CSEA, the classified employees, endorsed three candidates who promise to make the Banning USD administration accountable to the students, parents, staff, and citizens of the Banning Unified School District. This is an important election for Banning schools. It can finally ensure that spending cuts start with management's perks, instead of essential staff. Banning has no more bilingual aides, and is slashing library staff hours. Meanwhile, administrators continue to spend freely on attorneys and consultants, as though they worked at Goldman Sachs. They don't. They work for us.
On November 8th, Banning residents can exercise their power to change the school district by electing Alfredo Andrade, Alex Cassadas, and Ray Curtis to the Banning School Board. You can give them the authority to supervise the administration.
Isn't it about time that the Banning School Board did that?
In solidarity with California teachers sitting-in in Sacramento, I sent out the following press release earlier today:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, May 6, 2011
Contact: Campaign Press Office (916) 996-9170 Marcy@WinogradforCongress.com
CAPITOL OCCUPATION: Congressional Candidate & Teacher Endorses Emergency
Actions; Marcy Winograd to Use Campaign Phone Bank to 'Save our Schools'
VENICE - Marcy Winograd, a public high school teacher and congressional
candidate (CA-36) will use her campaign phone bank to support the California Teachers
Association "State of Emergency" week of action, May 9-13, at the State
Capitol and across the state.
I had the opportunity to speak this morning with three California teachers about the budget cuts they've faced. We also discussed the high stakes of the November election and Proposition 24. All three of the teachers to whom I spoke, Mary Rose Ortego, Sergio Martinez and Tyrone Cabell, are working actively to try and restore the terrible budget cuts in our schools.
Mary Rose Ortega, who teaches third grade, summed up the state of affairs. "30,000 teachers have been laid off in the last 3 years", she said. With the budget the way it is, she told me, we can expect thousands more pink slips soon.
The numbers became even more shocking when we discussed the effects on individual classrooms. I learned that class sizes have gone up to 40 in most elementary schools, and resources are incredibly scarce. Teachers are rationing paper, textbooks aren't updated or replaced even when torn, and teacher's aides have had their hours cut so students are getting even less one on one attention.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger received a gift of nine works of art by local school children yesterday. The artwork was created "to save public education" by children and their parents at the Davis farmer's market and third-graders at Dry Creek elementary in Roseville and included a piece titled, "Evil Money-Grubbing Robot Seeking to Destroy Public School."
Twenty students participated in the presentation and asked for the governor's help to get the framed paintings put on display in the Capitol.
There is a path to follow in this series regarding the mess here in South Orange County and the Capistrano Unified School Districts Board of Trustees. The big picture needed to be outlined in one diary, to show how this board was working against the teachers and the bargaining process. It was merely a snapshot, the picture is bigger and it has been going on for years.
The second piece of the puzzle has to do with Education Alliance, a Political Action Committee in Tustin, CA and a number of other political entities hell bent on dismantling public education (And opposing other important political issues such as health care reform and climate change legislation) so that they can privatize and funnel money into charter schools.
"Adequate control of human exposure would be difficult, if not impossible." -CA Scientific Review Committee
This is the time of year many talk about United Farm Workers' founder Cesar Chavez. Cesar was many things, among them he was a strong voice on pesticides.
Cesar Chavez said, "In the old days, miners would carry birds with them to warn against poison gas. Hopefully, the birds would die before the miners. Farm workers are society's canaries. Farm workers-and their children-demonstrate the effects of pesticide poisoning before anyone else...There is no acceptable level of exposure to any chemical that causes cancer. There can be no toleration of any toxic that causes miscarriages, still births, and deformed babies."
John Fensterwald has a great story in the Educated Guess about what the parents in Cupertino are facing for their children. The district is K-8 only, and as the area is pretty wealthy, and fairly progressive, they've been able to pass a couple of parcel taxes for the district. In fact, last year they passed one for $4 million. But, that's not going to be enough:
But now this K-8 Silicon Valley district, home of Apple Computer and some of the highest performing schools in the state, is facing a $9 million deficit for next year. And that's putting in jeopardy many of the programs parents consider essential: small classes, summer school, the GATE program for gifted children, librarians.
*** *** ***
To that end, the Cupertino Educational Endowment Foundation is asking parents to help put an initiative on the November ballot that would lower the threshold for passing a parcel tax from two-thirds to 55 percent to make it easier to pass the next parcel tax. And organizers are asking every family to donate $375 toward a goal of $3 million to keep small classes in grades one to three while saving 105 teachers who've been told they'll otherwise lose their jobs.
Even in a place like Cupertino, where the district has always been able to find a way, there just aren't the answers that there used to be. Sacramento has cut them out at the knees, and they're trying to recover the best they can. Will Cupertino still have decent schools come next year? Probably, but if even the so-called "rich districts" are struggling to make ends meet, what does that say for the districts that are dependent upon the state?
If Meg Whitman wants to talk about too much state spending, how about she actually takes a look at our schools? You know, because hers went to private school, she's not so familiar. And with each cut, with each lost resource, times become harder.
I have a friend who teaches at a public school in San Leandro. It's a working class area these days, and the economy has hit the community pretty hard. Students are coming to school completely without supplies, and the districts simply don't have the money to pay for everything. But, the teachers aren't going to let the kids sit there with no pencil, and they end up footing the bill. While the Right wants to talk about how teachers are so spoiled, the fact is that they aren't exactly making Kingly ransoms. And honestly, I can't think of a profession that deserves every cent they earn more than teachers. But, even with that being said, teachers are being forced into spending hundreds of dollars each semester to provide simple school supplies for their classrooms.
Today, the Committee on Education and Labor considered the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act. Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers and I introduced this bill in December for a simple reason: all children should be safe and protected at school.
Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office told our Committee about a shocking wave of abusive restraint and seclusion in our nation's classrooms. They told us that hundreds of students in this country have been victims of this abuse. In many cases these victims were our smallest and most vulnerable children: children as young as four and five, and many students with disabilities. And in some instances, children died.
We learned that while restraint and seclusion should be considered emergency tactics used as a last resort, far more often these techniques are abused under the guise of discipline or to force compliance. Last year, in California, districts reported more than 14,300 cases of seclusion, restraint and other "emergency" interventions.
With no federal laws on the books restricting restraint and seclusion in schools, state laws read like the Wild West. Many states have no regulations whatsoever.
Luis Medellin and his three little sisters, aged 5, 9 and 12, live in the middle of an orange grove in Lindsay, CA--a small farming town in the Central Valley. During the growing season, Luis and his sisters are awakened several times a week by the sickly smell of nighttime pesticide spraying. What follows is worse: searing headaches, nausea, vomiting.
The Medellin family's story is not unique. From apple orchards in Washington to potato fields in Florida, drifting poisonous pesticides plague the people who live nearby--posing a particular risk to the young children of the nation's farm workers, many of whom live in industry housing at the field's edge.
This situation also often exists in schools in agricultural areas where it's not uncommon to have a school next to a field.
As you've probably noticed by my posts this year, I'm not a fan of Arne Duncan. Obama's Education Secretary has not only continued most of Bush's education agenda, but he has upped the ante by using $4 billion in "Race to the Top" funds to force states to adopt unproven and right-wing methods of teacher assessment. Earlier this year California legislators dutifully pushed through part of Duncan's shock doctrine reforms that would never have been approved under different conditions; the Assembly is currently debating other ways to bring CA into compliance with the funding requirements.
What's most insane about this whole exercise is that California isn't guaranteed any Race to the Top money at all - instead we have to compete for it:
States will be judged on a 500-point scale that will measure their plans to enact a variety of reforms, including implementing data systems, turning around low-performing schools and paying effective teachers and administrators more.
States now have 60 days to apply for federal funding, which puts more pressure on California Assembly members, who are currently in a special legislative session focused on education. The deadline to apply for the first round of federal dollars is in mid-January....
Education Department officials also issued an estimate, based on school-age population, of how much each state would receive if it were awarded a grant. Four large states, including California, could get $350 million to $700 million.
State officials had hoped California would be eligible for up to $1 billion.
So, just to be clear, Duncan is using the Race to the Top funds as bait to force all 50 states to adopt his crazy reforms designed to even further emphasize testing, link teacher pay and performance to those tests (regardless of the other qualifications and achievements of those teachers) - all without any guarantee that states will get a dime for their trouble.
California ought to call BS on Duncan's Race to the Bottom. We should drop out of the contest for these funds, as they come at too high a cost - undermining our schools' ability to properly teach our children for a shot at a small amount of one-time funds. It's like taking the mortgage payment and buying lotto tickets with it.
Our schools are in serious trouble, thanks to $10 billion in unacceptable cuts made during the 2009 budget deals. Duncan's bait money won't make much of a dent in rehiring teachers or improving educational equality. Since the Obama Administration has gone AWOL on the education crisis, California is going to have to seize on public support for schools funding and resolve this problem on our own. We certainly should go no further in implementing Duncan's reforms.
I mentioned the move by the La Mesa/Spring Valley school district to delay the President's speech to their students. I said then, and I believe more today, that we need to think about how treat each other in political discourse. On occasion, there can be a right and a wrong besides a right and a left.
I just spoke to [school board member] Halgren. She explained that she hadn't understood that the group experience -- not the exact content of the speech itself -- was part of what made the event important. Two teachers who talked with her about it convinced her that it should have been a collective experience. "There are certain things that you do in life that bring us together as a community and as a nation," she said.
I also got an e-mail from another board member, Bob Duff. He wrote:
After seeing the President's speech, I now believe the message should have been viewed live and I regret I was responsible for the delay. All should had the opportunity to have seen it live. For this I truly apologize.
Too bad you don't normally get do-overs for your moments of partisan inanity. The real losers here were the students of the district.
With all the furor over President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren gradually dying down around the country, it's still raging in La Mesa:
Trustees of the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District met in a special session on Labor Day and voted to prohibit their schools from showing President Barack Obama's speech Tuesday to district students.
The address, which the president delivered at Wakefield High School in Washington, D.C., was televised at schools across the country. (SD U-T 9/9/9)
If you are interested in their litany of excuses, you can read the whole article. My favorites were, "it will take too long for the students to walk to the cafeteria" and "20 minutes was too long." Instead of simply allowing the students of the district to watch the speech along with the rest of the nation, the district apparently plans to "lesson plan" around it...ie, shelve it for a while until people forget about it.
Yet, this is part of something bigger. It says something quite disturbing about where the Right is taking the nation. Included in that is the right-wing media. For example, peep this article at the OC Register. Not only does the Register write an article about a completely unscientific "poll" but it tries to infer that somehow 26% of OC residents would support a white supremacist party. Now, I realize that there are some crazy people in this state, but I can't believe the numbers are really that high.
I suppose there was always some level of guttural discourse about politics, it's basic to the game. However, if we are to really address the problems of the 21st Century, we have to think about the issues, and talk about them, like adults. Enough with the scare tactics and race baiting already.
To my fellow Californians who are thinking of taking a sign with a Hitler mustache on Obama, some unsolicited advice. Take a deep breath. Think about whether you really want to compare your president to a man who killed millions of people for no reason other than he didn't like them. Godwin's Law needn't always be true.
Here at Calitics there is an interesting diary from 'zeroh8' asking "Why Are We Spending So Much More?" zeroh8 looked at the changes over the last ten years in how the state spends money. The result, according to the diary, is a per-capita increase of $1088 as follows:
California Government Department 2007-08 less 1997-98 Per Capita Spending
Criminal Justice $185 General Government $14 Health $265 Higher
Education $109 K-12 Education $399 Resources & Environmental
Protection $27 Social Services $59 Transportation $30 Total $1,088
Robert Cruikshank commented that the appearance of an education spending increase is an illusion, (sadly California still ranks 47th in education spending-per-pupil)
My sister got her layoff notice yesterday. After teaching 5th grade for three years in an Orange County school district, and having achieved "permanent" status, she was told her services will no longer be needed as of the end of the school year. By all accounts her students' parents loved her, and as she told me last night, "I don't know what else I would do, teaching is all I've ever wanted to do." And that's true, ever since she taught our cousin what a fork was. Teaching is the family business, and now, she's been told her dreams are no longer possible because California has stopped caring about schools.
She is not alone in watching her hopes and dreams vanish. Over 20,000 of her fellow teachers have been pink slipped, with LA Unified alone firing 9,000 teachers. Uncounted numbers of support staff - the people who answer the phones, who drive the buses, who enable teachers to focus on their jobs, are getting laid off as well. Nobody in Sacramento or the offices of the Zombie Death Cult have been able to explain how this is going to help our state survive economic crisis.
The mass layoffs are an act so vile and insane that it almost defies description. Teachers should be the last people in society laid off, before almost everyone else but the technicians at the water treatment plant. To engage in a mass firing of teachers in the midst of a Depression is like a man stranded in the desert poking out his eyes with a stick because the sun is too bright. Sure, it might help temporarily, but eventually you're going to want to see where you're going, and wish you'd never acted so rashly back there on the dune.
Here at Calitics we have repeatedly explained why these layoffs are happening - a conservative veto (the 2/3rds rule) enables Republicans to starve government of revenue and then force crippling cuts while Democrats fail to craft a coherent response. Our knowledge of those underlying causes should not blind us to the insanity of these layoffs.
These pink slips also make a mockery of President Obama's education plans, which revolve around trying to attract new teachers to the profession:
And so today, I am calling on a new generation of Americans to step forward and serve our country in our classrooms. If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make the most of your talents and dedication; if you want to make your mark with a legacy that will endure - join the teaching profession. America needs you.
Such words ring hollow here in California, where those who already have stepped forward to make the most of their talents and to make a difference in the life of our nation have discovered that the legacy that will endure is a pink slip telling them "sorry, we don't really want you after all."
I don't entirely understand why talk of making teachers work harder, making their profesion more competitive, and making their job secure is so common in America. We don't talk about making the lives of other people who work in public service, such as soldiers and first responders--or even health care workers--in such a foreboding way. If, as a nation, we actually want to solve our teacher shortage, part of that is going to mean dropping our constant national threats to make teachers lives more difficult. That is just a really, really bad way to recruit and retain teachers.
Obama's efforts to attract and retain the good teachers is simply impossible and unrealistic when those teachers who, like my sister and her 20,000 colleagues, have been given glowing reviews from administrators and parents alike and yet still find themselves turned away from the career they love.
His plans also suggest he is too wound up in what education writer Stanley Fish called the neoliberalization of education - the belief that education reform involves introducing market forces into schools, even though market forces prioritize money and denigrate other values such as good teaching, care for students, and building communities.
If Barack Obama wants to be serious about education reform, he needs to realize that you must first stop the bleeding before you can do anything else. The US Senate's decision to gut the state stabilization funds is behind the mass layoffs here in California. That act will neutralized the effect of the stimulus in California and cause lasting damage to a generation of young people whose education has been sacrificed to appease Republicans in Sacramento and the US Senate.
Before Obama focuses on how to fire bad teachers, he needs to first ensure that we retain the good ones. If teaching becomes seen as a profession where quality work brings no job security, then reforms are doomed from the outset.
89 percent would go to K-12 schools, and the rest to community colleges.
The measure would restrict use of the revenue to specific purposes that include class size reduction, funding art, music and vocation education courses, and salaries for teachers and other school employees.
The money couldn't be used for administrative costs, and legislators and the governor couldn't touch the revenue. The money would be allocated to school districts based on their average daily student attendance.
CTA's decision to move ahead with the plan is likely a recognition that the current budget mess is not going to be resolved without catastrophic cuts to schools. But is this the right move?
Sales taxes are often described as "regressive" taxes since they hit the poor harder than the rich. Over the last few decades California has relied more and more on the sales tax to fund services. As a result the lowest 20% pay more taxes than the highest 20% of income earners in California.
And yet sales taxes are more progressive than the alternative, which are cuts to schools that will hurt working Californians far more than a sales tax. Teachers help support working families and the small businesses that depend on their spending. For centuries - literally - education has been understood to be a key route toward economic security and prosperity for working people. Without access to a quality education, that route is closed. Given that situation a sales tax is more affordable and valuable to the lower 20% than cuts.
When assessing taxes and spending this simple equation needs to be kept in mind:
Income and property taxes > sales taxes > service cuts
That raises the question of why CTA proposes a new sales tax, instead of raising income taxes on the upper incomes and restore progressivity to California taxation. This could be as simple as restoring the tax brackets of 1992-98 that helped fuel broad economic growth.
It's unclear why CTA chose not to go this route. The personal income tax is a volatile tax, but so is the sales tax, especially in an era when Americans are spending less and saving more.
Still, even a sales tax is better than education cuts and mass layoffs of teachers. As someone who hopes to start a family of his own in the coming years, I'd like to know that I can send my kids to a decent public school like I enjoyed as recently as the mid-1990s.
I'll vote for this if it makes it to the ballot - and I suspect Californians will too. As we saw in November 2008, Californians are actually quite willing to tax themselves to fund specific projects, notably including mass transit. If thousands of teachers receive layoff notices and schools are slated for closure this spring, it seems highly likely to me that the CTA proposal will pass.
Some may criticize ballot box budgeting - but it is a byproduct, often necessary, of a legislative process that has been hopelessly broken by the 2/3 rule.
California Republicans finally, finally submitted what they claim is a plan to attack the budget deficits, detailing specifics of the cuts they are demanding. The plan they submittedonly cuts the deficit in half, thereby admitting (but not admitting) the urgent need to raise taxes to cover the other half of the deficit.
The Republican plan guts public schools, community colleges, Medi-Cal, transit, mental health and many other programs. And yet it still leaves half of the deficit in place. So it isn't really a "plan" at all. It is just one more extremist demand that we gut public schools.
Thank God we have Jeff Denham in the State Senate. Without him California might have already succumbed to the Communist menace that seeks to overthrow our great American way of life by subverting our children and our schools in the service of...
Oh? What's that you say? The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago and the Cold War has been over for just as long? Huh. That's odd. Because even though the State Senate passed Alan Lowenthal's bill to remove membership in the Communist Party as a firing offense for public employees, Denham has denounced the bill as giving succor to our numerous Communist enemies around the world:
Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Atwater, warned "the Communist Party is not a dead organization ... and (is) actively repressing human beings in Cuba and China in brutal ways.
"The state has every right to hold school employees accountable for their political standing, especially if that employee belongs to an organization that favors the violent overthrow of the government," Denham said during the debate on the bill.
Denham said that it's also "reasonable that use of public school property should be limited to groups who support our democracy and do not advocate the overthrow of government by force, violence or other possible means."
I wonder if Denham got the memo that the Cold War is over - or are Republicans really so desperate that they have to turn to red baiting to try and improve their political fortunes?
Or perhaps the Yacht Party believes that only their efforts to overthrow government, by starving it of the revenues necessary to provide the basic services that keep a modern society functioning, is legitimate?
At least the recall is still on the ballot in the 12th district, and voters can decide for themselves whether they want to be represented by someone whose politics are 50 years out of date, or by someone who actually understands the present-day needs of his constituents instead of spending his time chasing after the Red Menace.
Here in the dog days of April, as the state awaits the governor's May Revise, frustration seems to be setting in over the budget. The real political battles will begin in earnest after the May Revise, but the jockeying for position has been going on for some time, including in the state's media. Unsurprisingly, the media wants to spin the budget crisis as a failure of all Sacramento politicians, when in fact the current impasse is the responsibility of one group alone: the Republicans.
As an article in today's Sac Bee would have us believe, there is "scant support for budget changes." But a deeper look shows that while Democrats have already proposed budget fixes, such as closing the yacht loophole and creating an oil severance tax (as exists in nearly every other state), it is the Republicans alone that have blocked meaningful budget action.
And why have they done so? Republicans want us to believe that any revenue solution is economically damaging:
However, Sen. Dave Cogdill of Modesto, the GOP's incoming leader, said the state should not take away credits at a time when the economy is struggling.
Other ideas that have yet to gain traction would raise income taxes on high-wage earners or amend Proposition 13 to assess businesses in the same way as residential property. The latter, known as "split-roll" property tax, would require that commercial and industrial properties be reassessed more regularly, bringing the state an estimated $3 billion annually.
Cogdill dismissed all as non-starters.
"We should help the general fund by stimulating the economy and be a more beneficial partner with industry, rather than stifling them," Cogdill said.
But whose economy is stimulated by revenue cuts? Who actually sees this so-called economic growth? And who suffers from the spending cuts that are forced by the revenue cuts? A closer look at the overall situation shows that the Republicans' claims are nonsense. Tax cuts provide economic growth for a wealthy few, but cause economic distress for pretty much everyone else - especially when those tax cuts come at the expense of education. More below.
Conservative leader and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich writes about the California court ruling that children - even home-schooled children - must be educated by credentialed teachers, saying it is an example of "Judicial Supremacy." In his article he quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial calling the ruling a "strange new chapter" in the "annals of judicial imperialism." Later in the piece he writes,
The decision represents yet another case of a special interest -- in this case, the education unions and bureaucracy -- using the courts to get what they can't get through the popular vote.
This is yet another example of judicial supremacy: Rule by an out-of-control judiciary rather than the will of the people. It joins court rulings such as the removal of "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance on a long list of usurpations of the freedom and self-determination of the American people.
Lets take a moment to examine what Gingrich is really complaining about here.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger received a gift of nine works of art by local school children yesterday. The artwork was created "to save public education" by children and their parents at the Davis farmer's market and third-graders at Dry Creek elementary in Roseville and included a piece titled, "Evil Money-Grubbing Robot Seeking to Destroy Public School."
