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Archive for the ‘Elgin Community College’ Category

Beyond degrees: Empowering Illinoisans through career-first education

Posted in 220, 300, Barrington High School, Education, Elgin Community College, Harper College, Illinois Policy Institute, Politics, Saint Viator High School, School Districts, Taxes, Topics Of Interest on June 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »

By Josh Bandoch, Lauren Zuar | Illinois Policy Institute

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The best path to empowerment and success, especially for poor people, is work. Work allows us to prosper while providing dignity, upward mobility, the means to support ourselves and create value for others. It’s how we become thriving members of our community.

Central to this process is our education system. One of its core functions is to equip all students with the knowledge and skills necessary to find gainful employment and, ideally, careers. It’s falling woefully short, as Illinois faces a massive skills gap with over 324,000 job openings and over 283,000 Illinoisans looking for work as of November 2024. Workers lack the skills companies need. That’s a key driver of Illinois’ steep unemployment rate – one of the highest in the nation.

Why is this happening? A primary reason is Illinois’ education system mistakenly pushes college degrees as the best path to success. They aren’t. Pushing this harmful narrative creates a host of other problems. Statewide, fewer than half of students who enroll in college graduate, while student debt continues to soar – approaching $2 trillion nationwide.

Illinois can become a true leader by going beyond degrees and establishing a career-first education system. Such a system emphasizes empowering students with practical skills to maximize their chances of building lasting careers. For some students, this means earning a college degree. For many others, it means emphasizing skills-based learning opportunities such as apprenticeships or other workforce development training.

The economic and social benefits of apprenticeships are abundant. Apprenticeships are paid work training programs in which participants take on zero debt. Apprenticeship completers earn an average national starting salary of $80,000, surpassing the average $55,000 for workers who do not pursue or complete one. The hiring rate for people who complete vocational training, such as apprenticeships, is 44% higher than people with a bachelor’s degree and 46% higher than people with a graduate degree. Career satisfaction is high, too, with nearly 90% of surveyed tradespeople reporting they are very or somewhat satisfied.

Despite these enormous benefits, Illinois shortchanges apprenticeships in favor of colleges and universities. In 2025, Illinois has allocated $2.6 billion in general funds to colleges. Meanwhile, the state is projected to spend only $148.7 million in general funds on apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships and workforce training – less than 6% of the college funding.

To adopt a career-first educational model, Illinois should:

  • Expand apprenticeships, especially youth-focused and non-registered programs.
  • Reform occupational licensing laws to allow apprenticeship as an alternative to formal education.
  • Raise public awareness of apprenticeship benefits and opportunities.
  • Regularly assess workforce trends to align education with labor market needs.
  • Shift funding from universities to support additional apprenticeship programming.

Read more of their insightful report here or download it here.

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A top university bet on D.E.I. What went wrong?

Posted in 220, 300, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Elgin Community College, Harper College, OP/Ed, Politics, School Districts, The New York Times, Unions on October 16, 2024| 1 Comment »

Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato

By Nicholas Confessore | The New York Times

Diversity, equity and inclusion programs are under attack. A dozen states have passed new laws restricting D.E.I. in public universities. Conservatives argue that the decades-long drive to increase racial diversity in America’s universities has corrupted higher education.

After covering some of these debates for The Times, I decided that I needed to see D.E.I. programs up close. So earlier this year, I began visiting the University of Michigan, one of the country’s most prestigious public universities.

Michigan voters had banned affirmative action in 2006, leading to a plunge in minority enrollment, particularly Black students. So the university built one of the most ambitious D.E.I. programs in higher education. It hoped to attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty. Since 2016, I learned, the university has spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on the effort. Each of Michigan’s 51 schools, colleges, libraries and other units has its own D.E.I. plan; many have their own D.E.I. offices. By one count, the school has more D.E.I. staff members than any other large public university in the country.

The program has yielded wins — a greater proportion of Hispanic and Asian undergraduates and a more racially diverse staff. It has also struggled to achieve some central goals. The proportion of Black undergraduates, now around 5 percent, has barely changed in a decade.

Most strikingly, the university’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, Michigan has become less inclusive. In a 2022 survey, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Minority students — particularly those who are Black — were also less likely to report “feelings of being valued, belonging, personal growth and thriving.” Across the board, students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or with different politics.

These are the precise areas of engagement that D.E.I. programs have promised to improve. I wrote a story in The New York Times Magazine today about why the effort is coming up short.

Campus paranoia

At the University of Michigan. | Nic Antaya for The New York Times

One reason I wanted to report at the University of Michigan was to better understand campus conflicts around identity and speech. Last year, the school received more than twice as many formal complaints of sex or gender discrimination than it did in 2015. During roughly the same period, complaints involving race, religion or national origin have increased from a few dozen to almost 400.

Some of that change reflects a growing willingness to challenge ugly behavior that might once have been tolerated. But people at Michigan also argued to me that the school’s D.E.I. efforts had fostered a culture of grievance. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding administrative intervention.

At the law school, some students demanded that a professor be fired for referring to two students — who were both named Xu and sat next to each other in class — as “left Xu” and “right Xu.” Another class was derailed when the professor asked a white student to read aloud from a 1950s court decision containing the word “Negro.”

As at other colleges and universities nationwide, faculty and students told me, everything escalated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. One professor, Eric Fretz, was pulled into a Title IX hearing because he invited his class to let him know when he wasn’t being sensitive enough to gender stereotypes. (A student complained that Fretz was forcing his female students to educate their own professor on how not to be sexist.)

What is D.E.I. really for?

Michigan’s recent past may be a glimpse of D.E.I.’s future. The school’s program was built to accomplish what affirmative action, forbidden in the state, could not. Last year, the Supreme Court copied Michigan and barred schools nationwide from using racial preferences in admissions, making administrators likely to reach for D.E.I. solutions.

What went wrong at Michigan? One answer is that programs like Michigan’s are confused about whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. The earliest versions were aimed at integrating Black students who began arriving on college campuses in larger numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. But in subsequent decades, as the Supreme Court whittled down the permissible scope of affirmative action programs, what began as a tool for racial justice turned into a program of educational enrichment: A core principle of D.E.I. now is that all students learn better in diverse environs.

That leaves D.E.I. programs less focused on the people they were originally conceived to help — and conflicted about what they are really trying to achieve. Schools like Michigan pay lip service to religious or political diversity, for example, but may do little to advance those goals. Along the way, they make ambitious commitments to racial diversity that prove difficult to achieve. As a result, many Black students at Michigan have grown cynical about the school’s promises and feel that D.E.I. has forgotten them. They are, a leader in the university’s Black Student Union told me, “invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.”

I encourage you to read the in-depth story of what went wrong.

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Maia Kobabe’s ‘Gender Queer’ tops list of most criticized library books for third straight year

Posted in 220, 300, Barrington Area Library, Barrington Education Association, Board of Education, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Elgin Community College, Girlie man, Harper College, Politics, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, Property Taxes, School Districts, Taxes, Unions, What the Ficke (Bradford)? on April 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »

FILE – Amanda Darrow, director of youth, family and education programs at the Utah Pride Center, poses with books that have been the subject of complaints from parents on Dec. 16, 2021, in Salt Lake City. Kabobe’s graphic memoir “Gender Queer” continues its troubled run as the country’s most controversial book, topping the American Library Association’s “challenged books” list for a third straight year. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

By  | Associated Press

Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir “Gender Queer” continues its troubled run as the country’s most controversial book, topping the American Library Association’s “challenged books” list for a third straight year.

Kobabe’s coming-of-age story was published in 2019, and received the library association’s Alex Award for best young adult literature. But it has since been at the heart of debates over library content, with conservative organizations such as Moms for Liberty contending that parents should have more power to determine what books are available. Politicians have condemned “Gender Queer” and school systems in Florida, Texas and elsewhere have banned it. Last December, police in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, responded to a complaint from a custodian about the book by showing up and searching for it in an 8th grade classroom.

The ALA released its list Monday, along with its annual State of America’s Libraries Report.

“A few advocacy groups have made ‘Gender Queer’ a lightning rod,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. ”People are trying to shut down conversation about gender identity.”

Many books on the ALA’s top 10 snapshot had LGBTQ themes, including the four works immediately following “Gender Queer”: George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Juno Dawson’s “This Book is Gay,” Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and Mike Curato’s “Flamer.” The list’s other five books all were cited for being sexually explicit: Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Ellen Hopkins’ “Tricks,” Jesse Andrews “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s “Let’s Talk About It” and Patricia McCormick’s “Sold.”

“These books are beyond the pale for some people simply because they touch upon sex,” Caldwell-Stone says.

Read more here.

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Study: Illinois’ spending per student is one of highest in the country

Posted in 220, 300, District 220 referendum, Elgin Community College, Harper College, Politics, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, Property Taxes, School Districts, Springfield, Unions on February 28, 2024| Leave a Comment »

By Kevin Bessler | The Center Square

A new study shows that Illinois continues to pump money into education without seeing tangible results.

The Reason Foundation found that Illinois’ inflation-adjusted education revenue grew from just over $13,000 per K-12 student in 2002 to over $20,000 per student in 2020, a growth rate that ranked third highest in the U.S.

“A lot of it is driven by teacher pension debt and Illinois is a pretty good example of this trend,” said Aaron Smith, director of Education Reform and co-author of the study. “During the time period we examined, their per student spending on benefits went up nearly 200%.”

That ranks Illinois second in the country, going from $2,024 per student in benefits spending to $6,062 per student. In 2020, Illinois had $22.56 billion in total education debt, up $2,934 per student in real terms since 2002.

Despite the increase in spending, the study found that between 2002 and 2020, Illinois’ total student population declined by about 6%. At the same time, the number of teachers increased by 2.5%. During that time, U.S. public school enrollment increased by 6.6% while total staff grew by 13.2%.

During this time, Illinois’ eighth grade reading scores decreased by two points, ranking 29th in the country.

“One of our findings was that there isn’t a consistent relationship between funding growth and student outcomes,” Smith said.

More here.

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Harvard grad Ken Griffin blasts elite students as ‘whiny snowflakes,’ says he won’t donate anymore

Posted in 220, 300, Barrington Education Association, Barrington High School, Board of Education, Elgin Community College, Harper College, Look For The Union Label, New York Post, Politics, School Districts, Taxes, Topics Of Interest, Unions, Village Attorney, Village Director of Administration, What the Ficke (Bradford)? on January 31, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin has vowed to halt donations to his alma mater, Harvard University. | REUTERS

By Ariel Zilber | New York Post

Longtime Harvard donor Ken Griffin has vowed to withhold financial support for the university unless it undertakes significant changes to its policy regarding antisemitism as the hedge fund billionaire lamented the “whiny snowflakes” that were being produced by Ivy League schools.

“I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” Griffin, the 55-year-old hedge fund billionaire who runs Citadel and Citadel Securities, told a conference in Miami.

Griffin, who graduated from the Cambridge, Mass.-based school in 1989, donated $300 million to Harvard in the last year alone and more than $500 million total.

The Florida native who recently relocated his company headquarters to Miami from Chicago has an estimated net worth of $36.8 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

But he said on Tuesday that he won’t support the school unless changes were made.

“Will America’s elite university get back to their roots of educating American children — young adults — to be the future leaders of our country or are they going to maintain being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions, a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame, and just being lost in the wilderness?” Griffin said.

When asked by the event moderator if he was financially supporting Harvard, Griffin responded: “No.”

“I’d like that to change and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” the billionaire added.

Griffin said it was incumbent on Harvard to “resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues.”

Read more here.

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As dual credit participation grows in Illinois, study shows gaps widening

Posted in 220, 300, Barrington High School, Education, Elgin Community College, Harper College, School Districts on December 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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CREDIT: McElspeth/Pixabay.com

By PETER HANCOCK | Capitol News Illinois

As the cost of higher education continues to rise in Illinois and elsewhere, a growing number of students are working to earn as many college credits as possible while they are still in high school.

But even as the popularity continues to grow for “dual credit” offerings – courses in which a student earns credit toward both a high school diploma and a college degree – a new study shows disparities between racial, economic and geographic groups are also widening.

According to the study, dual credit programs are more prevalent in districts that serve rural communities and small towns in downstate Illinois than in suburban and urban districts. They are less prevalent in districts that serve minority and lower-income students.

And even within individual districts, the study found that white students and those from more affluent backgrounds were more likely to enroll in and complete dual credit courses than minority students or students from lower-income households.

The study was conducted by the Illinois Workforce & Education Research Collaborative, or IWERC, a research arm of the University of Illinois System’s Discovery Partners Institute, which works to develop the state’s high-tech workforce and economy.

Dual credit courses are offered through partnerships between high schools and postsecondary institutions.

According to the study, a small number of dual credit courses are offered through public four-year universities, but the overwhelming majority – about 97 percent – are offered through local community colleges. As a result, the courses offered in any given high school are strongly influenced by the policies and programs of the community college district that overlaps with the high school district.

Sarah Cashdollar, an IWERC researcher and author of the report, said in an interview that details of those partnership agreements may help explain some of the disparities between school districts and between different geographic areas.

“It is costly to provide dual credit, especially for community colleges,” she said. “Depending on the partnership, it can also be costly for the school district. And so there might be variation in terms of how community college districts have managed those costs.”

Although students typically pay some tuition to enroll in a dual credit course, Cashdollar said the cost is typically only a fraction of what students would pay otherwise, which is one of the reasons why dual credit programs help lower the overall cost of higher education.

Read more here.

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220 Board approves 2024-25 BHS course offerings

Posted in 220, Barrington Education Association, Barrington High School, Board of Education, Elgin Community College, Harper College, Politics, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, Property Taxes, School Districts, Unions, What the Ficke (Bradford)? on October 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

220 2024 Courses

“At the Oct. 17 Board meeting, the Board approved BHS course offerings for the 2024-25 school year. Each year the high school engages in a process to propose changes to the BHS course guide.

These changes include new course additions, deletion of courses, and changes to titles, weights, audience, prerequisites, or course descriptions.”

Click here to view a presentation that outlines this year’s changes. Click here to view the current BHS course guide.

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Grassroots organization says Illinois should leave libraries to local control

Posted in 220, 300, Barrington Area Library, Barrington Education Association, Board of Education, Deception, Elgin Community College, Harper College, His Master's Voice, Look For The Union Label, Politics, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, Property Taxes, School Districts, Unions, What the Ficke (Bradford)? on October 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Gender Queer

A pile of challenged books appear at the Utah Pride Center in Salt Lake City on Dec. 16, 2021. Attempted book bannings and restrictions at school and public libraries continue to surge, according to a new report from the American Library Association. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

By Kevin Bessler

(The Center Square) – As Gov. J.B. Pritzker continues to discourage libraries from removing controversial books from their shelves, a grassroots organization says the state of Illinois should turn its attention elsewhere.

On Jan.1, Illinois will become the first state in the country that would cut off state taxpayer funding to any libraries that remove books currently on the shelves. Under the new law, Illinois public libraries can only access state grants if they adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which stipulates that “materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

On Tuesday, Pritzker attended an event at the University of Chicago to commemorate National Banned Books Week. The school plans to build a collection of books that have been historically banned, creating an accessible library open to the public.

“Tyrants and fascists rise up and authoritarian regimes take hold, and what’s the first thing that they do? They ban the books that disagree with them,” Pritzker said.

Shannon Adcock, president of the advocacy group Awake Illinois, says it is another example of state government overstepping its bounds.

“We have local library boards and trustees, we have local school boards of elected school board members that are there to take an oath to represent their constituents and to be stewards of their local tax dollars,” Adcock told The Center Square.

Read more here.

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Few Americans say conservatives can speak freely on college campuses, an AP-NORC/UChicago poll shows

Posted in Elgin Community College, Harper College, Politics, The New Normal, The Other Half, Topics Of Interest, Unions, WTF on October 3, 2023| Leave a Comment »

College Free Speech

Protesters shout before a 2017 speaking engagement by Ben Shapiro on the campus of the University of California Berkeley in Berkeley, California. New polling finds that America’s college campuses are seen as far friendlier to liberals than to conservatives when it comes free speech. Polling from the University of Chicago and the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 47% of adult Americans say liberals are free to express their views on college campuses, while 20% said the same of conservatives. (Associated Press)

By COLLIN BINKLEY, JOCELYN GECKER and EMILY SWANSON | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans view college campuses as far friendlier to liberals than to conservatives when it comes to free speech, with adults across the political spectrum seeing less tolerance for those on the right, according to a new poll.

Overall, 47% of adults say liberals have “a lot” of freedom to express their views on college campuses, while just 20% said the same of conservatives, according to polling from the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Republicans perceive a stronger bias on campuses against conservatives, but Democrats see a difference too — about 4 in 10 Democrats say liberals can speak their minds freely on campuses, while about 3 in 10 Democrats say conservatives can do so.

“If you’re a Republican or lean Republican, you’re unabashedly wrong, they shut you down,” said Rhonda Baker, 60, of Goldsboro, North Carolina, who voted for former President Donald Trump and has a son in college. “If they hold a rally, it’s: ‘The MAGA’s coming through.’ It’s: ‘The KKK is coming through.'”

Debates over First Amendment rights have occasionally flared on college campuses in recent years, with conflicts arising over guest speakers who express polarizing views, often from the political right.

Stanford University became a flashpoint this year when students shouted down a conservative judge who was invited to speak. More recently, a conservative Princeton University professor was drowned out while discussing free speech at Washington College, a small school in Maryland.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states have proposed bills aiming to limit public colleges from teaching topics considered divisive or liberal. Just 30% of Americans say states should be able to restrict what professors at state universities teach, the poll found, though support was higher among Republicans.

Overall, Republicans see a clear double standard on college campuses. Just 9% said conservatives can speak their minds, while 58% said liberals have that freedom, according to the polling. They were also slightly less likely than Americans overall to see campuses as respectful and inclusive places for conservatives.

Read more here.

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Heading into election season, access to controversial books gets spotlight

Posted in 220, 300, Barrington Education Association, Barrington High School, Board of Education, Countryside Elementary School, Deception, Elgin Community College, Ethics, Harper College, His Master's Voice, Politics, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, Property Taxes, School Districts, Springfield, Taxes, Unions, What the Ficke (Bradford)? on September 16, 2023| 1 Comment »

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A pile of challenged books appear at the Utah Pride Center in Salt Lake City on Dec. 16, 2021. Attempted book bannings and restrictions at school and public libraries continue to surge, according to a new report from the American Library Association. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Officials from Illinois’ major political parties are making clear one issue they’ll be taking sides on heading into the 2024 election cycle.

Illinois still has a primary to get through in March. But, heading into November next year, things are expected to heat up. One issue Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias put in the national spotlight during testimony to a U.S. Senate committee this week was that of access to controversial books.

“Tragically, our libraries have become the thunder domes of controversy and strife across our nation, the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” Giannoulias said.

The Democratic statewide official promoted the Illinois measure he spearheaded to withhold taxpayer-funded grants to public and school libraries that he said “ban books.”

“This right to read legislation will help remove the pressure that librarians have tragically had to endure over the last couple of years,” he said.

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Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias during a U.S. Senate committee hearing

Giannoulias was read obscene materials* some say should be allowed in school, which he acknowledged was offensive.

Illinois GOP Chairman Don Tracy said he was baffled by the Democrat’s position.

Read more here.

* “Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana did not hold back during today’s Senate Judiciary Committee in which there was a hearing on so-called ‘book bans.’”

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