College Trustees Skip Work But Still Get Paid

The City College of San Francisco is violating state law by paying trustees who regularly skip meetings. Records show there were only five meetings in which all Board of Trustees members were in attendance, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. On several occasions, the body barely made the quorum it needs to hold votes. The Board of Trustees are paid $500 per month whether they attend meetings or not, as they oversee a $400 million budget and set policies for nine campuses. Over the past year and a half, seven members of the elected board have been absent a total of 31 times.

“It’s gotten to the point where the chancellor has his assistants call us up before every meeting to make sure board members are coming to the one meeting we have per month,” Trustee Steve Ngo said

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Dump Colombia education reforms, thousands demand

Tens of thousands of students skipped classes to chant, march and dance down the streets of the capital Thursday, paralyzing the city in an ongoing struggle over the future of higher education, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The protests – which also brought out labor unions, professors and high school students-have emerged as one of the most stubborn problems in the 15-month administration of President Juan Manuel Santos, and echo similar marches in Chile. After months of insisting that the government would not allow education reform to be held hostage by protests, Santos on Wednesday offered to kill the reform bill if students would return to class. But organizers say the government must back down first…

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NSF awards $10 million grant to Stanford University to launch national center to educate entrepreneurial engineers

The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $10 million grant to launch a national center for teaching innovation and entrepreneurship in engineering, based at Stanford University, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Directed by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the entrepreneurship center at Stanford’s School of Engineering, the new center addresses the critical need for innovative and entrepreneurial engineers. STVP’s key partner on this initiative is the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA)…

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Bill to curb California college execs’ pay raises

Days after California’s public universities handed lucrative new pay and bonuses to three executives and a chancellor while raising student tuition, a state senator has introduced a bill to make such pay increases illegal in tough economic times, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The bill, filed Monday by state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would prohibit executive pay increases at the University of California and California State University in years when the state does not raise its allocation to the schools…

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Community college system looking into online fees

California community college officials are looking into whether students are being charged improper fees to access online courses at campuses across the state, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

“If the fees are not valid, the chancellor’s office will direct the colleges to cease and desist the practice, and provide direction on how to proceed,” said Paige Marlatt Dorr, spokeswoman for Jack Scott, chancellor of the 112-college system…

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Stanford students can opt for time-outs

More than 1,700 students crossed the stage Sunday to receive one of the most prestigious documents in academia: a Stanford University degree. But some in the class weren’t there, having chosen to pursue dreams that seemed too ripe to put on hold, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. At Stanford, 95 percent of students complete a bachelor’s degree in six years or less. So students who “stop out,” or leave with the intention of someday wrapping up their degree, are rare…

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WCET receives grant for groundbreaking higher education analytic research

WICHE, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, announced today that WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, has been awarded a $1,000,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund an initiative to unify student data from six U.S. institutions and demonstrate the effective use of predictive analytic methods for improving student outcomes, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The goal is to identify variables that influence student retention and progression, and guide decision-making that improves postsecondary student completion in the U.S…    

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Compassion in education theme of TED conference in East Bay June 11

Prospect Sierra has partnered with U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center to host a TEDx conference on the topic of compassion in education, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Tickets for the conference, scheduled for Saturday, June 11, 2011 at the Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, California, are now available online at: http://tedxgoldengateed.org. TED began in 1984 as a place for innovators and leaders in the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design to share ideas. 26 years later, TED has become a global online and conference community of individuals and organizations who believe in the power of spreading ideas through videotaped presentations shared via the Internet. TED.com has a video library of over 600 amazing talks of such high quality that the site has become the platinum standard for innovation in digital storytelling…

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Blind law student wins computer aid for bar exam

A blind law student can use computer-assisted reading devices in next month’s bar exam, a federal judge has ruled, rejecting the examiners’ arguments that the assistance was too generous and might let someone steal the test questions, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco ordered the National Conference of Bar Examiners on Jan. 29 to accommodate Stephanie Enyart, who suffers from macular degeneration and retinal dystrophy and was declared legally blind at 15. Enyart, 32, graduated last spring from UCLA Law School, where she took tests on a laptop with software that magnified the text and read the words into earbuds. But she has not taken the bar exam because its examiners have refused to allow the same arrangements. Federal disability law “does not require testing organizations to provide disabled examinees with their preferred accommodations,” the examiners’ lawyer, Gregory Tenhoff, said in court papers. He also said putting the test questions on a computer disk would expose them to hackers and thieves. The examiners said Enyart would have to accept the usual accommodations for blind and visually impaired applicants: a pencil-and-paper test with questions displayed on an enlarged screen, a human reader, and twice the usual three-day testing period. In siding with Enyart, Breyer said the bar could provide its own computer for increased security. “A disability should not prevent an individual from pursuing their dream, if that’s what it is, of practicing law,” the judge said…

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