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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > June > 13
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Ellen Belcher: Union drive at Sinclair exposes second tussle
The talk at the water cooler at Sinclair Community College is whether the full-time faculty will get a union.
Professors get to make this call. If at least 30 percent of them sign cards asking for a vote, an election can be called. The Sinclair chapter of the American Association of University Professors is pushing hard to represent the full-timers, and the administration is pushing back.
Judging from its website, the pro-union side has complaints, but pay isn’t a big issue. In fact, the anti-union side says the faculty are doing fine without a union.
Trustees increased the full-time faculty pay pool 6.5 percent this year, 6.5 percent last year and 5 percent the year before that.
This doesn’t mean everyone got a 6.5 percent raise. Some got less, some got more. But much of that money went to increase base salaries.
The set-aside was a hugely generous statement, especially this year.
The administration and a faculty group have a memo of understanding that laid out these percentages as goals, but they were not set in stone. They were conditioned, for instance, on Sinclair’s levy passing, enrollment going up and bringing in more part-timers — all of which came to pass.
With the union drive as a backdrop, the ratio of full-time to part-time instructors is sparking passionate conversations.
That policy decision is important because part-timers aren’t as involved or as closely supervised as full-time people in the day-to-day work of colleges — everything from advising students to designing degrees.
This is one element of the union debate that doesn’t just matter to the people who work there. It matters to the taxpayers who support Sinclair and the tens of thousands of students who attend the college. Having fewer full-timers changes the culture for everyone, not just the faculty.
Sinclair is pushing the envelope on its ratio, with or without a union. It has officially adopted the goal of having 50 percent of its “course hours” taught by part-timers. (That’s not the same as having a 50-50 full-time to part-time staff ratio; a college can have lots of adjuncts and still have full-timers teaching most classes.)
Historically, Sinclair has had one of the best full-time to part-time ratios in the state, going as high as 62.5 percent in 2002. As it has been hiring more part-timers, so have other community colleges, which has allowed it to look good in comparison to others, but not its past ratios.
The pro-union side says that it was told that the percentage of course hours taught by full-timers this year was between 48 and 52 percent, a big and quick drop considering the number was 60 percent in 2007.
The Ohio Board of Regents — which oversees public colleges in Ohio — argues for a 60-40 ratio for new programs at community colleges. The thinking is that faculty need to be on campus and easily available. Eric Fingerhut, the board of regents chancellor, said that even though much is changing in higher education, that ratio is still the right goal.
Community colleges often are dealing with students who are not prepared for college. Teaching that population is not something just anybody can do — without training, without experience, without being committed to the work and the institution.
Part-time instructors have a place and are immensely valuable. If they’re working elsewhere in the line of study they’re teaching, they bring real-world experience to the classroom. They help colleges save money because they’re paid much less. But if they’re piecing together a living by holding down multiple part-time jobs or have a day job, they may not be available to students or their colleagues.
President Steven Lee Johnson points to a 2007 document that says the administration worried that going to a 50-50 mix, at the urging of the “operations council,” was not a good thing, that he was agreeing to it with “extreme reluctance” in order to pay for raises for full-time people.
At least in that light, the pro-union side’s frustrations with their bigger workloads and the growing use of part-timers take on a different cast.
The tension between how many full- and part-time faculty Sinclair should have is not a run-of-the-mill management-labor disagreement. It’s important apart from a decision about the need for a union. That decision gets to the heart of the kind of college Sinclair aspires to be.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Education, Ellen Belcher, Higher Ed
Editorial: Ohio is late, but on right testing track
Junking the Ohio Graduation Test and exchanging it for “end-of-course” exams is a great idea.
In fact, subject-specific tests were a great idea when then-Gov. Bob Taft’s commission first proposed them 10 years ago. The group that made that pitch included then-University of Dayton President Ray Fitz and Tom Breitenbach of Premier Health Partners.
Though the state missed its chance to be a pioneer in high school end-of-course exams, the Ohio Department of Education is catching up. It announced last week a plan to make the switch as early as 2013.
The state will develop tests designed to measure whether students really have mastered the material in specific courses.
An example is Algebra II, one of seven subjects that some Ohio students took end-of-course exams in this year as part of a pilot program.
Algebra II is a high school student’s first foray into higher-level math; research shows that doing well in this class strongly correlates with success in college. A state Algebra II exam, taken when students complete the course, is a much better way to judge their understanding of the material than a general 10th-grade math exam.
It’s also a way to make sure that schools are really covering the subject, not passing off a basic class as Algebra II.
In other states, subject tests cover a range of subjects, from basic to advanced courses. A minimum number must be passed to graduate and students often get at least some choices about which tests they take.
In addition to these tests, and instead of having an Ohio Graduation Test, Ohio will pay for every student to take the ACT college entrance test. There won’t be a minimum score needed for students to get their diploma. Rather, the goal of pushing the ACT is to get students thinking about college and what they have to do in high school to be prepared for college.
Having almost every student take the ACT also permits a fairer comparison of Ohio students with those in other states.
The 10th-grade Ohio Graduation Test served its purpose of raising the standards for graduation. It replaced a test that was based on eighth-grade material. But beyond that, it isn’t very useful. It measures general knowledge and doesn’t test whether students have really learned the content in specific classes.
Moreover, the passing score has been kept low enough that all but a tiny fraction of students ultimately pass it. (If you don’t pass, you can’t graduate.) Because it is only taken in Ohio, there is no way to compare Ohio’s students with those in other states. It means nothing to most colleges.
Gov. Taft’s 2000 commission was ahead of its time in many of its recommendations. Its other good ideas — breaking down test data to make it more meaningful, developing standards for each subject and attaching tests to those standards at various grade levels — were largely adopted and have helped teachers and parents spot problems and gaps in kids’ knowledge.
But end-of-course exams didn’t make it into law back then. In 2000, only two other states were using end-of-course exams. Now 14 have them and several others are moving in that direction.
That the commission’s work still looks goods a decade later speaks well of the 33 carefully selected educators, legislators and business leaders who came up with the ideas. Brother Fitz believes taking another look at their work might be worthwhile.
“I’m a big fan of revisiting things and getting a conversation going with the best minds in the state so they can wrap their thinking around this,” he said. “We know much more now than we did 10 years ago about what we can do and (what) we can’t do.”
When the state and the country jumped on the testing bandwagon — out of concern that too many schools aren’t giving students what they need — everyone knew that it would take time to get good at figuring out what students really know.
That process hasn’t been easy, it’s definitely not over and it probably will never be perfect. But the movement is evolving in the right way.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ohio government, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
