock of the City of Fresno and cannot be expected to greatly enhance value added. Therefore, the actual impact on public education, gang activity and racial isolation is slight to non-existent.

With these conditions in mind, the location of the Fresno Grizzlies to Fresno does not indicate any justification for the Fresno City Council to advance $8.5 million in public funds to support the construction of the proposed Grizzly ballpark in downtown Fresno.

Even P.T. Barnum would be amazed at the gullibility of modern-day Fresno City councilmen, like Dan Ronquillo. The renowned showman may have correctly assessed the fact that "there's a sucker born every minute," but at least Mr. Barnum didn't gouge his customers or overpay his circus performers. At least he paid his own rent for facilities that he used.

No such economic modesty afflicts the owners of Fresno Grizzlies minor league sports franchise. Instead of good business sense, economically irrational behavior adds injury to insult and to make matters worse, it is accompanied by the audacity of a second story man's breaking and entry into the host's safe deposit box.

The history of Pro sports team owners is less than honorable. The newspaper front pages have been filled with the antics of sports team owners. They routinely gouge their loyal fans with prices for tickets, concessions and parking that cannot be sustained by ordinary working folks.

Teams routinely reward mediocrity with staggering multimillion dollar contracts for their employees. Such decisions also create a dangerous dissonance between fans and players.

Long-term fan loyalty and support are spurned by owners, who routinely abandon one City after another. The driving force behind these economic facts is the provision of taxpayer subsidies for ballparks.

Franchise owners routinely demand and receive taxpayer funds to cure their own inadequate business management. No amount of hype and lipstick can gloss over the fundamental economic flaws associated with the corporate welfare demanded by the Fresno Diamond Group. Assertions of jobs, "multipliers," "spinoff activity" and tax revenue have been revealed by independent analyses to be untruthful.

Projections of jobs and revenue have fallen flat as local taxpayers are always saddled with long term debts coming from unanticipated failure of the failed baseball franchise model. There are no exceptions to the rule. Independent economic analysis of audited records has never validated the rosy economic assumptions.

I am disappointed when any business leaves Fresno, but Fresno Mayor Jim Patterson has added more than 4000 jobs in the area in the last two years. The Mayor has taken very aggressive steps to create a pro-business environment, and many businesses now are anxious to locate here, for the right reasons.

It's true the Fresno Grizzlies draw fans from around the region. It is also true, that gains for Fresno from the presence of this sports franchise for the past season are so small they are not even measurable. Actual per game paid attendance averaged around 4000 fans.

I support exploring different methods of financing a publicly owned ballpark in Fresno. But going any further would set a dangerous precedent. If we give special treatment to the Fresno Diamond Group, we would then be obligated to do something similar for pro hockey, pro bowling, pro golf, and so on. The Fresno Diamond Group has less than 5 employees. We have employers in Fresno with many thousands of people on the payroll. On what basis could we refuse them?

A majority of Fresno City Council members have apparently succumbed to economic bullying and plundering by private investors of the Fresno Diamond Group.

Patterson, Steitz, and Mathys think their opinions are grounded on legal principle. These civic leaders have an appreciation for the limited and legitimate role of government that provides essential public services and does not waste public tax money. A privately owned ballpark can never be construed as one of the essential public services for which local government exists.

The irony of Fresno Diamond Group's coercive scheme is staggering, for it carries with it immense lost opportunity costs. When the Fresno Diamond Group breaches its agreement, the $8.5 million grant to them is essentially lost. Fresno taxpayers are left standing at the back of the line with a Third Morgtage which has no economic value.

The Fresno City government founded upon the idea of economic liberty should just have said no to this private ballpark subsidy. In so doing, rational economics would have quickly regained its footing without the pillage of the public purse and political recriminations could have been averted that will justifiably hound five present Fresno City Council members out of public office.

© Copyright 1998 HTML Graphics By The Fresno Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Comment

Archive Search:

---