July 31, 2007
Morning Roundup: Schools and Seizures Edition
Good morning, D.C. If you missed the news breaking yesterday, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had a seizure on Monday while on vacation in Maine. While the cause of the seizure is unknown, doctors examined the Chief Justice and determined there was no cause for concern and that Roberts has already fully recovered. It's likely Roberts will now be prescribed some form of anti-seizure medication because he had another similar episode 14 years ago, and he may be advised not to drive, to avoid heights and not to swim alone.
Schools Looking Familiarly Grim: The Post brings further word on exactly what kind of state D.C. Schools will be in when they open in just a few weeks: Half of all the schools do not have all their required textbooks and half of the school buildings will not have any air conditioning on the first day of school. At a news conference yesterday, Mayor Adrian Fenty promised that this would be the last year of such textbook debacles and said the city is updating school heating and air-conditioning systems.
Acting UDC President Named: The University of the District of Columbia announced yesterday that it has named Stanley Jackson, the senior vice president of operations and a former deputy D.C. mayor, as acting president. A committee will now begin conducting a national search for a permanent president. Former UDC president William Pollard resigned under pressure from the board of trustees in June.
Briefly Noted: An off-duty D.C. firefighter was shot and carjacked in Northeast ... The FBI and the Internal Revenue Service raided the Alaska home of Sen. Ted Stevens (R) yesterday as part of an investigation of political corruption ... Woman manages to buy house with stolen identity.
This Day in DCist: Last year we discovered a free market solution to that summer's youth curfew, and two years before that Metro was under fire for arresting an EPA scientist for eating a candy bar in a station.
Photo by Samer Farha
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Ok this is apropos of nothing, but I happened to be looking at the online DC property tax rolls and realized that there's an entry for the White House. I guess that just makes sense, but it's still funny to see. Apparently there are three properties at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, and they have a combined assessed value around $1.6 billion. I don't know what's the point of assessing the value (or even how you'd go about doing that) if it's untaxable.
I wonder what the Capitol is worth. Anyone know what its address is? Zero East Capitol St.?
At a news conference yesterday, Mayor Adrian Fenty promised that this would be the last year of such textbook debacles and said the city is updating school heating and air-conditioning systems.
Can any DC lifers refresh my memory? When's the last time DCPS got all the kids their schoolbooks on time? Back when Walter Washington was mayor maybe? Back when Alaska and Hawaii were territories? Did they even have air conditioning back then? New mayor, new councilmembers, same DCPS bureautards getting paid six-figures to make the same excuses. You can be goddamned sure THEY got their cost-of-living-adjustments on time, yet they can't even do something basic like buying schoolbooks. There's something comforting about knowing that August means the same press releases, the same excuses, and the same we'd-f**k-up-a-wet-dream attitude.
[golf clap, throws feces]
Does anyone know what happened at Thomas Circle last night? I was in a cab going up 15th st at about 7:30 and saw that they blocked off mass ave going under the circle, and there were lots of bystanders and police vehicles. Any one?
Is there a list of which schools have air? Or a school conditiong website?
Re Ted Stevens: Responding to a Senate Ethics Committee complaint, Alaska's other senator, Lisa Murkowski (R), just returned a piece of land to the Federal contractor who sold it to her at half its true value.
And the Bush administration thought it was so smart to send all the honest, non-political investigators to Alaska.
guest#3, I think it was a suspicious package scare. I walked by there (there was one side street that was not blocked off) and I saw a large red box sitting on the median strip. So I assumed that was the problem. But I suppose it could have been something farther down the road under the circle itself. Couldn't really get a good vantage point to see much more.
The Post article wasn't very clear - did the principal of M.M. Washington Career High School order French textbooks for a vocational school that doesn't offer French? Or were some other school's textbooks shipped to the wrong school? On the bright side, it's a good thing Rhee has another month to make sure all the textbooks are in the right places - I'd think one of her 6-figure assistants could see to that.
Fixing UDC is one of the biggest impediments to adding families to DC for the long term. Even bigger than the DCPS. If I were raising a family around here, I would much rather have the knowledge that my child was in-state in Virginia or Maryland with excellent public and community colleges. Local schools can go up and down depending on the neighborhood and the local principal. But the public college system is part of the planning for your child's long term future that we have not given enough thought to. UDC must be more competitive as well as expand its community offerings.
The problem with UDC is that there is simply no market at all for the school. Decent students from DC can use their federal money to go to state schools in other states, heck for some of them the commute to College Park is easier than to Van Ness. Remember, however, that state schools in other states get significant (up to half in some cases) of their students from other states. Kids from the entire NE flock to places like UMD and UVA and UDC, which must compete with other more prestigious schools "in the city" will never attract those students. The result is that UDC gets what's left and that isn't very good.
Gotta agree with #9- since DC students get in state rates in any state, UDC is just not a factor in where I raise my kids.
i don't know about you, but when i was in public school in northern NJ (mid 80's - 90's), we didn't have air conditioning. we had fans, and we got along just fine. from what i've seen / heard, the schools haven't been updated since and no one complains about it. so why should these DC schools be more concerned about their :: gasp :: air conditioning than their textbooks.
school is for learning - not just dumping off your children for 8 hours a day. ugh.
Guests 9 & 10 raise some valid points, but I'm with DC1974; the District should have its own worthwhile public institution of higher learning.
As for the book fiasco, I lay the blame squarely on Fenty; he's been in office since January and should have been riding herd on the process of getting textbooks from Day 1. Everyone knows this is a clusterf*^k every year and Fenty seemingly did nothing to stop it.
Two things erincarly:
1. Northern NJ =/= DC in terms of humidity and heat.
2. Global warming.
I went to private school in DC in the late 90's/early 00's and we didn't have air conditioning either. While taking classes in un-air conditioned rooms while wearing a tie and jacket every day was not really comfortable, it didn't have any affect on my education. I agree with erincarly - who cares about air conditioning? That money could be better spent.
Now that you mention it, I went to a high school in Philadelphia area with no AC as well. During the hotter months, they graciously let us take off our sport coats. This wasn't that long ago, either. 6 years maybe? Anyways, I agree. Get them textbooks first!
Hillrat: #10 here again.
What would you think if DC were to extract additional services to residents from places like GW, GT, and JHU?
Those institutions like to talk about how much financial aid they make available to DC kids, but they don't really do much aside from that. For example, GW doesn't even open its libraries to its own graduates, let alone the general community. And GT wants its own private huge-assed boathouse in a National Historic Park in return for allowing local kids to use the third-party boathouse space its crew now occupies? And remember when JHU tried to re-brand the Dupont Metro station as "Dupont/JHU"?
Regardless of how you might otherwise feel about any of those institutions, it's clear every one of them greatly benefits from being in DC, and has benefited from specific DC Gov development decisions, so could do a little more to return the favor to DC.
#16, You're way off in your GW comments. Foggy Bottom and West End Association members are allowed to use and to borrow books from Gelman Library, and the general public is allowed to peruse its U.S. government documents section. And alumni are allowed to look over the library's offerings (tho they have to play an annual fee for limited borrowing priviliges). So to say that "GW doesn't even open its libraries to its own graduates, let alone the general community" is just not true.
Holy shit, can we get a moratorium on assholes who talk about how comfortable they were wearing sport coats during high school?
I mean, there are very few options that lead to young men wearing sports coats in high school in the recent past, and none of them make me think very highly of you.
Guest 10/16 - Get a screen name already.
The problem is that those schools are OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive. A full-time student at UDC is paying about $5K/year in tuition and fees, GW is $37K/year and GT isn't much cheaper; unless GW is going to subsidize DC students to the tune of 32 grand every year I don't see what they can do to help.
Maybe UDC could bump up it's tuition and allow students to "affiliate" with GW or GT. The kids take half their classes at UDC and half at GW/GT; this would give kids that aren't rich from outside the region a reason to give UDC some consideration and perhaps raise academic standards there as well. I dunno, maybe we're onto something.
#17-
If you consider limited/paid access to limited segments of the community as equivalent to full access by graduates or the general community, I guess that's your prerogative.
-GW Class of '95
Guest 10/16 again. Used to use my name, lost it in the change over, and haven't bothered to think up a clever replacement. Sorry to offend.
Back on point, it just seems to me that the existing top-shelf (and almost top shef, like GW) universities are resources the city should look more closely at. They want from us in development rights and taxes, and they are uniquely positioned to return certain benefits. Aside from jobs and scholarships, I mean. For example, are their fixed land costs being fully-employed in the summer season? Would their non-tenured professors like a few extra bucks? Things like that might be easy starts.
-GW class of '95
Just an FYI - DC residents do not get in-state tuition at public schools, they get grants that pay the difference between in-state and out of state but only up to $10,000 per year. So they still might end up paying more if they go to a "top" out of state school.
However, overall DC students actually get a better deal than most state residents since they can use this $10,000 at any public school in the country as well as private schools in the DC Metro area and private black schools anywhere in the country (racist). So they can get $10K off of GT or GU if they want.
http://seo.dc.gov/seo/cwp/view,A,1226,Q,536777,seoNav_GID,1510.asp
Georgetown and GW have no more of a reason to set up an "affiliate" program with UDC than Columbia does with CUNY or Harvard does with UMASS-Boston. These are private schools that can get away with charging extremely high tuition rates. Every city has them and in no city that I know of do these private schools provide more than token accessibility to the community. The solution to DC public higher ed problem will never lie in its private schools.
What DC should try and do is copy the CUNY model which provides an affordable QUALITY education to New York City residents. I was on the faculty at a CUNY School and in my classes I never had more than 1 or 2 students from outside of New York City and most of my students were first generation college students. These were kids from neighborhoods in Queens that you never heard of that were working 30 hours a week and paying their way through school. The admissions policy was essentially open, the tuition was affordable, financial aid was easy to get, and the system worked. Compared to the worst of the CUNY schools, UDC is a shambles and don't even get me started about the "DC School of Law."
In some ways the DC tuition waiver program hurts UDC as it allows students to go to places like George Mason and College Park. However, the CUNY system has survived the growth of the SUNY (NY State) system (which draws students out of NYC and into schools like Stonybrook) and if the right people were put in charge of UDC it could survive as well.
Oh, I went to school all 12 years in the middle of NJ, and let me just state that it is exactly as humid there as it is here in DC. Hot and humid, and all we had were fans and open windows. Worse, these were parochial schools, so we were all wearing wool pants and skirts and cardigan sweaters through all of the heat in April, May, and June. It sucked.
What's interesting about the lack of books is that last year, former Superintendant Janey poured money into a new automated system, and the problems it created are monumental. Nice going... Janey.
What DC should try and do is copy the CUNY model which provides an affordable QUALITY education to New York City residents.
A fine idea, but the District has less than 600,000 residents as compared with 8 million plus in the five boroughs. I don't think that population disparity will allow the CUNY model to be transplanted to DC.
I've always thought UDC should be a community college. Also, regarding the "getting in state tuition at other schools deal", I believe that is limited to full-time first-degree students correct?
For working adults who are DC residents, the options are not so attractive. Unless I'm missing something, an DC-resident adult can't continue "life long learning" or go back to school to get another degree at in-state rates. DC needs to think about this too if it wants to retain all the young residents that it's trying to recruit to live in the District long-term. If the educational opportunites suck, or are prohibitively expensive, that's a big disadvantage.
DC is on average 4 degrees warmer than central NJ and I assume probably more humid as well.
http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/compare/USDC0001?sfld1=Washington,%20DC&sfld2=Trenton,%20NJ&clocid1=USDC0001&clocid2=
#27 brings up a good point- There's an interesting (but obviously incomplete) mix of DC options for DC's return-to-school set. USDA offers some good courses for cheap, and many DC area employers provide tuition assistance.
Again, incomplete, but interestingly more varied than in other places, right?
Folks who keep pointing out that the out-of-state voucher system hurts UDC need to remember that the program is a relatively new one (the legislation was passed in 1999), and that it was only really made necessary by UDC's drastic decline in quality over the previous decade(s). Throughout the 90s the university was seriously in danger of losing its accreditation, and was not a legitimate alternative for high-achieving but low or middle income DC residents.
In other words, the vouchers didn't in any way cause UDC to become a sub-standard university, but they may well be playing a role in ensuring that it stays a sub-standard university.
In academia, for better or worse, reputation is nearly everything. Go anywhere in the county and say "Georgetown" and you get a certain reaction. Say "University of North Dakota" and you get another. Say "University of the District of Columbia" and you are likely to get either a puzzled look or a look of outright contempt. I would go so far as to say that if you asked a random sample of university professors accross disciplines to rank the primary state university in every state and DC, UDC would come in dead last on nearly every ballot. Its reputation is simply that bad.
The good thing is that reputations can change over time (look at the University of Maryland as a local example of a school that has "moved up"). But it takes both time and a near wholesale overhaul of the place. Maryland didn't start getting better (early 90's) until the state totally reorganized its system of higher education and the school slashed dozens of majors and put resources into programs that it could excel in. They also launched and sustained major marketing and fundraising campaigns. It wasn't easy (I remember faculty calling it a bloodbath when it was happening) but it was necessary and it is exactly what UDC needs.
UDC needs to examine every program, every class, every professor, and every classified employee. Keep the ones that work, get rid of the ones that don't. Decide what type of school it wants to be, then be the best of that type of school. Bring the community in to make them feel a sense of ownership of UDC (larger state schools do this with sports teams, but UDC could host theatre, readings, speakers, etc). Finally, market the heck out of the place. Bring a sense of pride into the name and the changes. Call it the "new UDC."
Remember, if DC wants to be a state, it needs, to a certain degree, to act like a state, and providing a decent system of higher education for your residents is something that all 50 states do, and do better than DC.