Time for the CSU's Top Brass to Look in the Mirror
By Lillian Taiz
California Faculty Association
As soon as he took office, Gov. Brown set a new standard for a more frugal and more focused model of state government. Even as he tackled a multi-billion dollar budget shortfall he demonstrated, by eliminating cell phones and state cars, that priorities matter, in small ways as well as large.
The Governor wants to ensure that California’s public institutions live up to the mission for which they were created.
It is in that spirit that the California Faculty Association launched a CSU Waste Whistleblower web page (http://www.calfac.org/form/report-waste-csu) where people can log on and anonymously submit tips about state funding that is being wasted, misspent or improperly used on the California State University's 23 campuses or in its offices in Long Beach or Sacramento.
Pepperdine’s Soggy Waffle
By Peter Schrag
Education research, someone famously said many years ago, “is a soggy waffle.” Nothing demonstrates that better than the latest version of a Pepperdine University report purporting to show that, as one headline summarized it, since 2003 “California schools spent less in the classroom as budgets increased.”
Politically, especially for tax cutting conservatives these days, it’s a great weapon. But as research, it’s hard to imagine a soggier waffle.
School districts, the report suggests, don’t need more money. If they just devoted enough to the classroom and cut out the waste, especially the money spent on bureaucrats, they could hire thousands of additional teachers, give every student a computer and still have money left over. In just one year, the report says, the state could have captured an additional $1.7 billion for the classroom, good for 21,000 more teachers.