A 2012 law, designed to keep children vaccinated, forced parents seeking exceptions to receive counseling and a signature from doctors or other health care professionals. But a carve-out applied by Gov. Jerry Brown allowed those with an objection rooted in personal beliefs to skirt the regulation.

The so-called “anti-vax” movement, which has attracted the attention of politicians since the past decade, has developed largely in response to concerns that the ingredients of many popular vaccines could contribute to autism.

Over the years, officeholders from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to President Barack Obama have weighed in, sometimes tentatively, on the debate. Now events in California have sharpened battle lines and made opposing sides more strident.

Dangerous trends

Although California’s initially small population of unvaccinated or more slowly vaccinated children escaped the notice of regulators and activists, a recent increase to more sizable numbers has raised eyebrows and alarms. “State records show more than 13,000 kindergartners in California are unvaccinated because of either personal or religious beliefs,” the San Jose Mercury News reported, with under half without vaccination at some private schools. Thousands more children in other grades, the paper concluded, had also skipped vaccines.

These trends were visible as early as the onset of the previous school year. In September, the Los Angeles Times reported that “parents are deciding against vaccinating their kindergarten-age children at twice the rate they did seven years ago, a fact public health experts said is contributing to the reemergence of measles across the state and may lead to outbreaks of other serious diseases.”

According to state data cited by the Times, the percentage of kindergartens with at least 8 in 100 unvaccinated children had more than doubled over the same time period. The Times observed the 8 percent threshold “is significant because communities must be immunized at a high rate to avoid widespread disease outbreaks. It is a concept known as herd immunity, and for measles and whooping cough at least 92 percent of kids need to be immune, experts say.”

But in a recent follow-up report, the Times noted that vaccination rates had actually climbed in 2014, “Statewide, the rate of vaccine waivers for kindergartners entering school in the fall declined to 2.5 percent in 2014 from 3.1 percent in 2013. Bigger declines were seen in districts with some of the larger vaccine exemption rates.”

Culture war politics

For activists and analysts weighing in on the trends, however, last year’s dip in waivers isn’t enough to bring calm to the cultural storm. The “anti-vax” movement has attracted strong critics on the political right and left, each of which recognizes familiar stereotypes of their cultural opponents among the country’s vaccine rejectors. For conservatives, self-entitled upper-middle-class hipster parents are to blame; for liberals, scorn is directed at what they consider superstitious anti-science Christians.

As for medical professionals themselves, worry has centered around the elevated risk of outbreak for serious, painful diseases. Steven Salzberg, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins, issued a typical warning several years ago concerning the spread of whooping cough. His frustration this year reflects a broad consensus among doctors that at least some vaccines are essential:

“Most of the anti-vax crowd have no scientific training or expertise, which might explain (but doesn’t excuse) their complete ignorance of the science. Over the past 15 years, dozens of studies involving hundreds of thousands of people have shown convincingly that neither vaccines nor any of the ingredients in them are linked to autism. Vaccines are not only safe, but they are perhaps the greatest public health success in the history of civilization.”

If pressure for increased regulation builds, “vaxxers” and “anti-vaxxers” may well be obliged to negotiate, with some vaccines becoming mandatory and others being regulated according to more or less restrictive timetables.

But on both sides, the appetite for compromise is weak. In one quote making the rounds in the media, a mother unwilling to let her child get a measles inoculation told the New York Times she’d rather her daughter “miss an entire semester” than receive one shot.

By Michael Warnken

Sept. 10, 2012

Until the public shooting of two Hispanic men by local police just a month ago, Anaheim was mostly known for the Anaheim Angels, Gene Autry and Disneyland. Today, we are well aware it is not the happiest place on earth. Anaheim, like many other parts of the state, has a gang problem and it seems to a have a police problem, too, as the recent shootings by police occurred in broad daylight under questionable circumstances.

Mayor Tom Tait called for an investigation into these incidents by the offices of California Attorney General Kamala Harris and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. However, local residents were not satisfied, and many felt that the police had crossed the line, especially since there had been six other similar events this year, five of which were fatal.

Most of the police brutality was focused around Hispanic citizens, who make up half of city residents. However, because many residents are immigrants who are not citizens, perhaps about one third of the city’s eligible voters are Hispanic.

The council’s current makeup is: Lori Galloway, half Hispanic, half Filipina; Harry Sidhu, a Sikh immigrant from India; and two Anglos, Gail Eastman and Kris Murray.

So Hispanic activists began calling for changes in the city’s electoral system. Along with others, the activists believe there is a connection between the electoral system in Anaheim and the violence.

The Orange County Register also reported:

“Those pushing for change point to the elegant neighborhoods of Anaheim Hills. The city’s current voting system has concentrated overwhelming political power there: Four of the city’s five council members are residents.

“That far exceeds the percentage of city voters who live there, a disparity that districts would remedy — according to their supporters — by more evenly distributing council seats. A review of voter-registration numbers by ZIP code shows that the Anaheim Hills area accounts for less than a fourth of the city’s voters.

“By comparison, the central part of the city — including Disneyland but also the hard-life neighborhoods at the heart of recent protests — has more than a third of the city’s voters but only one resident council member. And the west side of Anaheim accounts for about 40 percent of the city’s registered voters, but is home to no council member.”

On August 8, the Anaheim city council held a special hearing where a proposal by Tait was considered to raise the number of council members from four to six, with calls for an increase to as many as eight. Calls also went up to switch from the current system of at-large elections for council members to a system in which members are elected by geographical district. The council did not vote to send the proposal to the voters, but tabled it for further investigation.

At-Large Elections

An at-large electoral system exists when all the representatives in a city are elected by the entire populace. The alternative to this is known as “district elections,” in which city council members are each elected from different geographical districts of the same population.

District elections give smaller areas of people direct access to a representative. The people of that district knows who represents them, and are able hold them more directly accountable for their actions and decisions. Representatives in at-large districts are less accountable and like to claim they “represent everyone,” but in actual practice, they tend to ignore everyone equally, except those who are celebrities, powerful special interests and large campaign donors.

At-large electoral systems are dubious to begin with, as they have long been used to suppress minority political participation. This  practice was mastered in the American South, where cities with black populations of 40 percent to 50 percent or more would not have a single black city council representative.  The problem was so bad in the South that the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress in 1965 to address this and other voting-rights problems. The act forced cities in the Southern states to hold single-member district elections.

As the largest city in Orange County and the 10th largest city in the state, with a population of about 340,000 people, Anaheim should have single-member district elections. A move to such a system would open the city up to more electoral diversity.  Just as juries and grand juries should reflect a cross section of a community, any properly formed electoral system should reflect the participants that they represent in a meaningful way.

Local Representation

In a reader rebuttal in the Orange County Register, council member Kris Murray justified the tabling of the proposal of moving to six members elected by district:

“There are still many questions to be answered surrounding those shootings, and several independent investigations are already underway to do so. Although some have asserted that there may be a correlation between the two issues, the city would be irresponsible to undertake wholesale change of its entire electoral system without first providing an opportunity for extensive citizen dialogue, careful legal analysis, and consideration of the options available to meet voters’ concerns for fair representation.”

But Police officers, judges and city administrative employees are added to governmental institutions without much thought. It’s silly to suggest that moving to district elections and adding more city councilors to the most important branch in a representative republic requires months of review. So, let’s indulge Murray on that point and consider the proposal for an increase in members and single member districts.

Currently, each of the four council members in Anaheim represents all 340,000 residents of Anaheim. If single-member districts were implemented without increasing the number of council members, each of four district would comprise about 85,000 people. An increase to six members would create districts of just under 60,000 people. (In both cases, I’m assuming the mayor, who sits on the council, would continue to be elected at large.)

But in evaluating this proposal, one simple question that needs to be asked is this: Is that real representation? Is that truly adequate? Can anyone even begin to honestly suggest that a city councilor can represent 60,000 or more people? So, why stop at just six members? At some point, the fundamental question needs to be asked: “How many people can a single city council member adequately represent?”

True representation means agency, direct contact and access by all. This might mean proper representation leads to significantly more elected council members (or their equivalents) Consider, for example the fact that Chicago has 50 aldermen and New York City has 51 city council members. More is not a problem; in fact, from a legislative standpoint, these cities work quite well.

More decentralization is needed

In the end, representatives are elected to resolve problems. More representatives would indeed help address Anaheim’s current problems — challenges that are not limited to gang violence and police brutality. If the city council had enough representatives, they could hold their own hearings investigating the police, like a state legislature or congress would and try to work them out rather than depending on the state and federal attorneys general. This amounts to self-government.

Further, at-large elections serve to protect incumbents from challengers because of the influence city employees have on such elections. Through their unions, city employees (including police) are more able to concentrate their influence and back their slate of candidates in at-large elections. The fewer representatives, the fewer votes on the council are required to raise taxes and spike employee pensions. The fewer representatives, the less accountable they and their employees are to the citizens.

Anaheim’s city council is not going to want to implement any changes. It will likely continue to put the matter off as long as it can because the reform needed is a direct threat to the current council’s power. The longer they are able to delay a change, the more they can maintain the status quo.

However, the citizens of Anaheim need to be vigilant. They need to keep pushing for more representation and single member districts. The thoughts and ideas of the representatives should be as broad and diverse as the people they represent. More representatives would achieve that goal as well as level the political playing field and lead to less violence and more accountability.

(Editor’s note: This is a revision of an earlier piece on the same subject.)

(Michael Warnken is an expert in the field of political representation and American electoral history.)

Commentary

FEB. 24, 2012

By JOHN SEILER

One reason California schools perform so poorly is that the state’s educrats, instead of improving instruction, commonly look for gimmicks to cover up their own failures. In my 25 years of writing about Golden State schools, one recurring “reform” is to lengthen the school year. Supposedly the Korean or the Chinese or the Liechtensteinian kids learn better because they go to school for many more weeks than America’s kids, who during the summer months are left to roam the streets joining gangs.

That’s just the theme sounded Thursday by Bill Habermehl, the Orange County superintendent of education during his annual Orange County of Education address. According to the Orange County Register, he said, “We need to find new ways to compete with countries like Japan, Korea and China, where students are going to school for 200 to 220 days a year…. We are going in the wrong direction. At a time when we need to make schools more challenging, we’re cutting school day,” because of budget cuts. He wants to add another 15 school days. That’s three weeks. Throw in the July 4 holiday and a couple of teacher preparation days, and that’s another month of schooling.

It makes you wonder how America became the world’s premier industrial power when our kids spent all summer cutting each other up in “West Side Story” switchblade fights.

I reported on Habermehl back in 2010, in an editorial I wrote for the Orange County Register, “Study: School budgets not being cut.” Subhead: “Story Highlights: Expenditures outpaced inflation since 2003-04. O.C. superintendent questions results.” The editorial was based on exhaustive study by Steven B. Frates and Michael A. Shires of  the Davenport Institute at Pepperdine University.

Instead of looking at school districts’ publicized budgets, the scholars examined budget data actually sent to the state. This is crucial because, whereas publicized budgets can contain fiction, it’s illegal to send incorrect numbers to the state. The study found that, instead of being cut as the educrats claimed, school budgets had risen.

I called Habermehl about the discrepancy. I wrote about his response:

“William H. Habermehl, Orange County’s superintendent of schools, said his staff is examining the study and its conclusions, but at first blush, he told us, ‘The study just doesn’t make sense to me. There’s faulty analysis on their part.’ He noted the estimates of O.C. district cuts were deepest in the period following the study. ‘Our school districts have never been flush with cash. We never get as much as other districts’ because Orange County is a donor county. He added, ‘Our books are open. Our districts have always been prudent in how they spend their money’.”

But later, he said his staff had not time to do any further checking.

So, basically he has no idea what’s going on financially with Orange County schools. And when I wrote about budgets at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second biggest district in America, they also had no idea what was going on financially.

Pathetic Test Scores

Meanwhile, California schools continue to score near the bottom of the 50 states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.  On the 2011 NAEP, California scored 46th among the states in fourth-grade reading, 49th for eight-grade reading, 46th on fourth-grade math and 48th on eight-grade math.

If California’s once top-flight schools have fallen so far behind other states, which have school years of the same length, how could another two weeks of the same incompetence improve matters? Maybe we’ll improve to 45th.

Habermehl and other extra-school-days boosters also ignore that it’s precisely America’s long school break that has contributed to our creativity. American kids spend the long summers playing, reading, inventing, dreaming. They go on long vacations with their families to “See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” as beautiful Dinah Shore urged us. The kids get to see more of this great country of ours.

That’s just what my family did in 1964. My father bought a new Chevy Impala for $2,000. With Mom as co-pilot and three kids fighting in the back seat, we drove from Michigan to California and back. I kept a diary, since lost, some of my first writing in what would become a career in journalism. I read everything I could in the maps, pamphlets and books we got at Yellowstone, Yosemite, Redwood and other parks. We went to Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm and the since closed Marineland of the Pacific. I loved California and always wanted to move here, which I did.

And back home summers, we kids in those days spent most of the day outside playing, unsupervised. We learned how to govern ourselves, improvising rules in our endless baseball games.

Would I have been better off cooped up back in Elliott Elementary school?

And how about guys like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs? If you read their biographies, they started out monkeying around with technology in their spare time and summers, dreaming the future they created.

Where’s the Money?

Habermehl said the federal government isn’t paying schools what they’re owed. “If the federal government just pays us what we’re entitled to, then we can use the savings to pay for these reforms,” he said.

But the federal government is $15.4 trillion in debt. And another $1.3 trillion is being added this year. Where’s the money supposed to come from?

Yet, before the immense federal funding — and meddling control — of recent years, schools in California and elsewhere performed much better.

Moreover, if Habermehl needs more money, there are two sources: One is to cut back generous teacher salaries, perks and pensions, which average the highest in the nation, at $59,825. (See this list. Click twice on “average salary.”)

Or how about eliminating bureaucratic bloat, such as the duplicative county departments of education — beginning with Habermehl’s own Orange County Department  of Education. Any functions the county departments are doing easily could be shifted to the local school districts, slashing administrative bloat and waste.

California’s kids deserve better than the near-rock bottom education they’re  getting now. And they deserve refreshing, innovative summers off.