Education

CSU Board Votes to Place Burden of Ethnic Studies Requirement on Community Colleges

Published

4 years ago

November 25, 2020

Kiki

Dr. Alison Wrynn, CSU's Vice President of Academic Programs

California State University took another step toward requiring students to take an ethnic studies class as part of their lower-division coursework, a move that would also have significant implications for the state’s 115 degree-granting community colleges.

During the 23-campus system’s Board of Trustees meeting on November 20, the educational policy committee voted 9-2 to make a minor amendment to a policy approved in July that would have required students to take a course in ethnic studies or a class with a social justice component.

To comply with AB 1460, a new law requiring students to take a class in ethnic studies, the amended policy stipulates that students must complete the requirement by taking a class in one of four ethnic studies disciplines: Native American studies, African American studies, Asian

American studies or Latina and Latino studies. A class deemed to have a social justice component that falls outside those disciplines would not fulfill the requirement.

The Board did not make revisions to the policy requested by faculty, who want greater control over implementing the new requirement. Faculty groups called on the Board to establish that the class could be fulfilled as either an upper- or lower-division course, but the trustees did not take that step on November 17.

Now, students are likely to be required to complete the class in the first half of their coursework. Because many students take those lower-division classes at community college before receiving an associate degree and transferring to CSU as part of a specialized pathway, it would shift the responsibility to community colleges to offer ethnic studies to those students.

That would be a significant financial burden to those colleges, many of which don’t currently offer any ethnic studies classes.

The CSU chancellor’s office says it is still finalizing the implementation plan for the new class and has not officially determined that it will be a lower-division class. However, Michael Uhlenkamp, a spokesman for the chancellor’s office, said in a statement to EdSource that “it is our preference to have the requirement be a lower-level” requirement.

“We are hoping to have that guidance to share with the campuses in the next few weeks,” he added.

CSU faculty groups want individual campuses to have greater flexibility over how to implement the requirement and do not want to restrict students to taking the class in their lower-division coursework.

CSU’s Academic Senate, the official body representing faculty on system-wide issues, last week passed a resolution urging the Board of Trustees and the chancellor’s office to revise the proposal and establish that the requirement could be met as an upper- or lower-division class.

CSU’s Council on Ethnic Studies, which laid the groundwork for AB 1460, also took that position, as did the California Faculty Association, the union representing faculty across the system.

“We are looking to the CSU Board of Trustees … to exercise its oversight of the Chancellor’s Office and demand freestanding graduation requirement, allowing upper or lower division Ethnic Studies courses,” said Kenneth Monteiro, the former dean of San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies in a statement. Monteiro is also the chair of the CSU Council on Ethnic Studies.

The chancellor’s office argues that it would not make sense to give campuses autonomy for implementing AB 1460.

“Unlike a campus requirement, a system requirement must be consistent across the 23 campuses,” Alison Wrynn, CSU’s associate vice-chancellor of academic programs, said during the meeting.

If the class is indeed implemented as a lower-division requirement, it would create significant costs for the state’s community colleges that offer associate degrees.

Under that plan, the class would become part of CSU’s general education requirements. Students who transfer to a CSU campus from community college as part of the Associate Degree for Transfer pathway are required to complete those requirements at community college. About 14,000 students transferred to a CSU campus on that pathway this fall.

Aisha Lowe, the community college system’s vice-chancellor of educational services and support, previously told EdSource that it would cost up to $45 million in new spending for the system to offer the required courses to those students.

Most of that spending would be to hire new faculty. Lowe estimated that about 40 colleges currently do not offer any ethnic studies classes, and said that those that do will likely need to offer more of those classes to satisfy all students.

The law goes into effect beginning with students graduating from CSU in 2025. That means that students who enter college next fall will be the first class subjected to the requirement. For those students to be able to complete the requirement by their second year of college, the community college system would need to have the ethnic studies classes available by Fall 2022.

Kiki

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Activism

LIVE! — TOWN HALL ON RACISM AND ITS IMPACT — THURS. 11.14.24 5PM PST

Join us for a LIVE Virtual Town Hall on the Impact of Racism hosted by Post News Group Journalist Carla Thomas and featuring Oakland, CA NAACP President Cynthia Adams & other Special Guests.
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. PST

Published

5 days ago

November 12, 2024

Oakland Post

Discussion Topics:
• Since the pandemic, what battles have the NAACP fought nationally, and how have they impacted us locally?
• What trends are you seeing concerning Racism? Is it more covert or overt?
• What are the top 5 issues resulting from racism in our communities?
• How do racial and other types of discrimination impact local communities?
• What are the most effective ways our community can combat racism and hate?

Your questions and comments will be shared LIVE with the moderators and viewers during the broadcast.

STREAMED LIVE!
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/PostNewsGroup
YOUTUBE: youtube.com/blackpressusatv
X: twitter.com/blackpressusa

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Art

Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.

Published

2 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

Tony Cokes. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Special to The Post

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[^5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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California Black Media

On Your November Ballot: Prop 2 Seeks to Modernize Public Education Facilities

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities. If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Published

2 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond (Courtesy Photo)

By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities.

If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Supporters argue that the money is critical for making safety improvements in schools, as well as modernizing science labs, performing arts spaces and kindergarten classrooms. School districts in lower-income areas have no other way to pay for these improvements.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 38% of students attend schools that don’t meet the state’s minimum safety standards. The research shows that schools with sub-standard facilities tend to have students with lower attendance rates, lower morale and lower overall academic performance.

California Black Media spoke with a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesperson on why she believes it should be a YES vote on Prop 2.

“Measure US, Los Angeles Unified’s Local Public Schools Safety and Upgrades Measure on the November ballot would provide $9 billion to upgrade Los Angeles public schools for safety and 21st century student learning and college and career preparedness. The average annual cost to property owners is estimated at 2.5 cents per $100 of assessed (not market) property value. The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education adopted a Resolution on October 22 to support Los Angeles Unified’s Measure US, and State Propositions 2 and 4,” the spokesperson said.

Opponents argue that the state should include school repairs in its regular budget instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. Opponents also argue that the proposition would not directly impact students. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is on record as one of the organizations opposing the proposition.

“Proposition 2 is $10 billion of bonds, new state debt, to pay for school facilities. It is almost certain to result in higher property tax bills, because school districts must provide a ‘local match’ of funds in order to receive money from the Prop. 2 state bonds. That will lead to districts issuing new local school bonds, which are paid for by adding new charges to property tax bills,” said Jarvis.

Opponents also have voiced concerns about what they view as an inequitable distribution of funds. They believe that lower-income school districts should receive a greater share of the state’s sliding scale for matching funds.

“Enrollment is declining in both K-12 district schools and community colleges and the declines are projected to continue. But Proposition 2 commits California to pay an estimated $18 billion, including interest, for school buildings that may not even be necessary. Vote no on proposition 2.”

A “yes” vote gives approval to the state to issue $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.

A “no” vote will prohibit the state from issuing $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.