WestchesterParents

While I try to stay as neutral as possible on WestchesterParents there are times when I have to call people out when they offer policy proposals that fly in the face in reality.  Particularly in the case of education which I often write about and especially when it comes from a candidate for governor who is proposing what they will do to education over the next four years. This is one of those times. 

California Gov Candidate Brown Education today came out with a campaign press release aimed at education that is frankly dishonest and his proposals are written as if he were closeted away in a monastery for the last twenty years. You can find his plan here:

www.jerrybrown.org/sites/default/files/Education%20Plan.pdf

In his plan he makes a number of claims that I’ll list below. Each one of them I follow up with data that disproves the claim.

Claim 1 – “Despite the fact that many students (at Oakland Military, a school Jerry Brown claims to have started in Oakland as Mayor) come from low income families (80% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunches), this year 25% of our graduates were accepted to the University of California system. In prior years, graduates have been admitted to such prestigious schools as West Point and Yale.”

It wasn’t until the 2004/05 that year the Oakland Military Charter began reporting enrollment data to the California Department of Education (CDE) and only two full years of enrollment data is available to report.

Despite Browns claim that 25% of grads were accepted into the UC system, the raw numbers paint an entirely different picture that is easily hidden behind ‘percentages.’

The first full graduating class that matriculated through grades 9-12 at Oakland Military was the class of 2008 just two years ago. This class reported to the CDE a 43.68 percent drop in enrollment from 87 freshman that began 2004 to 49 seniors that reported back in 2007.

The class of 2009 saw a larger drop with 81 freshman enrolled in 2005 and saw only 42 students report in their senior year witch represented a 48.15% loss of enrollment.

While data from two graduating classes alone are hardly enough to hang your accolades on, a 48% drop in enrollment of which 25% (10 students) went on to a UC or UCS school is terrible.

Claim 2 – “I also started the Oakland School for the Arts, which is devoted to intensive pre-professional training in the arts within a college-preparatory curriculum. The school, going into its 9th year, is audition based and also serves 600 students from 6th through 12th grade.”

Oakland Arts began reporting enrollment to the CDE back in 2002 and its first class to matriculate from 9th to 12th was the class of 2006. This class began with 102 freshman and ended up with only 61 seniors, a 40 percent loss. The most recent class of 2009 began with 88 freshman students and saw only 45 students reporting for the senior year for a 49 percent loss. Just as disconcerting is the drop in freshman students reporting in 2006, 2007 and 2008 where the number of incoming students fell to 58, 26 and 77 students.

Claim 3 – “Both schools charge no tuition and are among the top-performing schools in Oakland.”

Charters by state law cannot charge tuition. They are public schools. As for top-performing, see claims 1 & 2 and judge for yourself how well they perform.

Claim 4 – “From my experience in starting and running these schools, I have gained first-hand experience in how difficult it is to enable all students to be ready for college and careers. Student outcomes are a complex interaction of student characteristics, teacher competence, instructional materials, and parental support. Any reforms and state educational policies must take into account this complexity and refrain from oversimplifying the problems and solutions.”

Brown has neither first hand experience nor any solution to enable “all students to be ready for college and careers” and his managing the schools above aptly point that out.

After making these claims Jerry Brown then goes on to state what he will do but his proposals are nothing new. His proposals follow the same path that has followed since the 1990′s and will simply make things worse.

Brown begins by saying he will “Establish(ed) Minimum Requirements for High School Graduates.” However the State of California already has minimum requirements in place. In fact in 1999 California had raised the bar and instituted a more rigorous college preparation curriculum “for all students.” This however has had the unintended consequence of exponentially raising the drop out rate and placed diplomas well out of reach for many students throughout the state.

Brown goes on to say that he will “Significantly increased investment in K-12 and Higher Education” but education today has already consumed 40 percent of the California budget.

Brown also proposes to raise the graduation requirement even further than it is today. Considering that it is the math portion of the state curriculum and CAHSE that has proven to be so difficult to pass, his proposal to and another year of math will most assuredly raise the dropout rate to well over 40 percent.

Most of Browns other proposals are related to funding as if to explain that California’s problems with its education system have to do with under funding. Funding is not the problem, the problem is making education relevant to California’s students.

Note to our readers: To date I have not yet seen candidate Meg Whitman’s education plan if she has submitted one. When she does submit one I’ll comment on it as well.

Tags: GENERAL, LOCAL, OUR SCHOOLS, POLITICS, QUALITY OF LIFE, RAISING CHILDREN, STATE // Add Comment »

Jonathan Coffin started out with a borrowed Sony digital camera that used 3.5″ diskettes (remember those?) for storing images and over the last four years he has compiled the most comprehensive catalog of birds, bugs, mammals, lizards, and plants in the Ballona area.

Since then, Coffin has moved on to better devices to capture over 2,500 exquisite images of local species few of us knew existed in the area. His collection of pictures at  www.flickr.com/photos/stonebird/ is truely a local treasure and continues to grow by the month.

Among the wildlife that he has digitally captured are the Burrowing Owl, Pacific Chorus Frogs, the majestic Great Egrets, the rare El Segundo Blue Butterfly and Least Bells Vireo and Belding’s Savannah Sparrow, the elusive Gray and Red Foxes, scalely creatures such as the lizard as well as caterpillars, beatles, velvet ants and both rare and common flowers such as the Orcutt’s Yellow Pincushion and the California Poppy.

Coffin’s images on Flickr capture an amazing quality that brings out the exquisite and unique beauty of his subject as they carry on their daily lives. Some of his subjects seem to pose for him. The Burrowing Owls are my favorites because they seem to look right into you.

The Stonebird Ballona collection continues to grow and his catalog has also begun to expand south towards the El Segundo Dunes and north into Marina del Rey, Venice and Mar Vista.

Stonebird is a treat that shouldn’t be missed.

Tags: GENERAL, OUR ENVIRONMENT // Add Comment »

A spirited defense of Assemblyman Steve Bradford’s (D) Limousine Legislation by Jenny M. appeared in our comments section in Part 1 but it was her initial comment on the state of education (the main point of the article) that was worth a column in itself. Part 2….

(Jenny M.) Unfortunately you cannot legislate students to stay in school. If there was a viable piece of legislation that would make all students graduate high school there is a good chance that would have flown through the legislature by now.

Jenny M is wrong on both counts. It was the legislature and the state board of education that forced students out of school by changing the curriculum. California students once had multiple paths towards a diploma but in 1997-98 that was eliminated reducing it to one single path. The argument then was that elementary and secondary schools should be preparing all students for college and so the curriculum was changed. Vocational paths to a diploma were eliminated and replaced it with two years of college preparatory math. In essence, they legislated a quarter of a million students out of a diploma.

From the California Dropout Research Project:

… students need a wide variety of skills to be successful in college and in the workplace. These skills include both traditional academic skills, but also applied, vocational skills, as well as so-called “soft skills,” such as punctuality, perseverance, and the social skills needed to work in groups. In fact, one recent study found that improvements in a range of non-academic skills were more valuable than improvements in math achievement for increasing chances for enrolling in and completing postsecondary programs, and for increasing earnings eight years after high school.

If California wants to truly prepare its students for life beyond high school, it should examine a full range of academic and non-academic skills and incorporate them in the state’s high school graduation requirements and accountability system so that schools and students are encouraged and recognized for acquiring them.

Finally, the state should consider more options for students to meet the graduation requirements. An increasing number of states have pursued the idea of multiple pathways for students to meet high school graduation requirements, such as through career and technical education (CTE) courses.

There could be a viable piece of legislation that would dramatically turn the dropout rate around and that would be a bill to eliminate the college preparatory math requirement (Algebra 1) and again offer vocational paths to a diploma. Students planning to go on to state universities would still need college preparatory math but those who choose a vocational career or a longer path to a college degree could still earn a diploma.

With multiple paths in front of them more students would be finishing high school, more students would be passing CAHSE and more high school grads would be going on to postsecondary programs such community colleges and state universities. More students would be applying for jobs with a diploma in hand. With multiple paths we could reduce spending on expensive intervention programs that are clearly failing and redirect that money to more meaningful academic offerings.

Today’s legislators are lock-step into group think and Bradford has so far fits neatly into that box. They are unable to seek solutions that put the California’s student’s interests first. Education unfortunately has steered perpendicularly to its stated purpose and goals and instead it has become a jobs program for state employees.

By the end of Steve Bradford’s first year in office, another 80,000 students in California will have dropped out. Students pushed out because the only other path available to them was dropping out.

Tags: LOCAL, OUR SCHOOLS, POLITICS, QUALITY OF LIFE, RAISING CHILDREN, STATE // Add Comment »

30  to 60 percent of the high school students in Bradford’s assembly district are dropping out and one of his first pieces of legislation is AB 2572 to regulate limousines going in and out of the airport????  Where are his priorities?

Your vote has value. What do you value most?

Tags: LAX - AIRPORT, LOCAL, OUR SCHOOLS, POLITICS, QUALITY OF LIFE, STATE, WESTCHESTER HS // 1 Comment »

“Voters will be asked to approve a new $11.4 billion water bond that promises to increase develop more reliable water supplies and increase local water supplies. (Los Angeles Times 6/20/2010)”

Time for a Sanity check…

Going back to 1996 there have been 6 voter approved bond measures amounting to $16.6 BILLION that promised to resolve future water shortages. None of them followed through on the campaign promises they made to voters.

So today we find ourselves in one of the most serious shortages since 1987 and perhaps since William Mullolland when he opened the gates of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. 

The six water bonds to-date have not resulted in reliable supplies as promised but instead have contributed to the states fiscal crisis and overdrawn water so severely that courts had to intercede and impose restrictions to stop permanent environmental losses.

All of this suggests that the bonds don’t work and do nothing to address the root cause of the water shortage. 

Water bonds have instead become an endless cycle of appeals promising reliability to voters for decades to come that are followed by spending billions on projects to improve water conveyance and storage only to find later that we are further behind and again needing another bond for a new infusion cash.

Like the other bonds before it, Prop 18 to will have zero chance of resolving the state’s water reliability problems. The capital projects these bonds pay for such as new underground storage, surface storage, or improved conveyance and water conservation programs stand no chance of providing reliable water supplies to urban centers and farms as long as there are no mechanisms to throttle back on housing production when water supplies are chronically short.

Only changes in the states housing and water policies can live up to the promises we see carted out every election time. The answer is perhaps a new element to CEQA and changing state law so that Urban Water Management Plans (UWMP) cannot be cited by city planning agencies and developers as evidence of available water.

Here is a list of those state water measures that were approved and the recycled claims and promises they made to us to gain voter approval:

1996 – Voters approved Proposition 204, the “Safe Clean Reliable Water Supply Act,” a $995 million bond that promised to “increase water supplies.” “…drinking water is something most of us take for granted,” proponents wrote in the ballot pamphlet that year. “But the truth is, unless we act now, California’s residents, businesses and farms face a future of chronic water shortages and potentially unsafe supplies.”

2000 – Voters approved Proposition 12, the “Safe Neighborhood Parks, Clean Water, Clean Air and Coastal Protection Bond Act of 2000” borrowed $2.1 billion based on proponent’s assurances that “This measure is vital because it protects the lands that give us clean water.”

2000 – Voters passed Proposition 13, the “Safe Drinking Water, Clean Water, Watershed Protection and Flood Protection Bond Act,” for an additional $1.97 billion of bonds after proponents warned them (in language almost identical to the arguments for Prop. 204) that “We can’t take our drinking water for granted. Water officials predict major shortages and say existing programs won’t fix the problem.”

2002 – Voters approved Proposition 40, the “California Clean Water, Clean Air, Safe Neighborhood Parks and Coastal Protection Act of 2002” that borrowed $2.6 billion. Proponents promised (in words exactly the same as the empty promise they made in Proposition 12): “This measure is vital because it protects the lands that give us clean water.”

2003 – Voters authorized $3.44 billion of water bonds by passing Proposition 50, “The Water Security, Clean Drinking Water, Coastal and Beach Protection Act of 2002.” Supporters promised: “California’s population is expected to nearly double in the next forty years. Proposition 50 funds state and local water system improvements needed to keep up with population growth by providing new water supplies and supporting water conservation programs.”

2006 – Voters approved Proposition 84 to authorize a $5.4 billion bond. The “Safe Drinking Water, Water Quality and Supply, Flood Control, River and Coastal Protection Bond Act Of 2006. Supporters promised: “Prop. 84 will increase the reliability of California’s water supply.”

Proposition 18, the so-called “Safe, Clean and Reliable Drinking Water Supply Act of 2010″ once again recycles old promises that previous water bonds failed to meet including “develop(ing) more reliable water supplies”, “Clean up drinking water sources”, “Protect & restore the environment”, “Increase local water supplies”, and “Enhance conservation“.

Prop 18 promises only two things… 1) It promises to more than double the past obligations that the previous 6 bonds saddled Californians with and 2) It promises that another bond will be on the ballot in two to four years after this one fails to meet it promises.

Tags: GENERAL, WATER // Add Comment »

“This schools tax is a bargain” writes LA Times columnist Steve Lopez on Measure E. “For just $8.33 per household a month, voters could save hundreds of L.A. Unified teachers’ jobs and help preserve arts education in elementary schools”

This familiar refrain has been used over and over again on previous LAUSD ballot measures:

In 1997 we were told “for just $5.00 a month…” when Prop BB was placed on the ballot.
In 2002 we had Measure K and again they said “for just $5.00 a month…!”
In 2004, when Measure R popped up on the ballot, again they said “for just $5.00 a month…”
Then in 2006, Measure Y showed up on the ballot and like the others before, it to was characterized as  “for just $5.00 a month…”

All of these measures were approved by voters.

Before anyone thinks hey… what’s $20 a month?  The fine print in each of these bonds was that it was $5.00 for each $100,000 of assessed value. Minor detail right?

Of course Measure E is a “parcel tax”. Just a flat $100 dollars a year or $8.33 like Mr. Lopez says but let’s take a look at what we are already adding it to on your property tax bill.

Currently property owners are paying .00151809 for UNIFIED SCHOOLS on their property tax bills so if their property is valued at $600,000 today, that homeowner is on the hook for $910 this year! If your home is assessed for more or less so will the tax be.

To give you some historical context on that piece of property, in 2008 the tax on that value was $748. In 2007 it was $740 and in 2006 it was $640. In 2002 is was $221 and before the LAUSD began squeezing us for 5 bucks at every chance they can, a $600,000 home’s bond indebtedness was a mere $20 in 1996.

So with this parcel tax the cost is really $910 + $100 for that homeowner and that’s far higher than the $8.33 that Mr. Lopez suggests we should approve. 

$1,010 may be pocket change for a prominent ink stained scribe like Mr. Lopez but to most other homeowners this is serious money that is layered on top of the 1% property tax itself. 40% which goes to schools already. Then there is also the monthly mortgage to pay, the rising LADWP water and power bills, trash bills, mouths to feed, kids clothes to buy, etc.

And to add insult to the homeowners injury, that resident living in the 500 unit apartment complex down the street will pay just 20 cents for this parcel tax!!!

Vote NO on Measure E

Tags: GENERAL, MANAGING GROWTH, QUALITY OF LIFE // 3 Comments »

No, L.A. should NOT grandfather in existing medical marijuana dispensaries. In fact, marijuana should not be dispensed unless it is prescribed by licensed professional doctors, dispensed in a licensed pharmacy by licensed professional pharmacists.

Ref: Daily News article.

Tags: GENERAL // Add Comment »

Not enough money for schools.
Not enough money for police, or librarians or park staff.
Not enough money for street and sidewalk repairs.
L.A.’s residents are seeing important services being cut back.
The city is hundreds of millions of dollars behind, soon to be billions and the city employees are facing layoffs and dozens of furlough days in their futures.

This month the neighborhood council I sat on voted to advise the council office and the Zoning administrator that they would like another 135 apartment units at Playa Manchester. These units sit next to the 535 units at Playa del Oro they approved back in 2000 here in Westchester. Last year they approved over 2000 units for Phase II of Playa Vista along with another 500+ units at the Hughes Center. 

There is a connection here that’s apparently it’s too far under the radar for most decision makers (including neighborhood council members) to recognize and that is the fact that these high density multi-story apartment units are growing in numbers at a rate of 2 to 3 times that of single-family units and they pay only $600 to $1300 per unit in annual property taxes compared to SFU’s that are billed ten times that amount. Is it any wonder to the mayor, the city council and this neighborhood council why the city is broke??  The discounted property income to the city that high density, vertically built mixed  housing generate simply isn’t enough to cover of public services needed for the number of residents they add to the city. 

For example, it costs taxpayers over $9000 annually just to pay for a single student’s public education in the LAUSD. At $900 per commercial housing unit it takes 10 units to pay for a single child.  On the otherhand it only takes 2 single family homes to pay for the same student.

Pile on top of that the hundreds of millions of dollars that are needed for police, fire, libraries, parks, pot hole repairs, street surfacing, refuse pickup, payrolls for council members and their staff, planning department staff, building and safety, Department of Transportation staff, neighborhood council budgets… and need I say ‘pensions’ (i.e. the hidden payroll) of retiring government employees?  By now it should be clear, for every unit built in a multi-unit project the city falls farther and farther behind.

The folks that are getting rich are the operators and developers of these increasingly large, increasingly dense and ever taller housing complexes that are invading cities everywhere in the Southern California region but mostly here in Los Angeles.

Even when the economy turns itself around there should be no doubt that our city will continue to fall farther in arrears since property tax receipts are no longer driven by the properties, but instead slowed by housing units which are growing at record rates.

Tags: GENERAL, MANAGING GROWTH, QUALITY OF LIFE // 2 Comments »

On Tuesday April 6th, LAUSD school board members Steve Zimmer and Tamar Galatzan will be proposing a compromise resolution to the school board to allow students already permiting out into neighboring school districts to remain there until they graduate.  The meeting will be held at 1PM at 333 S. Beaudry Ave., Board Rm on 1st Floor, Los Angeles 90017

I hope that you can all be there to express to the school board that education opportunities for students must trump the districts desire to handcuff them into seats of poorly performing schools in an effort to grab for more school dollars.   

Regardless of how the school board vote goes however, there are going to be a huge number of families that will have the door to a quality education shut closed on them unless the board amends the resolution to allow all students intra-districts permits to any districts that have room for them. Short of that, we need to look ahead and start lobbying state representatives to promote legislation that promises real choice in schools and even file law suits if they fail to.

So far state and federal “school choice” legislation has been very limited in scope and have provided very little real opportunity for us.

For instance, Senate bill SBX5_4 which we all hear about is limited to 1000 lowest performing schools and no district may have more than 10% of its schools on the list.  In a district with 587 schools, only 59 of LAUSD’s can be on the list and those will be spread out over elementaries, middle and high schools. 56 of LAUSD’s high schools alone are PI schools. Clearly SBX5_4 like other legislation before it falls far short of choice.

If there has been one benefit handed to us since Cortines ill-advised policy announcement, it has made us realize just how precarious our rights to school choice and quality education really is and in turn has provided us an opportunity to rally thousands of parents and students together at Stop LAUSD From Denying Permits For Inter-District Student Transfers!!  It took just one guy (Cortines) and a memo to the school board to take away our opportunities to quality education. It will take a thousand angry mom’s, dad’s and students to get it back.

We must take advantage of this opportunity and demand that our legislators write meaningful school choice legislation for all.

Tags: OUR SCHOOLS // 15 Comments »

LAUSD TO DENY QUALITY EDUCATION TO STUDENTS.

In a press release announced today, [Daily Breeze story] LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines pulled the trigger on intra-district transfers for families seeking quality schools.  No new out of district permits and students on existing permits will have them denied next year. [See Cortines new transfer policy]

Make no mistake about it, this is all about money. Your child’s education takes a back seat to LAUSD’s money woes.

“Just about every school district in the Los Angeles area is experiencing massive budget deficits but ours is the largest at $640 million,” said Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines.

Clearly Ramon Cortines best days are behind him. In his first tenure as LAUSD superintendent he bucked heads with the establishment setting up mini-districts in an effort to decentralize the top heavy districts and bring more autonomy to local schools.  For many of us at that time he was a hero. But we were soon disappointed when he walked away from this interim job before he finished the job of reforming the district.  

An education reformer? Not anymore. Upon his return, Cortines has not only inherited the problems left by his predecessors Roy Romer and David Brewer, Cortines has become an integral part of the problem. Under Cortines supervision, the school district has amassed a $640 million debt,  seen its dropout rates climb hover around 50% and graduation rates fall below 40%. Now he’s ready to throw a tiny segment of the districts student population representing just over 1%, under the bus by forcing them to leave schools that are better managed and offer far more opportunities than their home district. Force them to enroll in schools that have been targeted by the state as having persistently failed to meet state standards.

“It is time to bring our students home to LAUSD where we still have plenty of excellent schools for them to attend and we have great teachers to instruct them.” – Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines

Still have plenty of excellent schools? 

This is Ramon Cortines world view of excellent schools:

• 359 of the districts k-12 schools have persistently failed to meet the states academic targets for multiple years. Up from 292 schools in 2008.  These Title I schools are designated as “PI” schools and are on the states watch list.
• 56 of his 71 high schools (78%) are “PI” schools and are on the states watch list.
• Another 11 schools (14%) have persistently failed to meet AYP but are not targeted (yet) because they are not Title I schools.
• Only 8 of Cortines 76 high schools are in the upper 50th percentile and 6 of those are in the San Fernando Valley.  Only four have earned a state ranking of 7 and above.
• The entire school district is in year 3 as a “PI” district having failed to repeatedly meet state targets. It enters the “corrective action” phase where the California Department of Education must take more aggressive action to turn the district around including abolishing or restructuring the district.
• An average district dropout rate of  49.75%
• 422,654 students in the district are enrolled in “PI” schools and are eligible to transfer to non-PI schools. Up from 364,027 in 2007/08.
• The total number of “PI” schools in the district has increased from 313 to 359 between 2008 and 2009.

Ramon Cortines school district is financially broke.  $640 million broke, so he’s looking under the sofa for loose dimes and quarters.  It’s highly doubtful he will find enough coins to benefit a district that is in a downward spiral and losing enrollment to charter schools. What he will do is turn kids and their families lives upside down. 

Because there are so few schools above the 50th percentile, students that find themselves having school choice taken away from them will soon find letters like this in their mail boxes after they enroll in their “new and improved” school advising them that it has not met the states AYP and they have the option to be bused to a non-PI school, if they can find space for them. 

If they do find a seat at a non-PI school it will likely be a long bus ride paid for by the district to a  distant community served by the LAUSD, to a school that will be only half as good as the school in the district that once welcomed them.

Simply stated, Cortines does not have enough seats in quality high schools available to him. And what few seats that are available should be going to the students already trapped in his under performing schools.

Tags: GENERAL, OUR SCHOOLS // 9 Comments »