ACADEMY, CALIF. -- Among the men from all sections of the country who thronged to California during the excitement following the discovery of gold was a young American of Scotch ancestry, Gillum Baley, who was born in Pettis County, Mo., Jun 19, 1813. Gillum Baley from Gallatin County, Illinois.
     His youth and young man hood was spent in Sangamon County, Ill., where at the age of nineteen he was an ordained minister of the Methodist Church, although he never held an itinerant pastorate. At the age of about twenty-one, he chose Missouri as his place of residence, settling there in 1834.
     He was admitted to the bar in Missouri but never practiced, although he served for sixteen years as Associate Justice in the counties of Andrew, Jackson and Nodaway, in that state. In 1849 he crossed the plains to California with his two brothers, Caleb and W. Rite Baley. Leaving their home in April they arrived at the destination in September, and worked in the mines with more or less success for several years.
     In 1852 young Baley returned to Missouri via Panama, but the memory of California's charms lingered with him in his eastern home and he was not content until he was again en route for the Golden State.
     In 1858 he gathered 200 thoroughbred Durham cattle and with his wife and nine children and his brother W. Rite in the party, again started for the Pacific Coast. Near Fort Hardy the party was attacked by Indians, and losing their cattle and supplies were obliged to return to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a new outfit, starting again for the coast in August, 1859, with six mules and wagons. This time they were more fortunate and reached their destination, arriving at Visalia in November 1859.
     January 17, 1860, Mr. Baley moved to Millerton, Fresno County, leaving his brother, W. R., in Visalia. He made a number of trips from Stockton to Millerton, driving a six-mule team with supplies, and also mined on the San Joaquin River three miles above Fort Miller, and on Fresno River, until 1866, when he removed to Fort Miller on accout of the school advantages for his children.
     In 1867 he was elected County Judge of Fresno County and served twelve years on the bench. When the county seat was moved to Fresno in 1874 he was elected and served two years as treasurer of Fresno County. For a time he was engaged in the grocery business in Fresno with his son Charles C. Baley.
    He owned 160 acres of land at Tollhouse, Fresno County, also 1,000 acres in small tracts in different parts of the county.    Mrs. Permelia E. Baley died in Fresno in 1906.

    [Editor's Note: For more detail on this incident see: "The History of Fresno County, California, with Biographical Sketches," by Paul E. Vandor in two volumes from The Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, Califonia Vol. I, pp. 623.]

Letter to the Editor

Copyright 1962, 2004 by Valley Press Media Network. All Rights Reserved

THE DAILY arise and read a news leak from CLOVISNEWS.COM

~Updated~
February 17, 2004
THE MYSTERY AT ACADEMY
SCHOOLHOUSE & CEMETERY
Howard E. Hobbs PhD, Editor & Publisher

     ACADEMY, CALIF. -- The historic one-room Academy prairie schoolhouse, located one-quarter mile Northwest of the Academy Cemetery on the South bank of Dog Creek in a grove of oak trees, was established at the exact location of a much earlier settlement that would be renamed as as Academy in 1871. It would become the foundation for a first secondary school in Fresno County.  
     James Darwin Collins, later sheriff, was the first teacher. He taught there until 1876. The reputation of the young schoolmaster drew many of the early pioneer families to the vicinity of this school where they established homes along the Upper Dry Creek in order to give their children the benefit of his teaching service paid for by tuition. In this way the Academt settlement grew large as it was built into a thriving community.
    The Clovis Free Press has obtained a news story which appeared in the Fresno Expositor on the school and its name "Academy." The text of the Expositor story reported: "Academy is the name of th new Post office, and will become the local name of th region heretofore known as Upper Dry Creek. The name Academy is well deserved from the enterprise and liberality of its citizens who built the beautifu and an commodious school edifice that adorns the valley among the big Oak Trees just at the edge of the foothills."
     Just easterly of The Academy stood the small Methodist-Episcopal South Church, built in 1869 and still in use today. The stage route from Visalia to Millerton passed nearby and soon, a small village sprang up including a hotel, store, stables and a post office to which the name ACADEMY was attached. Later, it was a stopping place for the Tollhouse Teamsters.
     Many of the County's earliest families settled here engaging wheat growing and the cattle raising business. Nearly all of the early families attended the Academy Secondary School. Most of them and many of their descendants now rest in the nearby pioneer cemetery.
    The school building is typical of most one room school houses throughout the California prairie. Placed on one acre of land, the front door faced the East. There were four windows on the North and South sides, later a window on the Southwest side was changed to a door for fire safety reasons. There was a wood plank front porch floor with four galvanized posts that were worn slick from the pupils swinging on them.
     A school bell in the belfry was rung at 8:30 a.m. for 5 minutes, then class started at 9:00 a.m. The teacher's desk was on a raised platform on the West end of the room, with a blackboard, bookcase, piano and pull-down maps behind and to the sides. Three rows of double desks for the pupils, smaller desks in front and larger desks in back were placed in front of the teacher.
     There were curtains that could be pulled together in front of the platform area for plays and performances. A potbellied stove was on the North side of the room. Older boys would bring in kindling from the shed on those cold days and they would pop corn on the stove.
     Just inside the front door were pegs on the wall for coats, shelves for lunch buckets, places to hang drinking cups, a pail for drinking water, and a wash basin and towel.
     Outside on the South was a well near the drinking water. The wood shed was near the back door. On the North side was the two outhouses - one for boys, and one for girls. The official Academy School Roll Book included most of the names that are now carved in stone and marble headstone cemetery markers.
     The distinction of the most mysterious Academy grave goes to Permelia E. Baley (Plot #130) who died at age 87 with birth year shown as 1719 -- 130 years prior to the California gold discovery and the oldest known pioneer grave site in the Wild West. Funds to build the Academy Schoolhouse $3170 was raised from local donations. By 1877 the school had enrolled 55 students.
    In 1856 when Fresno County was organized, the town of Millerton became the Fresno County Seat. Big Dry Creek and its Academy were the nearest settlement. As the 1850's progressed, a wide variety of people began moving in. Women and children came too,on horseback and in horse-drawn covered wagons, bringing large quanties of food.
    In 1868 the first geneal store was opened. Lewis Clark and Jesse Blasingame arrived at about the same time. John Simpson donated land for a church house. Joel Hedgepeth became its first minister in the one-room building with the steeple and a bell in the same clearing near The Academy School house was constructed in1872. In 1876 the Academy Post Office was established.
    

       [Editor's Note: See an alphabetical list of persons and families remembered at the Academy Schoolhouse and Cemetery; Appreciation to John Allan Dow for permission to cite University of Southern California, doctoral dissertation: "History of Public School Organization and Administration in Fresno County, California" June 1967; to Wallace Smith, Max Hardison Pub., Fresno, Calif, 1935; to W. Storrs Lee, California, A Literary Chronicle, Funk & Wagnalls, N.Y., 1968; Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads,
p. 44, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1943; John Dewey, Democracy & Education, N.Y., Macmillan Co., 1916  .Miwok Indian peoples are known to have ranged at or near Big Dry Creek at Academy: U.C. Anthropologist A.L. Kroeber (1925) estimates that in 1770 there were about 500 Lake Miwok, 1,500 Coast Miwok, and 9,000 Plains and Sierra Miwok, bringing the total to 11,000. However, The census of 1910 returned 670, but Kroeber estimates less than 700 of the Sierra Miwok. The census of 1930 returned 491.]

Letter to the Editor

Copyright 1962, 2004 by Valley Press Media Network. All Rights Reserved

~Reprise~
May 5, 1996
Humble Clovis Defies
Education Visigoths
by Christopher Garcia, assistant editor of Policy Review:
The Journal of American Citizenship.

     CLOVIS -- In 507 AD, at Vouille in present day France, the King of the Franks led a band of warriors against the Visigoths, the marauding barbarians who had sacked Rome a century earlier. The king, named Clovis, defeated the Visigoths and broke their hold on Europe.
     Today, a modern namesake-the Clovis Unified School District (CUSD),another ominous empire: the education establishment. Despite serving a significant portion of Fresno's urban poor, Clovis is proving that public schools can deliver a good education with a small budget and minimal bureaucracy.
     Clovis has long ignored the prevailing cant about the need for high spending and huge bureaucratic machinery to regulate public education. During the 1993-94 school year, CUSD spent $3,892 per pupil; school districts nationwide averaged $5,730. The district's student-to-administrator ratio is 520:1-nearly twice the national average. And although similarly sized districts (like those in Rochester, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin) typically house 300 to 400 employees in their central offices, CUSD employs just 167.
     With no teachers union or Parent Teachers Association (PTA), CUSD is a rarity among public schools. In this case, less means more-more students performing above average across a broad range of measures. The district's average score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is 52 points higher than the state average and 42 points higher than the national average. CUSD's mean composite score on the American College Test (ACT) stands respectably at the 65th percentile. In 1995, with a senior cohort of 1,606, CUSD students passed 720 Advanced Placement (AP) exams.
     Perhaps one reason Clovis kids outperform their peers is that they show up for class more often: The district's high-school attendance rate is nearly 95 percent, and its drop-out rate is only 4 percent. The district doesn't skimp on its extracurricular offerings, either. More than 80 percent of Clovis students participate in one of the most successful programs in California.
     Last year, the district earned a championship at the National Future Farmers of America Convention and sent its state-champion Odyssey of the Mind team to compete in the world finals. Many Clovis children are among the most disadvantaged in the region. Nearly 40 percent of the district's students live in Fresno City.
     Six of CUSD's elementary schools enroll enough AFDC children to qualify for direct financial assistance from the federal government. And five schools have student bodies with more than 50 percent minorities. In 1989, the median household income of the community surrounding Pinedale Elementary School was $10,000 below the national median of $28,906. And yet Mexican-Americans, who make up the district's largest minority (about 18 percent of all students),state and national counterparts on the ACT by significant margins.
     Created in 1960 from the merger of seven rural, low-income school districts, CUSD presented its first superintendent, Floyd V. Buchanan, with a significant challenge: Barely more than one in three of the district's 1,843 students performed at grade level. Buchanan wanted to push this figure to 90 percent-but how? Put simply: competition, control, and consequences. Buchanan reasoned that schools would not be spurred to meet the goals that he and the central administration set for them unless they competed against one another in academic and extracurricular achievement. He established goals for each of the system's 11 schools at the start of the year, ranked them according to their performance at year's end, and established a system of carrots and sticks (mostly carrots).
     Most importantly, administrators and teachers were allowed to choose the teaching methods and curricula they felt suited their objectives. This formula, in place for decades, has allowed the district-now with 30 schools and 28, 000 students-to place between 70 and 90 percent of its students at grade level. Competition in the district exists at several levels. Earning a rating as a top school is its own reward, but the district recognizes high achievement in other ways.
     The top schools on the elementary, intermediate, and high- school levels are recognized at an annual, districtwide award ceremony. The district's best teachers and administrators are honored at a dinner. And the school's achievements are reported to parents and the community in the pages of the district's publications.
     The friendly, competitive culture at Clovis clearly has helped drive achievement. Because a school's performance at a districtwide choral competition or drama fair influences its ratings, teachers, students, and administrators work hard to give their routines the extra edge needed to push ahead of their colleagues. Schools borrow the winning strategies used elsewhere. Students at Clovis West High School, for example, often score better on SATs and AP exams than those at Clovis High School, so Clovis High has borrowed test-preparation tips from Clovis West.
     Clovis High is also trying to improve discipline by looking at successful techniques employed at Buchanan High. Competition, however, would produce little without local decision-making. Anticipating trends that would revolutionize America's Fortune 500 companies, Buchanan made flexible, decentralized, site-based management a fundamental feature of the school system in 1972. The district office has been responsible for setting goals and establishing guidelines, but schools have worked to meet these goals in their own ways. ";They give us the what and we figure out the how,"Elementary School.
     When officials at Pinedale Elementary School determined that parent participation there was lower than at other schools, for example, they realized that immigrant parents felt locked out by language barriers. So they created ";family nights"; to help these parents take part in their children's education. With their children present, the parents are taught games and devices they can use at home to help their children with their homework.
     The result: Immigrant parents now participate more. Such innovation is easier in the absence of teacher unions. For example, the district deploys teachers weekly to the homes of about 100 recently arrived immigrants to provide them English-language instruction and to help them build a bridge to their rapidly assimilating children. Meredith Ekwall, a first-grade teacher at Weldon Elementary School, teaches English at night to the parents of her ESL students to encourage
     English use in the home. In districts where collective-bargaining agreements stipulate precisely how much time teachers spend teaching, micromanage the amount of time teachers can devote to activities outside of the classroom, and dictate what a district can and cannot ask its teachers to do, such flexibility and voluntarism is rare. Along with teacher autonomy and greater parent access, Clovis strives for accountability.
     All the teachers, without exception, are expected to bring 90 percent of their students up to grade level. If they do not, everyone knows about it. The district's research and evaluation division notifies teachers, parents, and administrators of school and student performance. And with curriculum development and teacher hiring and firing in the schools' hands, knowledge is power. The approach has "made every teacher accountable,"VanDoren. "It made me sit down and look at all those kids [needing help] and ask, 'What can we do?"
     Parents seem more likely to ask that question in Clovis than in other school districts. Parents and other community members (including the clergy, senior citizens, and businessmen) sit on advisory boards, where they review individual school performance and formulate policy. Last year, some parents were upset that children were required to read feminist author Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Parents forged an agreement with the district that allows them to review books assigned to their children and help develop alternatives.
     Other boards recently voted to institute a voluntary uniform and a fee-based home-to-school transportation program. Teams of parents issue critiques of schools on the basis of data culled from parent surveys; these reviews are posted in every staff room in the district. These boards function the way PTAs are meant to, but without the stifling hand of teacher-union influence. ";The reason for the success of Clovis,"";is that these schools are truly governed by elected lay people."
     Ultimately, it seems, success in CUSD is driven by community expectations. ";There's a corporate culture that has been established that requires more of people, expects of people more, and gets of people more,"director of Fresno- Madeira Youth for Christ and member of CUSD's clergy advisory council.
    This culture of expectation is impressed upon teachers even before they pick up a piece of chalk. A lengthy, multi-tiered interview process incorporates parents, teachers, community leaders, principals, and administrators and signals to prospective teachers that the Clovis community demands much of its teachers.
     According to Ginger Thomas, the principal of Temprance-Kutner Elementary School, some teacher candidates quit the interview process, saying "you guys work too hard."Assistant superintendent Jon Sharpe contends that Clovis sustains "
a work ethic in the public sector that's almost unsurpassed."He may be right: In 1992, CUSD teachers even voted down their own pay raise to channel the money into books and supplies. In an education system under assault for its academic failures, Clovis has produced a winning formula.
     CUSD schools have won recognition by the state of California 15 times and earned national blue ribbons from the U.S. Department of Education 13 times. The prestigious Phi Delta Kappa Center for Evaluation, Development, and Research has featured Clovis in two works, Clovis California Schools: A Measure of Excellence and Total Quality Education. Even outspoken critics of public education recognize the district's accomplishments.
     "If we are going to limit ourselves to the Prussian system of education, Clovis is the best we are going to get in a tax-financed school,"founder of the Fresno- based Separation of School and State Alliance and the father of four Clovis students. Awards aside, the real lesson of Clovis is that good education depends not on bloated budgets but on creative and committed teachers and administrators held accountable by engaged communities. Clovis's success also suggests that quality in public education will not be the norm until resources are channeled to classrooms rather than bureaucrats, and parents wrest control over education from teachers unions. .

Letter to the Editor

Copyright 1962, 2004 by Valley Press Media Network. All Rights Reserved

December 23, 2003
Private  Graduate Schools Challenge Colleges of Education
By Howard E. Hobbs, Ph.D., Editor & Publisher

    CLOVIS -- Teaching may not pay much, but apparently teacher education does. Ever eager for new growth, several companies that operate for-profit colleges are expanding their offerings of master's and doctoral degrees in education. The companies are also taking steps to promote the teaching degrees they already offer.

"Part of it is driven by the new sense that continuing education is where the money is," says Thomas J. Jennings, associate dean of teacher education at Columbia University's Teachers College. The programs the companies are offering, he says, which are aimed at teachers who already have undergraduate degrees, are part of "a very profitable market" within teacher education.

While most of the companies continue to enroll greater numbers of students in their programs in business and information technology, the number of students signing up for graduate degrees in education -- both at campuses and online -- continues to grow.

So far, most traditional education programs have not been hurt by the companies' expansion. But some education deans and higher-education observers predict that the companies are edging the market for teacher education toward a period of change that will force traditional colleges to compete aggressively on price and service -- or lose students.

"Over the next 10 years, this is going to become a very big, free-falling market," says H. Wells Singleton, provost of the Fischler Graduate School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University, a private nonprofit institution.

The four companies with the biggest presence in teacher education -- Apollo Group, Capella Education, Education Management Corporation, and Sylvan Learning Systems -- now collectively enroll more than 22,500 students pursuing master's or doctoral degrees. That's a sizable chunk of the overall market for those degrees.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, about 130,000 people received master's degrees in education in the 2001 academic year, the most recent year for which statistics are available. An additional 6,700 received doctorates. While the overall number of students pursuing graduate degrees in education is also on the rise, the for-profits are making some nonprofit colleges more than a little nervous, particularly private institutions, which have a harder time competing with the companies on price.

More than half of the students now studying with the largest for-profit providers of graduate programs in education are enrolled at institutions owned by or related to Sylvan. Sylvan says its enrollment in education programs has increased 20 to 25 percent a year since 1997. Its revenues from teacher-education offerings topped $59-million in 2002, an increase of nearly 50 percent from 2000.

Sylvan expects continued growth now that it has jettisoned the tutoring business on which it was founded and refashioned itself as a higher-education company. Within the past 18 months, Sylvan introduced three new master's degrees in education at Walden University, the online institution of which it is majority owner. Walden will add a fourth master's degree in January.

Sylvan also owns Cantor and Associates, a division that provides distance-learning options for traditional colleges with which it forms partnerships. But Sylvan has been paring back its involvement with those partners and placing more focus on degree programs it offers through Walden, whose programs are more profitable for the company. Cantor had about 50 partners when it was acquired by Sylvan in 1997; today it has just eight.

Smaller players are also expanding. Argosy University, which is owned by Education Management, expects to offer its master's and doctoral degrees in education at 12 campuses beginning this fall, up from six last year. Jones International University, an online institution, added two new master's degrees this summer. And Career Education Corporation, a company known more for its culinary and computer-arts programs, entered the education market in February 2002 with an online master's degree program at its American InterContinental University. It says the program is still tiny but is beginning to catch on.

Meanwhile, another formidable competitor is planning to enter the fray. Kaplan Inc., which already earns more from its higher-education operations than from its better-known test-preparation business, plans to open its own education school within the year. Initially, it will offer master's degrees and hopes to attract students interested in switching to teaching from other careers. A subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, Kaplan also runs 57 undergraduate and career colleges and the online Concord Law School.

The company says its experience running the colleges, where enrollment has doubled every year for the past three years, proves it can thrive in an already-crowded field, because it understands how to reach and serve students. "We do know how to get people into and through academic programs," says Andrew S. Rosen, president and chief operating officer of Kaplan.

Education deans at traditional colleges and analysts of for-profit higher education say the companies are gaining ground because their approach is student-friendly. Many, for example, offer flexible scheduling. Capella students take nearly all of their courses online, and Kaplan's will, too. Some traditional colleges offer similar flexibility, but fewer have the marketing budgets or prowess to promote their programs.

Also, none of the for-profit companies offer bachelor's degrees in teaching. Because of the costs of setting up teaching internships at schools and of supervising those student teachers, bachelors' programs are often more expensive to operate than master's or doctoral programs.

"There's an element of cherry-picking," says Frank Newman, director of the Futures Project, a research center on education issues at Brown University. But traditional colleges will suffer if they don't respond, he says: "They're losing market share, and they don't even know it."

But even the undergraduate market may not scare these companies much longer. Officials at several institutions said they had heard that Apollo Group was considering offering a bachelor's-degree program through its University of Phoenix. Apollo officials declined to comment on any aspect of the company's teacher-education programs.

The companies also have a distinct financial advantage over the state institutions and private colleges that have traditionally offered graduate education for teachers: lower expenses. Because company-owned institutions don't have scholarly research or public service as part of their missions, their per-student costs are lower. Yet their tuition charges are not substantially lower than those of traditional private colleges. That allows the companies to keep more of their tuition revenue as profit -- and trim their prices to compete better if necessary.

"In effect, they are providing a different product line," says Arthur E. Wise, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, or NCATE. For-profit institutions "do not assume any responsibility for knowledge generation."

Some of the educators who have disparaged the quality of education research in recent years might say that's just fine. But Mr. Wise and others note that there are negative consequences as well.

For one thing, students enrolled in company-owned programs are much less likely to be exposed to researchers engaged in scholarship on such important topics as how best to teach reading.

Research could suffer, too. "If colleges of education are further squeezed by competitive pressures of for-profit providers, what effect will that have on the ability of nonprofits to do research?" asks Mr. Wise. Institutional support for research is already hard to come by, he notes.

The companies moving into the market argue that there is room for new approaches to teacher education, particularly because so many policy makers remain frustrated by the quality of America's teachers.

"There's not this universal sense that 'Boy, we really have great teachers and great schools,'" says Mr. Rosen, of Kaplan. "I just think this is a market that is ripe for added competition." He recognizes that the quality of Kaplan's programs, like those of the other companies operating in the field, will always be viewed suspiciously by some traditional colleges. But either Kaplan produces graduates the school systems want, he says, "or we won't have a business."

Frank B. Murray, president of the Teacher Education Accreditation Council, a new accrediting body, says the for-profit character of the colleges isn't the key to assessing their quality.

"Some of the for-profits will enter the market for the wrong reasons, and because standards are low for the profession they will be able to mount and sustain marginal programs," Mr. Murray says. But he says some traditional nonprofit colleges operate marginal programs now, and some of the for-profit providers may well be offering programs "of fairly high quality, relative to traditional programs."

Deans at several traditional colleges acknowledge that their uneven reputation leaves many of them vulnerable. "We probably do need to be shaken up," says Elizabeth Hawthorne, dean of the National College of Education, an arm of Chicago-based National-Louis University. The college, one of the largest non-profit institutions offering teacher-education courses, enrolls about 7,000 students in its bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs in locations throughout the country.

Though her institution, which is private, has been nimble -- it offers one degree online already and has plans to add another this winter -- she worries about having to compete with institutions like the University of Phoenix and Walden, which place less emphasis on costly endeavors like research. Also, she notes that her institution is accredited by NCATE, while none of the for-profits are. Gaining and keeping that accreditation helps to distinguish the college from others, she notes, but it also is expensive.

Unlike schools of law or medicine, colleges of education are not required to qualify for special professional accreditation by groups like the one Mr. Wise oversees. General accreditation by a regional body suffices.

Of the 1,200 or so colleges offering education programs, 560 are accredited by NCATE and an additional 100 are candidates, Mr. Wise says. He says Phoenix and representatives of some other for-profit institutions have been attending NCATE workshops to learn about earning accreditation, but none have yet applied for it.

Should they bother? While many education deans and policy makers think of accreditation by NCATE, and the new TEAC, as measures of quality, many deans grudgingly acknowledge that the factors that contribute to accreditation, such as well-stocked libraries and commitments to research, may not matter to many of their potential students.

Take Delores Bellinger. A teacher for 27 years, she is now teaching gifted third-graders at Arden Elementary School, in Columbia, S.C., and hopes to eventually become a principal. A year ago, when she decided to pursue a Ph.D., she enrolled at Capella University. For her, Capella's online approach sealed the deal. After so many years as a classroom teacher, and taking graduate classes in traditional settings, "I just could not face going through four walls again," she says.

Capella's accreditation, by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, "was enough for me," she adds.

She says she has been more than satisfied with the quality of her courses. "I'll be able to stand up against any graduate from any college," Ms. Bellinger says. She's also been pleasantly surprised by the level of interaction with her Capella professors. Like many of the other companies, Capella has a small core of full-time faculty members and hires working professionals -- principals, assistant superintendents, and the like -- to teach its courses. Many have doctoral degrees.

Taking two courses at a time, Ms. Bellinger hopes to complete her classwork by December and then move on to her comprehensive exams and dissertation. Once she has her degree, she says, she'll be eligible for a $7,000 bump in salary, and even more if she lands a post as a principal.

Like Ms. Bellinger, many classroom teachers pursue graduate work because they need it to advance in their careers and earn more money. And in most school districts, pay increases for advanced degrees are awarded as long as those degrees come from institutions recognized by a regional accrediting body.

In some cases, that means teachers are drawn to "programs that are quick and easy," even if they cost more, says Beverly Young, director of teacher-education programs for the California State University system. Cal State's are quite inexpensive, but "our programs are academically rigorous," she says. A Cal State student could earn a master's degree at a cost of about $3,000. At Capella, a master's degree costs about $15,300; at Phoenix, it's about $14,000; and at Walden, about $7,400 to $9,500.

As Kaplan and the other for-profits get even more aggressive, Mr. Singleton, the Nova Southeastern provost, predicts that students will shop around a lot more for the programs that best suit them, and colleges will have to compete more vigorously. He also expects more colleges to start working closely with school districts to develop customized graduate degrees.

Nova, which has seen its enrollment in education grow from about 7,000 to nearly 13,000 in seven years, is already doing a lot of that, he says. But it will need to do even more to stay competitive.

Letter to the Editor

Copyright 1962, 2004 by Valley Press Media Network. All Rights Reserved

November 23, 2003
Clovis Schools Instructional Methods Under Parent Fire
By Howard E. Hobbs, Ph.D., Editor & Publisher

    CLOVIS -- According to Clovis parent, Mrs. Lisa Alves current methods of instruction are inadequate. Alves has raised her voice in protest at the school's Parent-Teacher Club. Apparently in response to Alves comments, the School District administration issued an order banning Alves from making contact with school personnel and ordering her from coming onto the school site.
     The mother of the Riverview Elementary School First Grader claims she has the right to assess teacher and administrator effectiveness. Apparently the district officials didn't see it that way.
     This all ended up in local Court and an eight-day trial ensued during which the presiding judge ruled in favor of Alves, holding that the Clovis Unified School District had not proved that Alves' conduct constituted any danger to school district administrators or teachers.
     According to court records, Alves explained that she and many other parents with children enrolled in CUSD schools are dissatisfied with the tactics of school district officials in managing parental objections to district policies. The District then spent $25,000 on legal fees to defend the school district board's actions.
   The local school district and its governing board need a new approach to civility in school district governance. Whatever else a school board member may provide, we need board members who are willing and amenable to examine the impact a school board has on the community over the course of several years.
     Such associations require much of board members. Existing research indicates that school board conflict contributes to learning disruptions and diminishes student learning gains, as much as prior achievement and family and peer characteristics.
     What is needed is a way to separate the important contributions that school board members, teachers, administrators, family, school, and other influences bear on student achievement and feelings of well-being.
     It is unfair to attribute everything that goes on in schools to school board members. But our current school accountability programs do not separate the role of teachers from such things as how closely aligned a district’s curriculum is to state academic standards, turnover in staffing, or new administrative and school board leadership or test scores.
     Although we currently know little about the interplay of these effects, we will need to better understand them to know which factors amenable to public intervention hold the best promise for improvements in public education within the Clovis Unified schools.

Letter to the Editor

Copyright 1962, 2004 by Valley Press Media Network. All Rights Reserved

Friday November 7, 2003
Everything In Clovis
Save Mart Swiped This Week
Amy Williams, Staff Writer

   CLOVIS -- News America Marketing is handling the Save Mart advertising campaign here in Clovis. This is advertising with a big impact. The firm boasts that it has the power to impact the purchase decisions of local consumers through an integrated portfolio of home-delivered, on-line and in-store media marketing service.
    News America Media boasts it is one of a kind. The complete range of products is part of the company’s International division. It's clients include hundreds of brands from the nation's leading packaged-goods manufacturers, entertainment, communications and direct response companies. News America Marketing is a News Corporation Company.
    One of News America's attention getting ads is drawing wide spread attention in Clovis. Attached to every Save Mart shopping cart is a small sign which reads, "whatever you're buying SWIPE IT." On the News America Marketing web page, they state the purpose of the ad "... is a mini-billboard that separates groceries at checkout with custom color advertising, providing a "last chance" exposure to consumers moments before they leave the store..." and is a graphic representation of an American Express Charge card and beneath is is the statement: "Earn Points, Miles, or Cash Back."
     According to Webster's Dictionary the word swiped is an informal expression meaning - to steal, as in - He'll swipe anything that isn't nailed down. Alternatively, Webster makes reference to the word swipe as a slang expression -- to make a sweeping stroke.

Letter to the Editor

Copyright 1962, 2004 by Valley Press Media Network. All Rights Reserved

August 11, 2003
Davis' Version of Budget Crisis:
Effort to Rewrite History
By Dan Walters

    SACRAMENTO, CA -- Governor Gray Davis and his minions have been working overtime to convince Californians that the budget crisis isn't his doing, well aware that it is a major source of voter anger as he faces a historic recall election.
     Davis' version of the crisis portrays the state treasury as the victim of a sudden, steep and unanticipated economic nose dive that slashed revenues and threw the budget into imbalance.
     "Over the past four years," Davis said in January as he submitted his budget, "working together, we have made critical investments in improving education, protecting public safety, expanding access to health care and providing taxpayers with significant tax relief.     "With the pace of both the national and state economies continuing to languish, and no significant rebound in sight, California has experienced the most dramatic decline in revenues since World War II ... " Davis said.
     When Davis unveiled a revised budget in May, he also issued a revised version of his message that an unanticipated economic decline created a deficit that he pegged at $38 billion. And he continued to beat that drum for weeks, until he finally signed a much-overdue budget that does little, if anything, to resolve the underlying crisis.
     The problem with the message is that it simply doesn't square with either the state of the economy or the historical record of what Davis and the legislators did.
     The undisputed fact is that after a severe recession ended in the mid-1990s, the state experienced a solid, if unspectacular, gain in tax revenues for four years before the highly volatile high-tech industry produced a spike in personal income taxes -- about 12 extra billion dollars -- that lasted just one year before revenues resumed their normal pattern of slow growth.
     When the extent of the windfall became known in 2000, Davis publicly -- and prudently -- declared that it would be a mistake to enact major increases in ongoing spending, or major tax cuts, and promised to resist them. But succumbing to pressures from both fellow Democrats and Republicans, Davis soon agreed to commit roughly $8 billion of the windfall to tax cuts or new spending. And when revenues did return to normal levels, the state was left with a "structural deficit" of roughly $8 billion a year -- one that will continue indefinitely.
     The mistake of enacting those unaffordable tax cuts and spending increases was compounded in the subsequent three years by budgets that papered over the deficits with creative, if misleading, gimmicks, raids on other state funds and loans of various kinds.     But was it, as Davis said in his January message, the product of a languishing economy? California's economy has been a bit sluggish, but economists agree that its problems, whatever they may be, have been largely confined to the San Francisco Bay Area-centered technology sector and that overall, California's economy has been outperforming those of other states.
     "When the hard budget decisions must be made, the economy is often a convenient scapegoat, but in this case it's an inappropriate one," says a recent economic review by Santa Monica-based Straszheim Global Advisors, which cites a series of indices indicating that California has done no worse than the nation as a whole, and by some measures better. It describes California's worst-in-the-nation budget woes as "home grown," more political than economic.
     "The tech boom ... threw off a tremendous tax windfall which California's elected officials spent like an ongoing new revenue stream," the analysis continues. "The rest is budget trouble history."
     In part, economists agree, California's budgetary problems stem from a volatile, income tax-centered revenue system that tends to push revenues sky high in good times and into a deep trough a mild downturn. Rather than make budget decisions based on that reality, politicians tend to act on faulty, if convenient, assumptions.
     A phony history of California's fiscal crisis may serve Davis' political need to shun responsibility, but it just isn't accurate. And acceptance of reality is the first step toward fixing a badly broken budgetary process.

    [Editor's Note: California went from a surplus when Gov. Davis was elected, to a record decline and a $34.8 Billion deficit.]

Letter to the Editor

Copyright 1962, 2004 by Valley Press Media Network. All Rights Reserved     

July 25,2003
The End of Everything
By Dennis Overbye, Science Writer

    CLOVIS  -- Recent astronomical observations indicate not only that universe is expanding but also that it is speeding up under influence of mysterious 'dark energy,' an anti-gravity that seems to be embedded in space itself.
    Astronomers say that if the universe is accelerating, distant galaxies will disappear from view, leaving our sky dark and empty, and will eventually be moving apart so quickly that usual methods of formulating physics may not all apply. The domain of life and intelligence, starved finally of energy, will not expand, but constrict and eventually vanish.
     In the decades that astronomers have debated the fate of the expanding universe -- whether it will all end one day in a big crunch, or whether the galaxies will sail apart forever -- aficionados of eternal expansion have always been braced by its seemingly endless possibilities for development and evolution. As the Yale cosmologist Dr. Beatrice Tinsley once wrote, ''I think I am tied to the idea of expanding forever.''
     Life and intelligence could sustain themselves indefinitely in such a universe, even as the stars winked out and the galaxies were all swallowed by black holes, Dr. Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, argued in a landmark paper in 1979.
     ''If my view of the future is correct,'' he wrote, ''it means that the world of physics and astronomy is also inexhaustible; no matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.''

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July 21, 2003
Stebbins Dean
Crack Up in Naples!
By Thomas Hobbs, Staff Writer

     FRESNO - Stebbins Dean, CEO of Fresno’s Chamber of Commerce, has been arrested in a police sting operation in Naples, Florida. The arrest was covered in the local Naples Daily News. Collier County Sheriff’s report states that Dean negotiated purchase of what he believed to be crack cocaine from undercover officers on Saturday night.
      At the time of his arrest, Dean told officers he was in staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples while attending a conference for the national Chamber Executives' Leadership Forum...More.

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Monday July 14, 2003
The Worth of Freedom
Stepping On the Free Press
By Howard Hobbs, Ph.D., Editor & Publisher

    CLOVIS, CA -- It is not always easy to separate society's need and the individual's right under State and federal laws.
     In the City of Clovis this week, however, American constitutional guarantees to a free press are being indirectly questioned and perhaps abridged if city fathers go ahead with plans to force the local newspaper out of its editorial office space at 754 3rd Street corner on Third and Hughes in Old Town Clovis.
     This is the more serious question of the day. The inviolate role of the free press must be...More!

Letter to the Editor

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