Author Archives: Maxine Einhorn

About Maxine Einhorn

Maxine Einhorn is from London and has lived in the Bay Area for 12 years. She has worked in adult education in London,UK, for over twenty years as a tenured instructor and department manager. She has an MA in Film and TV from University of London and has taught, moderated and appraised academic work in film studies and media literacy at undergraduate and college level. She runs the ESL/ Post Secondary project at KQED which offers media-rich resources for and created by ESL educators.

What’s Happening to Adult Education?

March 7, 2013, 12:05 pm • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
Comments (8)
photo by Lillian R. Mongeau/Oakland North

photo by Lillian R. Mongeau/Oakland North

In his budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2013-2014, Governor Jerry Brown announced that California is no longer facing a budget deficit. In relation to funding education, his budget increases state funding per student in K-12 schools to $2,700 by 2016-2017. For K-12 and community colleges, funding is projected to increase by $2.7 billion next year and $19 billion by 2016-2017.

What of adult education? The plan recognizes that K-12 school districts and community colleges are authorized to provide adult education instruction, but highlights a lack of coordination between the two systems in terms of serving adult learners. The contention is that the system is currently inefficient and unaccountable. The Governor’s plan proposes $300 million in new Proposition 98 General Fund revenues to fund a comparable K-12 adult education service delivery system within the community college system.

This plan would fund core instructional areas such as vocational education, ESL, adult basic and secondary education, and citizenship. Courses outside of these areas would require students to pay in full. Adult education would be relocated within the community college system.

The Governor’s budget recognizes the importance of adult education and that it must be funded. The issue is where and how it is to be delivered.

The adult and community college level groups of CATESOL are engaged in discussions right now looking at questions such as:

  • Which agencies should be responsible for delivering adult ESL instruction?
  • What are the benefits of keeping adult ESL in the community adult schools?
  • How do the 17 community colleges in California currently offering non-credit ESL programs serve their learners?
  • What are the distinctions between the services community adult schools in K-12 districts and community colleges provide? Whom does each type of institution serve?

Resources

Adult Education Disappearing in California 9/12

A new report by the research group EdSource finds that adult education has been disappearing, ever since school districts were given permission to take funds once reserved for those programs and use them for other educational purposes.

At Risk: Adult Schools in California 6/2012

The EdSource survey found that 23 of the state’s 30 largest school districts have made major cuts to their adult education programs ...

Filed under: ESL Insights, Post-Secondary ESL
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Do Now #65: The Bottom Line (A Minimum Wage)

February 22, 2013, 9:11 pm • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
Comments (56)
Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

To respond to the Do Now, you can comment below or tweet your response. Be sure to begin your tweet with @KQEDEdspace and end it with #KQEDDoNow

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Do Now

Should there be a minimum wage? Is it time to raise the federal minimum wage? How might this be a good or bad thing? For whom?

Introduction

Is it time to raise the federal minimum wage? President Obama endorsed the idea in his State of the Union address. He called for increasing the federal minimum wage in stages from $7.25 to $9 by the end of 2015, and then linking further increases to the rising cost of living. Right now for most workers it is set at $7.25, where it has been since 2009. This adds up to $15,080 per year which is just about equal to the poverty level for a family of two.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 19 states and the District of Columbia have a minimum wage above the federal level.

The Lowdown presents the key arguments in favor and against raising the minimum wage.

The arguments in favor:
Since the economy has grown, wealth should be shared…. Full-time workers deserve to earn a living wage and be able to afford basic necessities like food, gas, and health care. It would boost the economy by increasing purchasing power, creating the need for more production and consequently more jobs. This would reduce dependence on social services. It is only fair since corporate profits have grown making the gap between rich and poor wider.

The arguments against:
It would hurt those it intends to help…. Raising the minimum wage would hurt already struggling small businesses by increasing their overall costs. Many American businesses might cut workers’ hours and outsource jobs to countries where labor is significantly cheaper. This would increase the unemployment rate, especially among younger workers.

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Filed under: Do Now, Do Now: Government and Civics
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Do Now #64: Why are Drones So Controversial?

February 15, 2013, 10:10 pm • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
Comments (74)
photo by jamesdale/flickr

photo by jamesdale/flickr

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Do Now

How do you feel about drones? Should they or shouldn’t they be used? Should there be rules about exactly how they can be used? Please explain.

Introduction

Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned aerial systems which have become controversial weapons of war - a controversy that extends beyond military uses of drones to target suspected terrorists. On NPR last week, New York Times reporter Scott Shane explained that the administration’s drone program is kept under the radar because to make it public could threaten national security.

Shane describes what really interests him "is how are we using a new military technology in countries where we're not at war to kill suspected terrorists? …What are the long-term consequences? Is this the way we'll be dealing with multiple problems perhaps even beyond terrorism in the future? ….”

The concern is that these weapons are changing the way America thinks about war. America has set a precedent by sending drones over sovereign borders to kill enemies, in some cases killing innocent people including American citizens in the cause of defending the US against enemies, especially Al Qaeda and all terrorists. The issue here is that the US is not at war with these countries, but sees the killing of American citizens on foreign territory as part of a counterterrorism offensive.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, about 2,500 people have been killed in drone strikes by the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military since President Obama took office. And the program is expanding. 10 years ago, the Pentagon had about 50 drones; now there are 7,000 drones which range in size from large, Predator drones (costing $5 million or so) carrying laser-guided bombs, to tiny Hummingbirds, devices the size of insects and birds.

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Filed under: Do Now, Do Now: Government and Civics
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In and Out of Shadows – Stories about Undocumented Youth

February 14, 2013, 1:54 pm • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
Comments (1)

In and Out of the Shadows


Courtesy The Marsh

Immigration reform is center stage right now – a top priority for President Obama’s second term in office. It is also centre stage for so many young people, many of our students here in California, who may be among the 11 million people in the U.S. without documents. They either came to theUS as young children or their parents immigrated to the US and remain undocumented.

Their stories form the basis of new musical called "In and Out of Shadows" at the Marsh Theatre in San Francisco, performed by members of the Marsh Youth Theatre group. Written by Gary Soto, it is based on interviews with undocumented teenagers from diverse ethnic backgrounds living in the Bay Area, who describe how their dreams for the future look really bleak without papers. No college would accept them. No employer could employ them. They would be invisible.

For example, Homero Rosas came to San Francisco from Mexico when he was 6 years old.  “My parents would tell me I wasn’t from here, but up until then I didn’t know what that meant,”….. “I didn’t know it meant I couldn’t get financial aid, I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t aspire to anything, really. I felt trapped.” His story is dramatized through his character, Juan.

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Filed under: ESL Insights, Post-Secondary ESL
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Do Now #61: Copyright vs Open Access

February 1, 2013, 6:16 pm • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
Comments (52)
photo by quatro.sinko/flickr

photo by quatro.sinko/flickr

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Do Now

Should knowledge on the Internet be open to everyone or protected by copyright law? Are academic and scholarly type articles in a special category? Where do you draw the line in terms of protected information?

Introduction

Aaron Swartz downloaded 4 million articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology digital library of scholarly works – JSTOR (or journal storage). Why did he do that? Aaron Swartz was a visionary. His Internet activism was all about open and unlimited access to knowledge and the wealth of material available on the Internet. He built technology for the open licensing project Creative Commons and sought access to academic and research work which he felt should be freely available to further learning for the greater good.

The arguments about open access in relation to academia are these: JSORT articles are scholarly funded through research grants to academics for the purpose of advancing learning for all. As government funded assets, they should be publicly available.

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Do Now #60: Online Learning

January 26, 2013, 8:39 am • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
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Online Learning

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Do Now

What are the advantages or disadvantages of taking courses online? Would you prefer that classes be given online or in person? Please explain your thoughts.

Introduction

The virtual classroom is really catching on in the U.S. with more than two million K-12 students taking classes online as an alternative and flexible way of learning.

In California, Governor Jerry Brown strongly supports this move away from the traditional classroom. He sees online college courses as a way to deal with the problem of overcrowded classrooms and hopes that through providing low-cost online classes, education will become more affordable for students. With this in mind, he is fostering partnerships between online learning programs and higher education, such as the partnership between San Jose State University and the startup Udacity. In his budget, he has allocated $17 million for community colleges and $10 million each for the UC and Cal State systems to expand online learning.

But as KQED’s MindShift points out in Where is Technology Leading Higher Education?, these dramatic changes in teaching and learning practices are traumatic for colleges. They are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. “Terms like historic, seismic and revolutionary now pop up in descriptions of the challenges that higher education faces in the coming years.”

Reuter's post Online schools face backlash as states question results claims that in many states, Maine, New Jersey and North Carolina, there has been a backlash with educators and officials questioning and challenging standards in the new cyber-schools.

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Do Now #58: The Effects of Violence in Media

January 19, 2013, 10:32 am • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
Comments (11)
from PBS video What Next: Violence in the Media

screenshot from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

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Do Now

Is there a link between aggressive behavior and the portrayal of violence in the media? Do movies and/or video games make us violent? Does video game violence affect us differently than movie violence? Please respond to any of these questions.

Introduction

Mick LaSalle, the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, seems to think so. In his article Violent Media Poisoning Nation's Soul, he argues, “The interaction between real-life and movies is complicated. Some will claim that movies influence behavior, even as producers will invariably insist that movies only reflect society, as though movies were some unobtrusive aspect of culture, unnoticed by the world. The truth is that movies and society influence each other in ways that overlap and are therefore arguable. But clearly something seems to be going on, and something is in need of changing.”

He acknowledges that there may not be an immediate causal connection, but in this piece describes his "epiphany" after the killer in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado dressed as a Batman villain gunned down people in the “The Dark Knight Rises” audience last year. The film didn’t cause the killing. But there must be a connection. Dark movies that glorify carnage associate these images with pleasure in the minds of theater-going audiences. Gratuitous slaughter becomes cool.

“… it did seem to me that the soul-crushing chaos of the film - ultimately reflected in what happened in Aurora.” LaSalle, 1/2/13

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Do Now #55: 2012 in Review

January 4, 2013, 7:11 pm • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
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Do Now

What story of 2012 had the most impact on you and how did you hear about it? (It could be something that affected you personally. It does not have to be one of these stories or even a national issue).

Introduction

KQED's news blog The Lowdown gives us the top 15 stories that Americans paid the most attention to this year. The results are taken from the polls produced by the Pew Research Center. It seems there are no surprises here - the presidential election was the most popular story, with the tragic school shootings in Connecticut attracting a great deal of attention and sympathy, and the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy followed as a close third.

But what were the top stories for you and where did you come across them?

Did the fortunes of Facebook’s stock value matter to you? Or how about the death of Whitney Houston or the doping allegations against Lance Armstrong who was stripped of his Tour de France titles? Or perhaps the controversy surrounding gay marriage....Which stories mattered to you and your friends or family?

Resources

Pew Research Center post Election, Tragedies Dominate Top Stories of 2012 - Dec. 20, 2012
The public’s news interests were very much focused on domestic developments this year, with the election outcome, last week’s horrific school shooting and Hurricane Sandy leading the list of the top stories of 2012.

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Do Now #54: Gun Violence in America

December 17, 2012, 2:54 pm • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
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Photo by Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images / SF

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Do Now

After the tragedy that occurred at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut last week, should the government impose stricter gun laws? If not, what should be done?

Introduction

Last Friday’s tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut has reignited the debate about gun control. As one of the worst mass shootings in American history, it is the latest tragedy in a deadly trail of mass killings. This time 20 of the 27 people killed were small children, which has added momentum to the plea to move on the issue now. Could this finally be the moment for reforming gun laws? Should military style weapons be banned from the streets?

Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who has been a leading gun control advocate and authored an assault weapons ban in 1994, which lapsed in 2004, is now expected to offer an updated version of this legislation. Now is exactly the time says New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an advocate for gun restrictions, "Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before." There need to be controls over the sale of weapons and assault weapons do not belong on our streets – this is the clear position of gun control advocates.

But as KQED’s The Lowdown asks, what is it with America’s Love of the Gun? The article points to the figure that “there are 89 guns for every 100 civilians," according to the 2011 Small Arms Survey. That amounts to roughly 270 million guns owned nationwide, far and away the highest gun ownership rate in the world.

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Language Teaching - Bilingual v Immersion Programs

December 10, 2012, 3:35 pm • Posted by Maxine Einhorn
Comments (4)

¿Hablas Inglés? Bạn có nói tiếng Anh? Вы говорите по-английски? هل تتكلم الإنجليزية؟

When we think about learning a language, we generally think about language taught as an add-on – like an ESL class for non-native English speakers or a class that is separate from academic content instruction. You learn German, Spanish or French in your language class, and knowledge and skills are taught in the native language. For example, math and history are taught in English here in the US or in the native language in other countries. But this approach, bilingual education, has been controversial since 1960s and is all about effective strategies for teaching and learning language.

Speaking in Tongues, a film by Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel explored this issue. In a time where 31 states have passed "English Only" initiatives, one urban school district is exploring the provocative notion that speaking a foreign language can be a national asset. Speaking in Tongues follows four diverse students and their families as they encounter the challenges and delights of becoming fluent in two languages. Witness how speaking more than one language changes them, their families, their communities, and maybe even the world. The film was presented on KQED's Truly California. Here's the trailer:

In a dual-language English immersion program, all instruction is given in English and teachers adjust the English level to the proficiency level of the class. Students develop language skills as they learn subject material. Similarly with Mandarin or Spanish – students would be taught math and other subjects in Mandarin or Spanish. The important difference is that the immersion teacher is able to speak the non-English native language, so that the teacher can tell if problems arise from understanding the language or from content. They can then use this language to explain further.

The California Department of Education estimates that there are 318 bilingual immersion programs in the state, up from 201 in 2006, with “about 50,000 students enrolled in dual-language programs …and about half of them are English learners. Ninety percent of the programs offer Spanish as the second language, followed by Mandarin (4 percent), Korean (3 percent) and other languages (3 percent).” - Eleanor Yang Su, KQED’s MindShift (March, 2012)

“We have more research now that shows students who develop two or three languages to a high level have certain cognitive advantages,” said Julie Sugarman, a research associate with the Center for Applied Linguistics, a Washington, D.C.-based organization. “They do as well or better than their peers in English-only programs.”

And it seems California is leading the way.…

Filed under: Post-Secondary ESL
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