There has always been a great deal of talk in education about serving every kind of person, but in particular those who have been under-represented in college.  Despite all of this talk, the world of educators is increasingly diverging from the world of their students, especially the under-represented, which is leaving more and more students feeling abandoned and without hope.

In one world are the educators who ever-increasingly view education in economic terms – economic terms demonstrated by soaring costs of tuition and books as well as soaring costs for administration as well as construction of new buildings justified by educators for whom there never seems to have been enough money over the past 40 years.

The other significant discourse in education is educators’ depiction of students of today as woefully deficient and entirely to blame for their inadequacies, thus becoming nothing more than an intolerable burden – I know because I hear this from the educators who oftentimes brag of their ruination of students, and I hear from the students who are overwhelmed and feeling hopeless; yet I have worked with many of these students who have been deemed by other educators to be “losers” and “failures”, and they have gone on to be great successes – and that is the purpose and power of teaching – to transform lives for the better.

The worlds of educators and students are diverging because while educators have remained in their “ivory towers” for the past century, the world of their students has changed drastically.  In the students’ world today there is marked deterioration into ever-increasing poverty due to a huge variety of reasons, a proliferation of socioeconomic ills, and a K-12 system that after 40 years has still not fixed its problems which has left most students increasingly ill-prepared for college and for life, and the response from educators is to blame the students for these failures that they, the educators, could never fix and demand that the students fix it on their own.  Nowhere is this abdication of our role as educators more evident and profound than in the ever-increasing neglect of our students witnessed in a growing lack of positive, if any, contact with students.

It is not only an enormous disservice to great teachers to have people in education who view students as a burden to be rid of, but also extremely disheartening, for that is our task as educators, to reach out and touch the lives of our students, and it is not an impossible task as there are many great teachers who have been successful even where others have failed and under the most difficult of situations.  Teaching is truly one of the most powerfully transformative professions – for teachers can not only give life back to their students, but also their futures, even futures once abandoned or unimagined.   Surely great teachers are the George Baileys of the world who the Angel Clarence described as those whose lives touch so many others for the better that if they had never been, there would be a great hole in the many lives they would have touched.

“There is a misconception in the higher education world that high standards and completion are naturally at war with one another, that you can’t do both” “Research findings contradict that. Successful institutions set high standards and then support students to reach them.”.

-Washington Monthly article about the top US Community Colleges

What has brought us to this point, where schools no longer believe that they can both teach well and still have students complete and graduate?  Are our schools this out-of-touch with their students or do they think their students incapable of succeeding?

2010’s & 2012’s #1 and 2011’s #2 community college in the USA is the St. Paul Community College of MN (serving Minneapolis/St Paul MN) and Pima Community College (PCC) doesn’t even place in the top 100, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The 2012 operating budget at St. Paul is $ 44M/year; PCC’s budget comes in at a little over $ 300 million.

The Minneapolis/St Paul Greater Metro Area’s (Twin Cities) population is a little bit over 3 million; Greater Tucson Metro’s is just under 1 million.

At PCC, +80% of our instructors are part-time.  At St. Paul, only 60% are part-time.   St. Paul’s Admin employees total 15; PCC has roughly 40+.

According to the USDoE, the higher the percentage of full-time instructors, the higher the academic standards.  Conversely, the higher the number of part-timers, the cheaper the operating costs.

Comparative studies show that a major part of St. Paul’s exceptional academic achievement record has to do with the high level of personal contact between students with faculty and staff members.  Their focus is student-centric and accessibility.  It is more than clearly obvious that PCC’s de facto policies are quite the reverse.

PCC’s consistent policy of “the more the merrier”/”bigger is better” education is flawed from more than an educational point of view.  It also consistently increases operating costs.  St. Paul’s 2013 budget is less than it was in 2010.  That’s not the case at PCC.  And PCC constantly cries out for more money.

What in the heck does PCC do with its money?  It certainly doesn’t invest in academic excellence, nor in the quality of its faculty members. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the hiring practices at PCC where less qualified people, some who have very poor history of success, have been hired over other very highly qualified applicants who have demonstrated great successes in their work.  Evidence of this lack of qualifications are demonstrated in the ever-decreasing enrollment at PCC and the growing number of students, employees, and community members who feel alienated from what was once their college.  Such arms-length distances between “the serving” and” the served”, as seen at PCC, may have a lot to do with the lack of achievement and success of our students in either real or even hypothetical terms. Perhaps over the doorways of our schools it should read, “Here’s looking down at ya’.” 

A. Wright

MORE CHANGES TO COVER MORE FAILURES

When unqualified and/or incompetent people are hired/promoted in education (or really anywhere for that matter), there are several things they do to cover up their inability to do the job right:

Because they don’t know what they are doing, they compensate by building more buildings or creating more paperwork or changing anything, so that it looks like they are doing something….usually changing from what does work to what doesn’t…

But they can’t fix the problems they created because they never ask the people who do know what they are doing, because they think they know better than anyone else

This is exacerbated because they don’t listen, so they don’t hear….

Because they don’t hear, they don’t understand….

They don’t need to because they know better than anyone else….

And even when they ask others what they think, they don’t want to hear and they are intolerant of those who disagree with them, even after they asked for others opinions, because they think they know better than anyone else….

And in knowing better than anyone else, they never take responsibility nor make decisions….but instead blame someone else when they fail…..

Instead they resent those who are competent because their incompetencies are then evident for everyone to see….so it is a necessity for them to do everything they can to keep competent people out…..

An, while they accuse others of wanting more money, they keep asking for money to fix the problems they created as well as money to create thousands and thousands of more programs to do what they failed at…because even while failing they still believe they knew better than anyone else….

But as it is with any fool, while they think they know better than anyone else, they are only fooling themselves, because others do know.. including students …if only the educators would listen to someone besides themselves…..but, after all, they do know better.

While the news reports have been steady about the firestorms that have been brewed at Pima College for a long time, perhaps it is more a fire wall that is of utmost concern for it has kept the truth from overcoming the fictional-appearing antics that have ruled the College and that have kept it from becoming stronger or transparent as a public institution should be. Likewise, the flurry of correspondence that has dragged on for many months between the Interim Chancellor (IC) of Pima Community College (PCC) and the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) almost reads like a combination of a case study in freshman public relations and a Ping-Pong game.

The short version of the story is:

The HLC informed the IC of PCC that it had received complaints about the inappropriate personal conduct of Dr. R. Flores (former Chancellor) as well as information that could challenge PCC’s accreditation, but Pima College’s fictional-like response is to act as though nothing happened over the many years with Dr. Flores and it must be someone else’s fault, a true  nature certainly to the heart of the board members who still think everything is fine because nothing was ever their responsibility and thus not their fault.

And this is all echoed by the PCC Interim Chancelelor who has consistently responded to the HLC with a lot of words and platitudes that basically say nothing more than “Trust us.   Everything is going to be fine”.  Right.  Let’s get real.

Does anyone actually believe that Flores’ personal deportment was the only problem at PCC and that all of the problems would go away if he went away, that he had not left a legacy?   Not really.  If that had been the one single flaw, it is doubtful he would have had to make his exit under such a cloud.  As inexcusable as his behavior was, people are much more likely to dispatch him without publicizing certain personal indiscretions if everything else is going truly well.  His departure looks much more like a major cover-up for many much larger sins and the IC PCC doesn’t seem willing to unearth or replace them with improvements.

Where there is smoke, there’s fire.  Here’s the record.

• Academic  standards haven’t been raised in years.  If anything, they are down.
• Financial  control has been sloppy, to say the least.  Many contracts are  questionable.
• Many  key Administrators are poor managers.  They were simply “favorites” of Flores.
• Faculty  morale is at its lowest point, ever—which is pretty bad.
• The number of recipients of diplomas/credentials runs less than 1% of the size  of the student body per year.  What the heck is that about?

Truth be told, the current IC is missing a golden opportunity to really put PCC on the academic map.  Unfortunately, based on everything we have seen so far, it doesn’t appear we are going to get anything more than more cries for more  money.  It’s a repeat of the story for the last 40 years that seem to echo throughout all of public education, yet with ever-increasingly dismal results. This is a clear examle of why dollars don’t buy quality.  In fact, the waste is both abusive and obvious, especially to the taxpayers who sink ever lower economically.

It’s time for bold, sweeping and dramatic changes.  PCC is still using 20^thcentury approaches to prepare people for the 21^st century.  The system at PCC is broken and the thinking in miserably unhealthy. PCC needs a leader with vision, right now.

Pima County doesn’t need another firewall of silence or hyperbole.  We have had more than enough ego-centric irresponsibility as a community—and we should be able to look to our community college to help us solve those problems, because we have no where else to look, but instead, PCC has become as much a major problem in and of itself.

Dr. Miles has been handed the chance to make a real and lasting positive difference on a silver platter.  Dr. Miles, “tear down this wall” of status quo and open up your organization to creating a better future for all citizens of this county who are in great need of great leadership. Our community desperately needs a school that will step up to meet the ever-increasing needs of our ever-increasing disadvantaged population.  Our situation is not hopeless if our public schools  would look to themselves first and foremost and ask what they can do for their communities, rather than what their communities should do for them.

Tucson needs help.   It’s your town as much as mine or anyone else who lives here…let’s make a commitment to making it a better one, because you Dr. Miles have the tools to do so.  Do you have the will or the vision?  It’s time to show us.

A. Wright

As an educator, I could feel my twisted gut once again turning on itself as the third student this week, with utter hopelessness, told me he was dropping out because he couldn’t get anyone to help him to do what he didn’t know how to do …was I in the wrong place I wondered – I must have made a wrong turn somewhere over my many years at Pima College to have ended up here, here where those we were supposed to serve had become our foe, and who we blamed for everything, especially for our own failures, because it was, after all, our job – to teach.

They, the students, come to us in the schools because they want us to teach them what they don’t know, but WE then expect them to know what they don’ t know…WE turn them away telling them they need to do it themselves,  but they can’t because they don’t know how, which is why they came to US…

Instead, in today’s world, WE are ever-increasingly minimizing our interaction with them (our students), oftentimes now to the point of nothingness,  such as teachers who have little to no contact with students, referring them to a computer or running them around in circles where they find no help….but teaching cannot occur in a vacuum, it demands interaction between a teacher and a student, and if WE continue to remove ourselves from the purpose of teaching by not interacting with, but even more importantly not caring about our students, then we will have sowed the seeds of our destruction – because WE exist because they, our students, exist, and when we fail to serve them, they will leave and so will our reason for existence.

They weren’t kidding….MORE

The headline this past week in the Star confirms what Dr. Olsen has described in her blogs….of the deep dark hole into which our public educators and officials have fallen…in which money has become more important than the students and the community who are all too painfully aware of,  and so this can only end in complete failure which is tragic because the public school system has served many people very well for many years, but perhaps it is inevitable that, like any other organization, public education too must follow the cycle of organizations which eventually ends in death.

What at Pima College adds up to $300 million in operating expenses at PCC?  Just what are Tucsonans buying for that kind of money? Do the PCC board and office of the chancellor really have so much contempt for its students and constituents that they think they have duped them all with their marketing schemes?  – The only people they have duped are themselves in that they believe nobody knows.

PCC’s student enrollment population ranks among the 10 largest out of the 1,100+ community colleges in the country.  Yet, our state is on the bottom of the national academic rungs – rating 44 out of 50, which is exacerbated by the institution of the Prep Academy in which the college turned its back on the neediest, why I am not sure.  Do they believe, as some educators do, that these people will never succeed because they are hopeless losers and so why should we try to help them, because any money and effort spent on them is wasted?   This was Dr. Flores’ defense in the first community meeting for the elimination of the lower-level remedial courses (at that time the  Prep Academy idea had not been born yet, but was born in the next community meeting).  What this thinking does do is set the foundation for the downfall of the public school system by negating the essential reason public education K-12 and universities were created in the early 1900′s which is to provide an opportunity for education to all people, not the few hand-picked by the elitists in power.

We know that the statements of Dr. Flores and his questionable behaviors have shamefully filled our newspapers for over a year now – this is impressive that there are so many skeletons lurking in the dark shadows of Pima College, which makes one wonder what is next!?  Yet, no one involved with these embarrassments seem in the least bit embarrassed which is clearly demonstrated in the Star article in that the old ways of Dr. Flores are still being executed, and yet those facilitating it remain seemingly incognizant, or uncaring, of their role in ruining the lives of their students and employees, as well as the community.

So, in this soap of dark shadows at Pima College, I can hardly wait for the next episode!

A. Wright

The best choices I made in life were the choices I would never have made, and teaching was definitely one of them.

I swore I would never teach, but over 15 years ago I was desperate for a decent job, so I took a job teaching at Pima College, and ever since it has been one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, despite all of the negatives I have encountered there, that is the power of teaching.  Since then, my respect for teaching has grown enormously because I have seen up close and personal that few actions can equal the power of education to change lives, even my own, that is, if it is teaching…but what we have today is resembling teaching less and less.

Teaching has become less of teaching due in part to what is a most disturbing and all too common mindset wherein a person believes they are superior while others are “inferiors”.  While this mindset has caused world wars and enslaved people, it is also destroying our schools today.

When educators believe they are superior, they act as elitists who are thus omnipotent and all-knowing – that is, they are always right and so they know what is best for everyone else.

“This professor does not accept responsibility for misinformation…Professor actually sent out email saying ‘don’t tell me your personal problems.”

When educators believe they are superior, they see their students (and everyone else) as imperfect and, therefore, “inferiors,” who they can then blame for the wrongs they, the educators, do, so it makes their wrongs right, which I have witnessed repeatedly in discussions and meetings with educators.

“She is by far the worst instructor I have ever come across, extremely rude.”

When educators believe they are superior and their students “inferiors”, the essence of teaching is lost and replaced with intolerance and discrimination by the educators, subsequently students lose hope and drop out because they have been thoroughly convinced by these educators that they can never succeed.

“You can’t offer  a different/opposing idea or opinion to her if you want to pass the class…at the start all the seats were full, at the end only six students remained.”

When educators believe they are superior and their students “inferiors,” their interaction with their students becomes minimal and nonproductive tainted by their lack of empathy for their students, particularly in online courses.

“It was an online class.  I had to swim by my own.  Her responses to questions were “read the book”.  The online platform was very bad, with plenty of bugs, and no help from the teacher, this class was a nightmare…This teacher is the worst teacher that I have ever met.  No instruction, no response.”

When educators believe they are superior because they know it all, they do not seek out, but rather reject, the expertise of the experts, so their incompetency is magnified by their refusal to recognize what they are doing wrong, thus thwarting any possibility to correct what is wrong.

“I expected at least some instruction…NOTHING! Teacher was not interested in teaching or the students learning anything.   Never talked to him even once.”

The truth is simple, but critical – The responsibility is ours, the educators, and thus the fault is ours too, for this is our job, to teach imperfect students so they can become better.  To accomplish this, we educators must have, and cannot lose, the heart for teaching, for our students.  So, if an educator doesn’t like students, doesn’t like teaching, or doesn’t like the salary, then they should leave  our schools, so respectability can be restored to the art of teaching and room can be made in our schools for the many good teachers whose hearts have been broken by the retention and persistence of incompetent educators in our schools, who have broken the hearts and wills of our students.

Let us teachers become, “One of the best teachers I ever had.  Most knowledgeable with a great sense of humor.  Willing to go out of his way to help with ALL issues.  Now that I took this class – I will miss him terribly!”

(quotes courtesy of ratemyprofessors.com)

As things remain the same at Pima College, let us be reminded that it is insanity to expect things to change when you have the same people doing the same thing, and still the good employees at Pima continue to leave, but what does remain are those who continue to ruin programs and students.

Perhaps it is human nature for people to want to feel good when they are doing wrong, so they justify it in several ways which includes believing that everything they do is right, trying to get others to go along with them in doing wrong, and blaming others.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the continuing deterioration of our schools over the past fifty years which has not been addressed in large part because educators don’t believe they have any responsibility for this because all they do is good, and so they blame everyone else including students.  The truth is that as educators it is our job and, therefore, it is our failure.

Teaching ain’t about the untouchables who are those teachers and school administrators who believe they are superior to, and subsequently intolerant, of what they perceive to be their imperfect students; what teaching is about is students who come to learn because they know they are not perfect and, unlike teachers, they know they do not know everything but that they can learn.

Teaching ain’t about about the unspeakables; too often in education the opinions or questions of students are silenced, but even worse sometimes the students are bullied by teachers and school administrators.  Sadly, too often nowdays, teachers have little to no contact with students, particularly notable in online courses.  The foundation of teaching lies in the elicitation of questions which then promotes critical thinking.  Decouvertes expressed it well, “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”  When we silence one, ultimately we silence all.

Teaching ain’t about money; teaching is about students.  Interaction between teacher and students requires no money.  It is hypocritical of educators to complain about others valuing money too much when they value it just as much, if not more, and with seemingly no conscience about their promotion of skyrocketing and unjustifiable costs for poor students in forms of tuition, fees, books, and many others which they oftentimes translate into bigger salaries for themselves.

Teaching ain’t about bureaucracies entangled with ever-increasingly complicated processes and paperwork that even the public educators cannot maneuver or comprehend which results in ever-increasing blunders and fiascos resulting in student dropouts.

Teaching ain’t about teachers and school administrators who don’t like students or teaching as evidenced in comments such as “I don’t care about my own children, so don’t think I care about you” or how about “It is my experience as a teacher that students are always wrong.”  These teachers and school administrators are the single most destructive force in our schools and are destroying the respectability of teaching.

Sadly, the failure of education lies within ourselves, the educators, who refuse to acknowledge and accept our faults and our responsibility to make our schools a better place for our students, rather than for ourselves, for the hole being dug by we educators is becoming our own grave.

WHAT AILS PIMA COLLEGE, AILS AMERICA

For a good public administrator/educator, two primary objectives of a job well done are protecting the well-being of the organization and obtaining as much money as possible for it; it is that they have done their job too well that is the problem.

To protect the well-being of the organization, it is believed that public employees must be able to act without impunity, that is to act with exemption from punishment or  loss, so that their decisions are not negatively influenced by corrupt outsiders.  To achieve this, public administrators/educators have built impenetrable walls around the public institutions, but the people they keep out are the people they are supposed to serve.  These walls are reinforced by mountains of paperwork and regulations and highly-taxpayer-funded lawyers which make it impossible for any ordinary person to hold any public servant accountable for any action, no matter how grievous.  The role of the public administrator/educator then is to deny any wrong so they are not responsible and to blame anyone else, but the problem is that you can’t fix a problem if you can’t admit what is wrong.

One of the greatest measures of the success of a public administrator/educator is how much money they can get, and to do so they use many excuses including they need money to hire the best people so they can provide quality, but neither of those have proven to be true – instead – money hires people who want money rather than who is the best which is devastating in public education because money then replaces students as the purpose.  When the best people are not hired, unqualified public administrators/educators are hired who act without accountability and responsibility as though nothing they do matters, but recent events and outcomes speak otherwise.

Although devastating to individual students but certainly least of the destructive outcomes are soaring tuition rates, student debt, book costs, and administrator salaries oftentimes accomplished through less than honest and fair practices accompanied by decreasing positive and productive student contact with teachers and school administrators/staff and diminishing student successes.  Greatest of the destructive outcomes would be some of the  recent tragic events in this country in which many of us would prefer to believe that nothing we do mattered, but conversely we don’t really want to believe that either because it would mean that we can’t prevent anything bad from happening and that we can’t make anything good happen.

Perhaps the true diverting of the dream in public higher education was been the shift of focus to money and away from public educators’ responsibility to students, which is ironical since public educators are some of the greatest proponents of liberalism.   What our public institutions and schools need to fix their problems is for those who created them to stop blaming everyone else and accept responsibility.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”.  Albert Einstein

The myth that money buys the best people needs to be dispelled.  I remember in college courses studying how when you give people lots of money to do something, then they do it for the money; if you don’t, then they have to find a better reason to do it, and such appears to be the case in Pima County where public officials, including educators, government officials and politicians seem more concerned with their personal collecting of tax dollars than with their people.

Government salaries dwarf taxpayers’

Pima College salaries

Are they acting in the best interest of the people when tax dollars start disappearing and the people responsible won’t say where it went?

Who’s paying who?

Politicians eating well

Are they acting in the best interest of the people when 42% of the people living in the area just north of downtown Tucson have incomes of less than 150% of the poverty level and 44% of families with children live in poverty which is more than double the national rate? (US Census, 2009)?

Are they acting in the best interest of the people when 16.8% of households earn less than $10,000 compared to 4.7% for the state of Arizona (US Census, 2009)?

Are they acting in the best interest of the people when the median family income is $24,476 compared to a national average of $51,425 (US Census 2009) and $25,669 in the poorest county in United States in Ziebach County, South Dakota (MainStreet.com)?

Are they acting in the best interest of the people when the number of residents with incomes below the poverty level is 36.7% compared to the state level of 16.3% (US Census, 2009)?

Are they acting in the best interest of the people when the per capita income at $13,862 is less than half of the United States at $27,041 (2009 ACS)?

Are they acting in the best interest of the people when the crime rates are more than double (266) the crime rates for United States (100) and Arizona (143) (City-data.com)?

So, the one thing we know for sure our tax dollars are buying is lunch at Rigo’s…………