The CTA and CFT would only accept this measure promoting fiscal responsibility and prudence if it included a provision making it more difficult for school districts to act in a fiscally responsible and prudent way! Here’s the LAO’s description:

If this proposition passes, a new state law would go into effect that sets a maximum amount of reserves that school districts could keep at the local level. … For most school districts, the maximum amount of local reserves under this new law would be between 3 percent and 10 percent of their annual budget, depending on their size. … Unlike the constitutional changes that would go into effect if Proposition 2 passes, this new law on local school district reserves could be changed in the future by the Legislature (without a vote of the people).

How hilarious. The CTA and CFT go along with state fiscal reform on the condition that local school districts be handcuffed on their own finances, freeing up more budget money for — you guessed it. Teacher compensation.

Last November, I outlined here how the Local Control Funding Formula “reform” ostensibly directing extra funds to struggling students got adopted so quickly. It was the cleanest possible way to pump up funding to the large urban districts with lots of English-learner students. UTLA didn’t embrace the LCFF because of social justice, blah blah blah. It was because of economic rewards. It’s now seeking to claim the bulk of the extra LCFF funds for a 17.6 percent raise for UTLA members.

The lesson of this scam:

Like Neo figuring out how life was coded to work in “The Matrix,” everything about California politics is much easier to understand once you realize that by far the top priority of by far the state’s most powerful group is protecting the interests of veteran teachers.  … The most-ballyhooed education reform in California since Gov. Pete Wilson’s classroom-size reduction program ended up just being an elaborate way for the governor and the Legislature to reward their masters and patrons in the CTA and the CFT.

The worse ‘fact check’ in the history of journalism

Meanwhile, over at the Sac Bee, I hope someone, anyone, is deeply embarrassed by the “fact check” that ran after the Kashkari-Brown debate on whether the governor is too close to teachers unions.

It mentions that Brown’s sponsoring charter schools while mayor of Oakland annoyed unions.

It doesn’t mention that the Brown-orchestrated adoption of Prop 30 and the LCFF steers many billions of dollars to teacher pay. Nor does it mention that the teachers’ system pension funding fix adopted this year is going to be paid for with 90 percent taxpayer funds and 10 percent teacher contributions — contrary to Brown’s 2011 view that public employees should split the cost of pensions equally with taxpayers, and far worse for taxpayers then pension funding fixes seen at the local level in California and in other state governments.

This is what’s known as “context” in the news business. It is insane to have an ostensibly serious “fact check” on the relationship between the governor and the teachers unions that doesn’t mention Brown’s three gigantic favors.

The instant media consensus after Thursday night’s first and only debate between Gov. Jerry Brown and Republican challenger Neel Kashkari was that the underdog GOP novice did better than expected but that no one got in a knockout punch.

But what about self-inflicted wounds? The governor shouldn’t get a pass for his bizarre claim that his 2012 reform measure ended pension spiking by public employees. It was just last month that the board of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System approved 99 ways for government workers to spike pensions above their base pay.

Who just made this point about CalPERS just two weeks ago? Dan Walters, the co-dean of the Sacramento press corp:

Among other things, the reform legislation sought to reduce “spiking” of pensions by restricting their calculation to regular pay.

This week, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, whose board is dominated by union representatives and union-friendly politicians, revealed a very generous interpretation of that provision.

It declared 99 forms of pay over and above regular salaries to be “pensionable.”

Read the whole column by Dan here.

Bee ‘fact-check’ ignores Brown’s huge favors for teachers unions

Media coverage of Thursday night’s debate also included this hysterical “fact check” from the Sacramento Bee on “Is Brown too close to teachers union?”

The Bee’s conclusion seems to be “no.”

It is true that the CTA gained broader influence in state politics after Brown, when he was governor before, signed the Rodda Act in 1975, requiring school districts to engage in collective bargaining. The CTA spent millions of dollars helping Brown win election in 2010 and remains a major supporter.

Yet despite their generally favorable relationship, Brown has irritated the union in the past with his advocacy for charter schools. He started two charter schools while mayor of Oakland and lobbied against legislation to unionize charter school teachers.

That is all the context offered. What truly awful journalism.

We are coming off a two-year period in which first the governor, at the behest of the CFT and CTA, got income and sales taxes raised with Prop 30, with the proceeds mostly going to school districts’ operating budgets — in other words, to make it much easier for union-controlled school boards to raise teacher compensation after years of tight budgets.

Then Brown changed school funding formulas in a way that delivered far more money to L.A. Unified, which is dominated by the single most powerful local union chapter in the state — United Teachers Los Angeles. The extra funds are supposed to go to help struggling students. But as the L.A. Daily News reported last month, the UTLA has explicitly said they should be used to give teachers a huge raise.

Concluding a second round of contract talks Wednesday, teachers union leaders released a statement … . United Teachers Los Angeles said district administrators explained that educators could receive either smaller class sizes or be “compensated fairly,” but not both.

“We don’t buy it,” the statement says.  “Millions of extra dollars have already flowed into the district as part of the state’s new funding formula.”

The teacher’s union wants a 17.6 percent pay raise, while district officials say they can only afford a 6.64 percent across-the-board raise and 2 percent bonus.

Oh, yeah, Jerry and the teachers unions aren’t tight because a decade ago Jerry wanted charters in Oakland!

LOL.

This is the maddening question that should hang over all the stories depicting Jerry Brown as some sort of genius governor. David Siders of the Sacramento Bee today became only the latest journalist to treat political process achievements as tantamount to real progress and successful stewardship:

“Praise for California and its governor, Jerry Brown, has drifted in for months now from the East Coast, ever since Brown and state lawmakers enacted a balanced budget this summer.

“The accomplishment followed years of deficits and budget standoffs at the Capitol. Coupled with the Legislature’s relatively frictionless action on issues ranging from education funding to gun control and immigration, the statehouse found itself comparing favorably to dysfunction in Washington, D.C. …

“Brown, the lunchtime speaker at the event, argued one reason for this success is that, through a series of ballot measures, Californians “broke a decade of dysfunction and laid the foundation for a government that actually works.”

Evan Halper of the L.A. Times also today accepts the narrative that political process achievements are tantamount to real progress:

“'Three years ago California was called a failed state,' [Gov. Brown] said. 'They were virtually chortling in the conservative venues.'

“Brown credited California’s turnaround to a series of ballot measures. The measures allowed a state budget to get passed with a simple majority of lawmakers, put an independent commission in charge of voting boundaries, and raised taxes by billions of dollars.

“'The people themselves through the initiative actually broke a decade of dysfunction and laid the foundation for a government that works,' he said.”

The rest of the story that Siders, Halper skip

How is it good journalism to accept uncritically the idea that California is doing better because its political process is less contentious?

How is it good journalism to focus on Brown's self-serving claims instead of the fact that California has the highest effective poverty rate in the nation? That California has the second-highest rate of people unable to find full-time work? Don't mass poverty and mass unemployment count as news?

I honestly don't know how Siders and Halper can't understand the flimsiness of equating process success with real-life progress. Nor do I understand why mass economic misery is a non-story. But here's what one veteran Sacramento watcher told me the last time I expressed frustration with the reporters covering the state:

Of course. But here in California, where the incompetence of the media can scarcely be exaggerated, almost nobody is aware that the Golden State is no. 1 in economic misery.

This malpractice is nothing new. On the debate over whether California should encourage hydraulic fracturing of its massive oil reserves, the state media never note that the Obama administration considers fracking safe. On the debate over education policy, the state media never note that Gov. Brown’s prescription for education reform — local control — is the same flawed, status-quo-reinforcing policy choice that led to the two big education reform moments of the past 30 years. On AB 32, the state’s landmark 2006 climate-change law, the Los Angeles Times waited until March 2012 to note that it was a risk to California’s economic competitiveness to force its energy costs to be higher than rival states and nations. On this front, the L.A. Times trailed the New York Times by years.

So on the economy, why would the fact that California has the highest effective poverty rate in the nation be mentioned? If key details are routinely ignored on other big stories, why change the template on poverty and human misery?

The governor thinks he’s the bomb. Why won’t media push back?

Which brings me to my Sunday U-T San Diego editorial.

“… what one would never guess from his press clippings is that Brown presides over the state with by far the nation’s highest poverty rate. According to a 2012 Census report, once the cost of living is factored in, nearly one in four state residents — 23.5 percent — live below the poverty line. And according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics measure that includes those who have given up looking for work, California has the second worst unemployment rate in the nation. More than one in six Californians who want to work full-time — 18.3 percent — can’t find such jobs.

“How anyone can look at this picture and conclude the Golden State has solved its economic miseries is baffling. Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are doing well. San Diego and Orange counties are much improved. But the Great Recession never ended in the Central Valley, Imperial County or the Inland Empire. Nor did it end for millions of Latino and African-American families in the minority neighborhoods that don’t reflect the tidy picture offered by the national media.

“Brown, alas, won’t acknowledge the depth of our economic woes. Such is his hubris that he’d rather enjoy the fawning than push back at the narrative of a booming, healthy California. Last month, he even gave a boastful interview to The Los Angeles Times that carried this headline: ‘Gov. Brown sees his ambitious agenda as a template for nation.'”

A normal newspaper would see a politician being this boastful and choose to point out the counter-narratives that undercut his claims. But not the L.A. Times’ reporting staff. Or its editorial page. Or its Sacramento columnist George Skelton.

What’s news vs. what’s not news: Aaauuugghh!

I have seen pack journalism my entire professional life. But I have never seen anything like the last few years out of Sacramento. I don’t think that the following four questions are only ones that would occur to a partisan individual. I think they’d occur to anyone who is reasonably well-informed.

Why isn’t it relevant that the Obama administration considers fracking safe?

Why aren’t Jerry Brown’s education policies placed in historical context?

Why did it take more than five years for a small part of the media to admit AB 32 was risky?

And on poverty, why isn’t the fact that California is worse off than Mississippi and West Virginia front-page news? Or back-page news? Or news at all?

I await sincere answers. But what do I expect, at least from Sacramento journalists? Snark.

By CHRIS REED

Just as red and blue have become associated with Republicans and Democrats, respectively, because of Election Night maps, will green someday become a synonym for fraud and dishonesty? After listening to Gov. Jerry Brown’s two years of lies, prevarications and fantasies about “green jobs,” I hope so. It would be semantic justice.

What brings this to mind is the latest fusillade of flapdoodle from Gov. Brown and his aides. On Friday, speaking in Goleta at The Wall Street Journal’s annual ECO:nomics conference, Brown offered warm words for himself. The governor praised the governor for the governor’s determination to revive California’s rotten economy by creating vast numbers of green jobs.

It was all a recycling of the rhetoric Brown has offered since securing the Democratic nomination for governor in early 2010: A commitment to renewable energy will create more than 500,000 jobs and get Californians working again! Message: Jerry cares! But in an environmentally responsible way!

But two years later, there is simply no evidence of a green economic revolution in the Golden State. Unemployment remains among the worst in the nation. Meanwhile, a new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report waterboards the assumption that California is a green jobs powerhouse, saying the state is about average in green employment.

‘Clean Tech’

Yes, “clean tech,” as it’s known in San Diego, has proven to be a modest economic engine, and in fact it’s quite plausible that revolutionary energy technologies could emerge from a lab somewhere in California. But serious economists and business analysts, as opposed to Brown, predecessor Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, acknowledge that green energy will never be a mass employer akin to the auto, steel or aviation industries.

A 2010 study by the respected McKinsey consulting group warned governments not to assume “green” jobs would ever be more than a niche in the economy akin to semiconductor manufacturing. Even the leftist Brookings Institution, in a 2011 study, warned of unrealistic expectations and said “green” jobs grew more slowly than general employment from 2003 to 2010.

These studies and basic data on jobs and growth prompted a remarkable news analysis last summer in The New York Times that said Brown’s green jobs forecast and President Barack Obama’s promise of 5 million new green jobs nationally appeared to be a “pipe dream.”

Alas, the cuts in the newsroom budgets of the Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times appear to have included their subscriptions to The New York Times. Even as reporters for both of the state’s most powerful newspapers finally have figured out that another putatively green initiative — the bullet train — is a fiasco, they continue to enthusiastically print the governor’s green balderdash.

You’d think coverage of an “ECO:nomics” conference that featured a governor congratulating himself on green job creation might bother to include some relevant facts, such as the Brookings Institution’s discovery that there were actually fewer green jobs in Silicon Valley in 2010 than 2003. But no. L.A. Times reporter Ricardo Garcia didn’t think it was relevant in his Friday account.

The Real World

Meanwhile, the Sacramento Bee’s David Siders did manage to allow some real-world events to flavor his Saturday story about Brown’s grand plans for solar power, noting the vast problems facing a proposed solar plant in Blythe that the governor just last year predicted would be a “really big” boost to jobs and growth.

But Siders — a naif who wrote a puff piece about the bullet train CEO just two weeks before the incompetent rail official was forced to resign — also included in his March 24 article a paragraph of spin from a Brown official that had me roaring with laughter.

“In theory, the fact that we’re having failures is actually a sign that the market’s working — that we have some comfort because there’s a lot of people out there, and out of this the best projects will probably emerge,” said Michael Picker, a senior adviser to Brown on renewable energy.

The bad news? Hey, it’s actually good news.

What the market is saying, of course, is that it’s still got profound doubts about the practicality and cost of renewable energy — even with the billions of dollars thrown at it by the Obama administration, even with promises of future subsidies, even with regulatory relief not granted to less sainted industries.

Did Siders bother to cite the McKinsey or Brookings reports? Did he look at all the various factors The New York Times cited in pronouncing green jobs a “pipe dream”? Did he note that there is in fact an energy jobs boom going on right now — but, as The New York Times reports, it’s in fossil fuels?

Nope. He let Brown’s aide depict green failure as green success.

Only in California, global headquarters for the cult that is environmentalism, could coverage of green energy be so half-assed that I would yearn for it to be outsourced to The New York Times.