It was reportedly the first raise in eight years for the rank and file, and the negotiations were handled by United Teachers Los Angeles.

According to an L.A. Times story on the payout:

The tentative three-year deal would cost $875.3 million for all employees, about $285.6 million more than the district’s original offer, according to a memo from Supt. Ramon C. Cortines to board members. Included in the increased amount is an additional $31.6 million for other employee groups, such as administrators, whose contracts entitle them to more money if other bargaining units negotiate better deals than their own.

Teachers unions in Los Angeles and around the state have battled for raises over the past year.

In San Diego, teachers seek a 10 percent wage increase over two years. In San Francisco, teachers obtained a 12 percent raise over three years. And teachers in a San Jose high school district got a 5 percent raise earlier this year.

Many of these teachers are members of either the California Federation of Teachers, the state affiliate of the national American Federation of Teachers; or the California Teachers Association, a chapter of the National Education Association. Together, the two represent 445,000 members.

The CFT files an annual financial disclosure with the U.S. Department of Labor. An analysis of the CFT’s annual labor department filings shows that yearly dues have increased 33 percent since 2005 – about the last time the L.A. teachers got a raise – from $361 annually to $482 last year. Dues have not increased since 2011.

Meanwhile, membership has increased from 51,712 active members in 2005 to 55,647 last year.

Among other findings in the analysis, which was done by accessing reports through this Department of Labor portal:

• The salary of the secretary/treasurer has increased 40 percent, from the $116,786 received by Michael Nye in 2005 to the $163,812 paid to Jeffrey Freitas last year.
• Pay to the president of CFT dropped from the $121,170 paid to Mary Bergan in 2005 to the $84,274 paid to Joshua Pechthalt last year.
• The federation added a salary to the upper ranks: $80,000 to Jim Mahler, head of the Community College Council.
• Overall, total officer disbursements rose 60 percent between 2005 and 2014, from $333,126 to $536,604.
• Employee disbursements, including political organizing, went from $3.6 million in 2005 to $4.9 million in 2014, an increase of 36 percent.
• Loans payable at the end of 2014 were zero compared to $3.2 million in outstanding loans in 2005.
• In 2005, the federation paid $62,000 to Sacramento PR ace Stephen Hopcraft. While Hopcraft’s website says he is still working for the federation, no payments to him were reported for last year. Instead, it reported spending $113,000 with Senders Communication Group in Canoga Park.
• For in-house lobbying at the statehouse, the CFT paid $248,781 in 2013-14. In 2005-06, it paid $329,260.
• The federation now has an unfunded pension liability of $5.1 million compared to zero in 2005. Total liabilities are now $30.1 million compared to $6 million in 2005. The growth has been driven by new accounting rules that require broader reporting of liabilities coupled with a steady creep in unfunded pension benefits.

The data shows a strong performance for the union in a state that has maintained its organized labor base while the rest of the country has seen an explosion of successful right-to-work legislation – Michigan and Wisconsin notably – and an increase in non-union workplaces.

Union membership in the U.S. has dropped from 24 percent of workers in 1973 to 11.1 percent in 2014, according to unionstats.com.

Membership in the public sector, though, has remained in the 30-something-percent range since the late ‘70s, settling at 35.7 percent last year.

In California, membership has remained above the national average since 2004, with 17.5 percent of workers represented by a union last year compared with 18 percent in 2004. The state ranked fifth in the U.S. for overall representation behind Hawaii, New York, Alaska and Washington.

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com

Photo of school bus by flickr user Kevin42135, used via a Creative Commons license

By John Seiler

Gov. Jerry Brown continues to misuse his fine Jesuit education. Explaining why he wants to shift money from middle-class to poor schools, he said:

“Our future depends not on across-the-board funding, but in disproportionately funding those schools that have disproportionate challenges…. Aristotle said treating unequals equally is not justice…. Growing up in Compton or Richmond is not like it is to grow up in Los Gatos or Beverly Hills or Piedmont….

“If you look at a classroom in Piedmont and you look at one in Compton, it’s a lot different. The [Piedmont] families have far more money, far more access to the better things in life. And the extent to which we can offset that by putting more funding into those school districts [like Compton], we’re going to do that.”

Brown’s words are quoted in a column by George Skelton, who should have done some checking.

I typed in Google: << Aristotle treat equals equally >>.

It brought up an explanation on a page on ethics, “Aristotle came up with the suggestion that distributive justice consists of treating equals equally and unequals unequally (Bk. V, Chap. VI)” of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s major work on ethics and a major foundation of Western ethics. The site referenced the translation by J.E.C. Weldon, which is free on the Internet. In Book V, Chapter VI, we read, in the Stagirite’s translated words:

“Also, if the persons are equal, the things will be equal; for as one thing is to the other thing, so is one person to the other person. For if the persons are not equal, they will not have equal shares; in fact the source of battles and complaints is either that people who are equal have unequal shares, or that people who are not equal have equal shares, distributed to them….

“Justice then is a sort of proportion; for proportion is not peculiar to abstract quantity, but belongs to quantity generally….”

Example

The Web site with the ethics page provide an inadequate triage example I will improve upon. Suppose four people are involved in a car accident. Two are bleeding badly.  The other two are shaken up, but are not bleeding. Whom should the medics treat first? The obvious answer is those bleeding. The two who are bleeding are “equal” in needing immediate care to prevent them from bleeding to death. The who who are just shaken up also are “equal” to one another in also needing treatment; but they are “unequal” to the bleeding victims in that their treatment can wait a little longer.

Brown, instead of referencing Aristotle, instead actually is referencing Plato’s “Republic,” which set up a socialist utopia in which there are three classes: the Philosopher-Kings (such as Brown), the Guardians (police and other government workers) and everybody else who is controlled by the other two. Absolute equality is imposed, and government educates the children.

Brown himself said, as quoted by Skelton, “That’s the whole essence of the progressive agenda, to try to compensate for the global inequalities that are growing.”

Although Plato’s pupil, Aristotle early abandoned his teacher’s utopianism for a philosophy of description of what he could see, and moderation between extremes.

He also strongly emphasized that a free society depends on a strong middle class. He wrote in Book IV, Chapter XI of the “Politics”:

“Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.  Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy; or a tyranny may grow out of either extreme–either out of the most rampant democracy or out of an oligarchy; but it is not so likely to arise out of the middle constitutions and those akin to them…. The mean condition of states is clearly best, for no other is free from faction; and where the middle class is large, there are least likely to be factions and dissensions.”

The vanishing California middle-class

Unfortunately, as Joel Kotkin wrote Sunday in the Orange County Register, the middle-class increasingly is under assault in California, with no relief from Brown:

“The biggest challenge facing our state is not climate change, or immigration, corporate greed, globalization or even corruption. It’s the demise of upward mobility for the vast majority of Californians, and the rise of an increasingly class-ridden, bifurcated society….

“The growing class chasm also distorts state priorities, creating an inordinate demand for public sector employment — and related jobs in health and education — while inculcating deep-seated resentment among private-sector entrepreneurs and professionals toward a state that asks much of them, but gives increasingly little….

“Essentially, there is only one practical solution to this dilemma: a program that promotes economic growth….

“Instead of delusion, California needs policies that can boost economic growth in precisely those areas – construction, agriculture, manufacturing and energy – with the best prospects for creating good, high-paying jobs for both blue- and white-collar Californians. Yet, right now the Legislature and, even more so, the empowered state apparat, seem determined to do everything they can to strangle an incipient recovery in these industries.”

“Bifurcated” means two dominant classes: the wealthy, made up of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and high-paid government workers on top, with most everyone else in the impoverished bottom. The middle-class is squeezed into insignificance. That obviously is happening.

Aristotle and guns

While we’re on Aristotle, it’s worth looking at what Aristotle thought about citizens being able to defend themselves. In the “Politics,” he wrote in Book III, Chapter VII: “Hence in a constitutional government the fighting-men have the supreme power, and those who possess arms are the citizens.”

Arms today, of course, would not mean swords, which would be mostly useless; but guns.

And in Book VII, Chapter IX, he wrote, “But on the other hand, since it is an impossible thing that those who are able to use or to resist force should be willing to remain always in subjection, from this point of view the persons are the same; for those who carry arms can always determine the fate of the constitution.”

In conclusion, we can say Aristotle’s position is that a free society depends on a large, well-armed middle class.

Practical problems

Aside from philosophy, Brown’s desire to shift money from the middle-class suburbs to the poor inner city has several practical problems. One is the cities already get adequate funding. As I have reported, the Los Angeles Unified School District spent close to $30,000 per pupil per year in 2007-08. It might be a little less now because of budget cuts — or more because of Prop. 30.

The second practical problem is the money is badly spent in poor schools. LAUSD’s graduation rate was a pathetic 62 percent — for all that money.

What poor kids need is not more money shifted from middle-class schools, but a complete change of a broken system. I would prefer an end to the Plato-like centralized system 91 percent of kids suffer under. But if we’re going to stay in the current system, then such reforms as the “parent trigger” and charter schools should be advanced.

It also wouldn’t hurt to teach Aristotle, the only genius in history to invent two whole new disciplines, logic and biology. Gov. Brown needs a refresher course and could attend.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — California’s public schools continue to lay off teachers, in a process that is as convoluted and illogical as one would expect in a bureaucratic system in which the needs of the students falls fairly low on the list of priorities. That’s my takeaway from a new report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office detailing the teacher layoff process as districts struggle with declining revenue in the face of shrinking budgets.

The big issue, however, isn’t the arcane process for shedding teachers, but what the process says about the inefficient way that most Americans have decided to educate their kids. As the LAO reports, decisions about who stays and who goes are based on which teachers have showed up to work for the most years — i.e., seniority — rather than which ones are most effective and energetic. The hearing and appeals process, by which every laid-off teacher gets an automatic hearing, adds enormous costs to a system that always claims to lack enough resources.

The LAO report only looked at one small, technical aspect of the public-school behemoth, and it was meant to offer a little advice for tweaking the layoff process. It wasn’t meant to provide a thorough analysis of school systems. But in some ways, that’s what is so frightening about the report. Americans don’t think twice about the way schools are designed. Few things are more important than educating children, yet we accept this current system the way Soviet citizens accepted long bread lines. No doubt, auditors in that system issued reports discussing ways to shorten the lines.

‘Underfunded’?

Don’t include me in the chorus of those who claim that the schools are somehow “underfunded,” even as K-14 education consumes more than 40 percent of California’s general-fund budget — not to mention all the local bond measures and federal funding. School-district budget “cuts” usually refer to a reduced rate of spending growth, not actual cuts.

One of the nation’s worst-performing systems, Los Angeles Unified School District, yearly spends more than $29,000 per student, when all funding sources are included, according to a Cato Institute report. Its graduation rate of 40 percent is appalling.

LAUSD is particularly bad, but it isn’t run that differently than your average suburban district.

Consider the LAO’s chart of a declining teacher workforce over the past few years against this report in the Los Angeles Daily News from 2008: “[A] Daily News review of salaries and staffing shows LAUSD’s bureaucracy ballooned by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over the same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent. The district has approximately 4,000 administrators, managers and other nonschool-based employees — not including clerks and office workers — whose average annual salary is about $95,000.”

Now consider this tidbit in June 2011 from the Sacramento Bee: “The number of educators receiving $100,000-plus annual pensions jumped 650 percent from 2005-11, going from 700 to 5,400, according to a Bee review of data from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.”

Here’s a Los Angeles Times headline from October: “California teachers lack the resources and time to teach science.”

Is this an issue of money or spending priorities?

Instead of focusing on the little things, Californians ought to be thinking big thoughts about education. We can start by asking: Is the public education system one that best serves the students? The answer, even for people whose kids attend decent schools is, “Obviously not.”

There’s an endless call for reform. Some ideas are useful. For instance, tuition vouchers, which let people take a portion of their school tax dollars and spend them at the school of their choice, or charter schools, which are government-controlled schools freed from some of the government-imposed red tape, offer some hope because they provide some level of competition.

Thought Experiment

I’m not calling for specific reforms here but arguing, instead, for readers to conduct a thought experiment.

If we were tasked with providing an important service, how would we provide it? If, say, we were asked to create the best possible chain of restaurants to serve hungry customers, would we buy a huge building, hire scores of extremely well-paid administrators and then impose a tax on local residents to fund the chain? Would we let a board of directors, elected from the community, choose the décor, the menu and the locations?

Would we empower a union to make hiring decisions and allow it to grant tenure to waiters and kitchen help, so that we could not fire them even if they were lazy and incompetent? Would we pay the most money to people who worked there the longest rather than to those who were the best workers?

When customers complained that we served too much meat and not enough pizza, would we shrug and ask them to elect board members who preferred pepperoni to cheeseburgers?

Would we pass laws mandating that people who live in neighborhoods near our restaurants eat only there — allowing them to eat elsewhere only if they spend additional money or move to the neighborhood where the restaurant more closely meets their taste? Would we ignore the pleas of people who live near filthy restaurants that serve lousy food just because we live near one that at least keeps a clean kitchen and offers adequate meal choices?

Other observers have made similar analogies, and school officials always claim that schooling somehow is different. But it isn’t.

Instead of tinkering around the edges and endlessly fighting for reforms that offer little hope of transforming the system, we need to redesign it from the ground up. Perhaps we should, in the words of the lateschool  reformer Marshall Fritz, “separate school and state” and allow the market to provide schools just as we allow it to provide food and other vital services.

By JOHN SEILER

Yesterday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a series on massive cheating on school tests across America, “Cheating our children: Suspicious school test scores across the nation.” It specifically looked at nine districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District. Here’s what it found about the LAUSD:

“Enrollment: 664,233

“Eligible for free or reduced-price meals: 79 percent

“AJC analysis: In 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2011, 740 classes showed unusual  changes, compared to an expected 572. Odds: 1 in 1 trillion.

“History: In 2010, Los Angeles shut down six charter schools accused of  cheating on state tests. Last year, the district accused teachers of giving questions to students in advance of testing, improperly coaching students and changing answers.

“High stakes: N/A”

“High stakes” means such things a rewarding teachers for student improvement, which in this case is “Non Applicable” because performance bonuses basically are barred in California because the unions protect poorly performing teachers.

Note that the statistical odds of the numbers turning out the way the LAUSD reported are 1 in 1 trillion — that is, impossible. Something similar was found in the rest of the nine districts that were looked at closely: Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, East St. Louis, Gary, Houston and Mobile County.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is a liberal newspaper, so we can’t say this is carping by a conservative think tank. According to the paper:

“Suspicious test scores in roughly 200 school districts resemble those that  entangled Atlanta in the biggest cheating scandal in American history, an  investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

“The newspaper analyzed test results for 69,000 public schools and found high  concentrations of suspect math or reading scores in school systems from  coast to coast. The findings represent an unprecedented examination of the  integrity of school testing.

“The analysis doesn’t prove cheating. But it reveals that test scores in  hundreds of cities followed a pattern that, in Atlanta, indicated cheating  in multiple schools.

“A tainted and largely unpoliced universe of untrustworthy test results  underlies bold changes in education policy, the findings show. The tougher  teacher evaluations many states are rolling out, for instance, place more  weight than ever on tests.”

Atlanta Cheating Scandal

The Atlanta cheating scandal has been going on for three years now. According to Wikipedia:

The Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal refers to the accusation that teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) district cheated on state-administered standardized tests and the subsequent fallout. The scandal began in 2009 when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published analyses of Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) results which showed statistically unlikely test scores, including extraordinary gains or losses in a single year.^[1] An investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) released in July 2011 found that 44 out of 56 schools cheated on the 2009 CRCT.^[2] 178 teachers and principals were found to have fixed incorrect answers entered by students.^[3] The size of the scandal has been described as one of the largest in United States history.^[3][4][5]…

The scandal has thrust the debate over using high-stakes testing to hold educators accountable, mandated by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, into the national spotlight.^[6] Teachers who confessed to cheating blamed “inordinate pressure” to meet targets set by the district and said they faced severe consequences such as a negative evaluation or termination if they didn’t.^[6]

Prior to the scandal, the APS had been lauded for making significant gains in standardized test scores. Between 2002 and 2009, eight-graders’ (the grade level at which the CRCT is taken) scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test jumped 14 points, the highest of any urban area.^[5] Superintendent Beverly Hall, who served from 1999 to 2010, was named Superintendent of the Year in 2009.^[7] The GBI’s report said Hall “knew or should have known” about the scandal.^[2] Hall’s lawyer has denied she had any knowledge of cheating practices.^[5]

Of course, President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act is itself a centralizing abomination. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants just 18 powers to the federal government, none concerning education.

Federal Control

Test scores started plummeting across America right after the feds started getting deeply involved in local schools following the Sputnik scare in 1957. The federal government panicked, fearing that capitalist America was falling behind the Soviets’ socialist system in producing scientists and engineers. So they imposed a new, crash program to fund science and math education in the K-12 schools, as well as at universities.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, despite sending up into space Sputnik, the first satellite, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, quickly fell behind in the “Space Race.” It was Neil Armstrong, not a Soviet cosmonaut, who in 1969 was the first man to step foot on the moon. Twenty years after that, the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended, and socialism was proved a total failure, although it remains the operating principle behind America’s K-12 schools and universities.

Predictably, federal control destroyed the salutary local autonomy that had been the hallmark of America’s education system. Since then, every president pushes his “education program.” The first President Bush (1989-92) had his Goals 2000 socialized education scheme. President Obama has his Race to the Top program.

Lance Izumi is an education analyst with the Pacific Research Foundation, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank. He wrote recently:

“Waivers recently granted by President Obama to 10 states allowing them to escape the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are themselves filled with prescriptive dictates from the administration.

“Obama offers seeming flexibility with one hand, while increasing control by Washington with the other. Nowhere, however, has his Washington-knows-best strategy been more evident than in his effort to force states to adopt national education standards.”

Yet nothing is working. The only results of the federal meddling have low test scores and scandals. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution pointed out:

“Perhaps more important, the analysis suggests a broad betrayal of  schoolchildren across the nation….

“The newspaper’s analysis suggests that tens of thousands of children may have  been harmed by inflated scores that could have precluded tutoring or more  drastic administrative actions.”

Meanwhile, back in Calfiornia, both Gov. Jerry Brown and legal activist Molly Munger are pushing tax increases that supposedly would increase education funding (although most of the money likely would go to pension payments). Yet the money, assuming it even reaches classrooms, only would keep the funding flowing to these schools for scandal.

Commentary

FEB. 22, 2012

By CHRIS REED

The proposal of a Democratic assemblyman to keep students from eating at food trucks instead of school cafeterias is ostensibly about public health, obesity and food safety. But while nanny state motives may be in play, it’s also easy to see this as the latest conscience-free effort to keep as much money as possible coming to public schools by any means necessary. Districts statewide face a constant struggle to find enough money for the salaries and benefits of their adult employees.

In that sense, targeting food trucks is just like targeting charter schools’ funding. It’s all about preserving the status quo — and one more example of the pervasive moral bankruptcy that the California education establishment displays whenever it comes to money or accountability.

The examples are legion, from the appalling to the mundane.

In Los Angeles Unified School District, a junior high teacher who taunted a suicidal young boy over the incompetence reflected by his failed attempt to slash his wrists didn’t even lose his job.

Also in LAUSD, at Miramonte Elementary School, allegations about gross misbehavior by teacher Mark Berndt weren’t taken seriously until disgusting photos of students were turned over to authorities by a commercial photo developer. Even after the scandal exploded, district officials paid off Berndt rather than trying to go through the teacher-protecting discipline system.

This is no surprise given the larger context. Pacific Research Institute education scholar Lance Izumi found that in all of the 1990s, only one LAUSD teacher was fired after district officials completed the disciplinary process — one!

This is the norm throughout the state, as barriers meant to stop what teachers union officials called capricious management decisions ended up being barriers to the most basic management.

Students Last

This adult employees-first mindset is everywhere.

In Sacramento, the California Teachers Association and California Nurses Association fought bitterly if unsuccessfully against a bill that would have allowed school personnel to administer treatment to students suffering epileptic seizures. Creating a need for more union jobs mattered more that keeping students alive.

With test results, if they show progress, they are hailed and touted as reasons to leave schools and teachers alone.

But if test results disappoint, the education establishment points to studies blaming the quality of the students being taught and hinting at “Bell Curve”-style explanations for their poor performance.

But when California voters balk at paying more for schools, the reverse race card is brought out. When it comes to increasing funds for schools, affluent older white voters who pay much of the taxes in the Golden State often say they’re worried about a lack of accountability and a resistance to reform. But we’re told these concerns are actually a reflection of the historical evidence that school finance policies are one more way that whites keep minorities down and that aging Caucasian voters in California repeatedly demonstrate they don’t care about the needs of minority children.

Yet the social justice talk associated with the education movement vanishes when it comes time to bully poor students and their families into paying fees for school activities that the California Constitution says must be provided free of charge.

Imaginary Numbers

When it comes to federal funding for public education, schools are happy to feed at the trough. But when it comes time to honor the policy obligations that are attached to the funding, school districts and K-12 “stakeholders” complain raucously about micromanagement.

There are even scams that the public isn’t broadly aware of, such as those involving the basic funding mechanism for California schools. Districts are reimbursed based on the Average Daily Attendance at campuses, with reimbursements being higher for troubled and pregnant students than for regular students.

What does this disparity lead school officials to do? You guessed it. To classify more students as troublemakers and as pregnant to get more money.

In 1995 and 1996, when I was a columnist for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, I did several interviews with an investigator for the state Department of Finance who said ADA fraud was rampant. Subsequent poking around led me to two school principals who wouldn’t go on the record because of fear of ruining their careers, but who said that some districts made up numbers as they went along.

It also appears that some districts report receiving less in local property taxes than they actually get to maximize their state funding under Proposition 98 formulas. In 2007, state finance officials revealed that districts statewide didn’t report $300 million they had received, a story that barely even garnered headlines.

What’s going on? Back in 1995, the state investigator told me school officials likened their attempts to cheat the state to “victimless crimes” — not fraud.

But then this is the mindset that justifies all corner-cutting by the California education establishment: They hold the moral high ground, so anything goes — fraud; hypocrisy; amoral behavior; gross inconsistency; tolerating gross misconduct, etc. — because the greater good is being served.

Perhaps 15 years ago, when schools were in better shape financially and when the failings of the education status quo weren’t so relentlessly obvious, this claim to behave amorally for the greater good might not have seemed so ridiculous.

But in an era in which struggling school districts routinely spend almost every last dollar on the pay and benefits of adult employees, it is ludicrous.

If a private institution behaved in such relentlessly self-serving and dishonest fashion, it would be a pariah. Its financial manipulations would put its executives at risk of incarceration. Its failings at its core mission would lead to massive job turnover and endless soul-searching. Its constant resistance to basic accountability measures such as assessing job performance would be derided as hopelessly backwards and counterproductive.

Appalling

But while individual issues and scandals often draw the proper response, no one ever connects the dots on all the different ways the California education establishment behaves in unscrupulous and dishonest ways. The cumulative picture is appalling.

Trying to keep food trucks away from schools to prop up student spending at cafeterias, while pathetic, is relatively minor. Yet it precisely reflects the anything-goes fervor of the school status quo movement.

How long before someone proposes locking up parents whose kids miss school and thus cost districts the ADA money they need to pay teachers’ salaries?

Don’t scoff. Not only am I not being facetious, this is already law in California. Parents of a student who misses 10 percent or more of school days can be jailed up for up to a year.

This is what it’s come to in the Golden State.

Connect the dots, people. Connect the dots.

Food fight!

I love it when kids rebel against the government schools. Reported CBS Los Angeles: “The revamped school lunches at Los Angeles Unified School District have won awards, commending them for improving the menu at the second largest school district in the nation. Too bad the students don’t agree.

“Rejecting healthful alternatives like vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles, students are throwing them in the trash by the thousands, bringing junk food from home and buying instant noodles and other decidedly unhealthy fare from the ‘black markets’ that have begun to thrive at campuses across the district, according to the Los Angeles Times.”

If the food smugglers get caught they really would have a “Twinkie Defense.”

More: “The kerfluffle led to LAUSD’s decision to change the menu in favor of healthier options. The district decided to do away with chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk.

“Now, the Times reports cartons of plain milk are being thrown away en masse, unopened, along with uneaten entrees. Participation in the school lunch program has dropped by thousands of students, who are ditching lunch and are suffering from hunger-related ailments.”

One problem is that it’s much disputed what’s a “healthy” lunch for kids. The schools push the federal government’s vegetable/carb-heavy Food Pyramid.

But what about the low-carb/paleo/Atkins diets that emphasize meat, eggs and cheese? What about kids with Celiac disease, who can’t have gluten (in bread, pasta, etc.)?

Food Diversity?

Usually, the LAUSD is ultra-politically correct when it comes to ethnic diversity. Its Web site boasts: “The Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity is committed to fostering a safe and respectful District, school and community culture where the seeds of peace and justice are sown so that all students and staff can lead safe, purposeful and academically fruitful lives.”

The district has identified 92 different languages spoken in the homes of its students, a rough approximation of ethnic background. Why then does it push only one food menu? Shouldn’t it have 92 menus, with the food adjusted to what the kids chow down at home from Mom?

As usual, the government doesn’t like dissonance, even in a system that prepares 650,000 lunches a day. It can’t accept that there can be conflicting, unreconcilable explanations for something. It can’t get beyond the lobbyists, such as the powerful grain and processed food companies that push the “healthy” food on kids.

The LAUSD has responded the only way it knows how: “The complaints have been heard and LAUSD is planning changes to the menu, the Times reports. Burgers and (healthy) pizza are coming back, and dishes like quinoa salads and brown rice cutlets are out.”

Let’s hope this food rebellion turns bigger and overturns the whole rotten government schools system. The kids hate the system, so why make them stay?

Abolish the government schools. Kids who want to study then will do so with enthusiasm, in private schools. Those that don’t can work. But better than the government schools would be to unleash the kids to run wild in the streets.

Jan. 21, 2012

JUNE 17, 2011

By JOHN SEILER

California Controller John Chiang says he’s the man who decides whether state legislators have met the Proposition 25 requirement to pass a balanced budget — or get their pay docked. So far, he’s waffling. He said:

We are awaiting the final budget bill language before we be gin our examination. In addition, we have asked the Department of Finance, which tracks and tallies the Legislature’s budget activities, for data to inform our decision.

But everybody knows the budget isn’t balanced. That’s why Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it. As he said yesterday in his veto statement:

Unfortunately, the budget I have received is not a balanced solution. It continues big deficits for years to come and adds billions of dollars of new debt. It also contains legally questionable maneuvers, costly borrowing and unrealistic savings. Finally, it is not financeable and therefore will not allow us to meet our obligations as they occur.

That’s obvious. What is Chiang waiting for? If you don’t work, you shouldn’t be paid. At least that’s always how it’s been in the private sector that I’ve worked in.

Prop. 15’s Language

The language of Prop. 25 is clear:

in any year in which the budget bill is not passed by the Legislature by midnight on June 15, there shall be no appropriation from the current budget or future budget to pay any salary or reimbursement for travel or living expenses for Members of the Legislature during any regular or special session for the period from midnight on June 15 until the day that the budget bill is presented to the Governor.

The actual budget passed June 15 was a fake budget, as Gov. Brown rightly said, so no budget really was passed.

And here’s how Prop. 25 was sold to voters. Note the bumper sticker at the right. It says, “No excuses.”

And the YouTube at the top of this article is an ad that sold Prop. 25 to voters, who passed the initiative with 55 percent of the vote. It says, “For every day the budget’s late, legislators lose their pay and benefits … permanently…. It holds legislators accountable for late budgets — period.”

Note that “period.” No if’s and’s, but’s — or fake budgets.

Rubber Room

Maybe the problem is that so many Democratic legislators come from government-union backgrounds. So they’re used to “featherbedding,” under which a union employee is paid not to work.

And in unionized schools, there’s even a special phrase, “rubber room,” where they put bad teachers who can’t be fired. The L.A. Times reported of the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2009:

About 160 teachers and other staff sit idly in buildings scattered around the sprawling district, waiting for allegations of misconduct to be resolved.

The housed are accused, among other things, of sexual contact with students, harassment, theft or drug possession. Nearly all are being paid. All told, they collect about $10 million in salaries per year — even as the district is contemplating widespread layoffs of teachers because of a financial shortfall.

Most cases take months to adjudicate, but some take years.

At least they’re not teaching the kids.

If Chiang doesn’t dock the legislators’ pay, the Capitol will be just a giant rubber room.

Gov. Jerry Brown and the teachers unions (but I repeat myself) are lobbying for $12 billion in tax increases “for the children.” The kids will suffer, supposedly, if massive cuts are made to their schools. (Never mind that hefty teacher pay and pensions could be cut.)

But, where’s the money going now?

There’s yet another scandal in L.A. Unified. The Los Angeles Times reported:

L.A. Unified sues over contamination at new Glassell Park campus

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been a constant salesman on the topic of public schools, pushing for reforms, helping elect new school board members and raising millions of dollars for local campuses.

But those efforts didn’t stop school board members, including some who were elected with the mayor’s help, from taking City Hall to court over a contaminated campus in Glassell Park.

The Los Angeles Unified School District filed the federal lawsuit earlier this year, alleging that solvents and other hazardous substances at an empty city-owned lot seeped into the soil at a 2,295-seat high school being built next to the Los Angeles River.

The case presents the latest twist in the history of the $239-million project in the Taylor Yard area northeast of downtown….

William Carter, [City Atty. Carmen] Trutanich’s chief deputy, said the city cleaned up its property in 2005. And he disagreed with the notion that the city has responsibility for the district’s remediation work.

“It’s obvious that L.A. Unified understood they were purchasing contaminated property — not to say that it was contaminated by our property,” he said.

So, because the LAUSD picked a contaminated site for a school, the city taxpayers and school taxpayers (the same people) pay for everything: contaminated property, cleanup, lawyers for the city, lawyers for the school.

The California Department of Toxic Substances Control even has a site for the cleanup.

By the way, the school will have 85 classrooms. Hasn’t LAUSD heard that this is a time of devolution and decentralization — of smaller organization units? The current model of massive, factory-style public schools was devised a century ago to mass-produce students who would go on to become mass-production factory workers.

This school boondoggle comes after hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on the infamous Belmont High School, which was built on a toxic site.

And after an L.A. Times series earlier this year exposed the vast waste in the L.A. Community Colleges’ $5.7 billion construction bond.

If we just cut out all this waste, there would be no problem funding schools — and certainly no need to draw more blood from taxpayers.

May 3, 2011

By JOHN SEILER

Bilingual education may be creeping back in California. Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times included an op-ed by Ruben Martinez, a professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University, about a new bilingual ed program at the public school his children will attend.

He wants his twins to grow up bilingual. So he spoke to them in Spanish, while his wife spoke to them in English. Most of the other people in his kids’ lives also spoke to them in English. He was advised on this method by “my colleague Rebeca Acevedo, a linguist and professor of Spanish at Loyola Marymount University.” Martinez writes:

These thoughts weren’t much on our minds when we moved to Mount Washington, a neighborhood with a top-ranked elementary school at the top of the hill. But then we heard that Aldama Elementary School in neighboring Highland Park had recently inaugurated a dual-language immersion program. Maybe I’d finally get some backup for Spanish — and in a public school classroom, no less.

Programs like Aldama’s combine “English learners” with “English proficient” students. Half the day’s lessons are in English, and the other half in the so-called target language. The Los Angeles Unified School District has dual-language programs in Spanish, Korean and Mandarin, and they are increasingly popular; the average growth rate of four or five new programs each year has doubled this year.

But Prop. 227 bans such programs at public schools, Lance Izumi told me; he’s Koret Senior Fellow in Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank. “I see people who are trying to skirt Prop. 227 all the time,” he said. “They’ve been trying to do it since the initiative passed, bringing in bilingual education under the cover of ‘dual immersion’.” That’s the phrase Martinez write is used of Aldama Elementary’s program.

Izumi pointed to a 2008 study of his, “Bilingual Ed Not Dead,” which found pockets of resistance across the state to Prop. 227’s implementation.

I’m all for parents teaching their children however they wish. That’s why there are private and parochial schools, as well as home schools. But public schools, which are funded by taxpayers, are supposed to follow the law, in this case Prop. 227.

As a professor at a major university, Martinez is in the upper-middle class. His children are growing up in an environment that encourages learning. They probably will attend major universities themselves.

Izumi pointed out that bilingual ed — or dual immersion — was allowed for Prop. 227 with a parental waver, but only for one year. “Even dual immersion is supposed to be overwhelmingly in English,” he said. “Even then, it’s a transition. Under Prop. 227, kids who are English-language learners are supposed to become English-only after a year.”

Prop. 227 Raised Test Scores

A genuine improvement in California politics in recent decades was the demise — mostly — of bilingual education becuase of Ron Unz’s Proposition 227 in 1998. It was called the English for the Children initiative. According to Ballotpedia, Prop. 227:

Requires California public schools to teach [Limited English Proficient] students in special classes that are taught nearly all in English. This provision had the effect of eliminating “bilingual” classes in most cases.

According to a 2009 report in City Journal:

Hispanic test scores on a range of subjects have risen since Prop. 227 became law….

Two broad observations about the aftermath of Prop. 227 are incontestable. First: despite desperate efforts at stonewalling by bilingual diehards within school bureaucracies, the incidence of bilingual education in California has dropped precipitously—from enrolling 30 percent of the state’s English learners to enrolling 4 percent….

Second: California’s English learners have made steady progress on a range of tests since 1998. That progress is all the more impressive since school districts can no longer keep their lowest-performing English learners out of the testing process. In 1998, 29 percent of school districts submitted under half of their English learners to the statewide reading and writing test; today, close to 100 percent of the state’s English learners participate. Despite this, the performance of English learners has improved significantly, from 10 percent scoring “proficient” or “advanced” (the top two categories) in 2003 to 20 percent in 2009. Similarly, on the English proficiency test given to nonnative speakers, the fraction of English learners scoring as “early advanced” or “advanced” (the top two categories) has increased from 25 percent in 2001, when the test was first administered, to 39 percent this year.

(This City Journal article also includes a concise history of the bilingual ed boondoggle, as well as reasons why obtaining more exact data on student achievement is difficult.)

Trendy Yuppies

Here’s Martinez describing how the upscale parents pushed for the program:

The initial push didn’t come from working-class immigrant parents but from middle-class newcomers. Courtney Mykytyn, a local mother with a new doctorate in medical anthropology, led the charge for Aldama’s dual-language program. Mykytyn refers to herself and other middle-class, professional parents at the school as the “hummus people,” because that is what they bring to parent potlucks — in contrast to the Doritos or tamales others would bring….

Establishing the program at Aldama took a lot of time and political effort, the kind of time that hummus people tend to have more of. But, Mykytyn says, eventually there was also buy-in from working-class families attracted by promises of higher achievement and cultural pride.

Except, as noted above, bilingual ed does not bring “higher achievement.” It likely doesn’t affect the upscale kids who take it. It’s the “working-class families” who suffer, as always, from schemes like this. Remember the “Whole Language” and “New New math” fads of two decades ago that decimated educations across California until they were jettisoned?

My fear is that these programs will grow into a resurgence of bilingual ed for all students for whom English is not the first language. Bilingual ed teachers get extra training and extra pay, encouraging school districts to advance bilingual ed to get more money.

The programs also enjoy the promotion of groups such as the California Association for Bilingual Education. Here’s how it describes itself:

The California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) is a non-profit organization incorporated in 1976 to promote bilingual education and quality educational experiences for all students in California. CABE has 5,000 members with over 60 chapters/affiliates, all working to promote equity and student achievement for students with diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds. CABE recognizes and honors the fact that we live in a rich multicultural, global society and that respect for diversity makes us a stronger state and nation.

CABE’s vision: “Biliteracy and Educational Equity for All”

The problem is that bilingual ed, after decades in use, failed to deliver the educational achievement that was promised.

Certainly, learning a second or even third language is to be encouraged. But the traditional way of teaching each language by itself, which is followed everywhere else in the world, is the proper method, not bilingual ed.

Poor Kids

Most kids in California schools, of course, do not have a professor as a parent. Many often come from poor backgrounds. Their best hope of making it in American society is learning English, by far the main business language both of the United States and the global economy. When German and Southern Korean business executives get together, they speak English.

That was the reasoning behind Prop. 227: At least get the kids to learn English at a decent level of proficiency. That’ll be a good start. A second language can be taught on top of that.

Another problem is that of funding. As I reported last year, the L.A. Unified School District spends an incredible $30,000 a year per student. Yet the district’s high-school graduation rate is just 40.6 percent, the second lowest in the country after Detroit’s rate. There’s a strong disconnect between cost and performance.

As usual, a government system — in this case, the public schools — doesn’t perform well and costs too much. If the bilingual ed program Martinez is touting spreads to other schools, performance will drop even further.

Kids at the lowest rung of the educational ladder will suffer as a result. Their one chance at making it in America, learning English, will have been taken from them.

“We need to constantly keep an eye on this stuff,” Izumi warned. “It’s amazing how much slips through the cracks.”

By JOHN SEILER

The research by Adam Schaeffer of the Cato Institute’s Center for Education Freedom seemed shocking: The Los Angeles Unified School District spent $29,780 per student in fiscal year 2007-08. That’s way above the $10,000 as advertised by the school district, and as used in most studies.

The $29,780 per student figure means a class of 25 students would spend $744,500 a year.

I talked to Schaeffer and had him send me his research, which I’ll append to this article. He also pointed to a more comprehensive study he conducted in March, “They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools,” which tracked and compared school-district spending around the country. It includes data on LAUSD that was updated in his more recent research. The earlier study found a wide divergence in total spending in California school districts, such as only $11,215 for Linwood Unified and $20,751 for Beverly Hills Unified.

I also talked to the LAUSD and to Lance Izumi,  Koret Senior Fellow in Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent institute.

Basically, what Schaeffer found was that the LAUSD doesn’t count capital spending, such as from local and state bond measures passed by voters. For example, $1.18 billion was spent in 2007-08 from Measure R, which 64 percent of voters passed in March 2004. And the district spent $668 million from state Proposition 55, also on the March 2004 ballot. According to Ballotopedia, it barely passed with 50.9 percent of the votes. Both were bonds.

Those and similar measures were passed during the boom times of the California economy. It’s a good question whether voters would pass them during the current deep recession. It’s also curious that these bonds, and similar ones, were passed at a time when state and LAUSD student enrollment has been declining.

Why isn’t this money accounted for in the usual per-pupil tallies? “They act as if its ‘bond revenue. Oh, it’s not tax money’,” Schaeffer told me. “What the districts do is like credit card debt. It’s revolving. When you bring it up, they always move the topic of the conversation to, ‘we froze salaries and cut positions’.”

LAUSD responds

I called up LAUSD, talked to Spokesperson Lydia Ramos, and sent her links to Schaeffer’s research. A week later I called her for her perspective. “Essentially it’s going to be difficult to comment,” she replied. “Most school districts don’t count capital funding” in budget reports. “We obviously are doing our best to pass every dollar down to the classroom.”

I pointed out that, when I buy something at Walmart, the price includes the costs of capital spending for buildings. “That’s not how we view our work,” she replied. And she said of the money sent for capital construction from Sacramento, “That’s really a state decision. When no one else does it” – includes capital spending in per-pupil spending numbers. “Why are we perceived as under-reporting when no one uses this methodology?”

I brought up Schaeffer’s number of $29,780 per student and asked if that was correct. “You’re using a methodology that only you are using,” Ramos replied. “No, that’s not accurate. That’s not what we’re doing. I’m going to have to let you go. This is an issue to take up with the state, or your local district, to see what they are doing.” [This is the first time in my 35 years of journalism that an official spokesperson has hung up on me.]

Because LAUSD gets both state and federal tax dollars, its spending is of interest to those outside the district’s boundaries.

Legitimate costs

“Those are legitimate costs to include,” Izumi told me of the capital costs. “They can say they don’t count it. But the specification for those costs always is that they will help kids.”

For example, as Ballotopedia recorded, Prop. 55’s ballot question asked state voters, “Should the state sell twelve billion three hundred million dollars ($12,300,000,000) in general obligation bonds for construction and renovation of K-12 school facilities and higher education facilities?” The bond had almost no opposition. Major funding behind the measure came from the California Teachers Association and the California Building Industry Association.

The cost of Prop. 55 is about $823 million per year, a significant contributor to the state’s current $19 billion budget deficit. LAUSD’s 694,288 students in 2007-08 were about 11 percent of the state’s approximately 6.3 million public-school students.

As to the LAUSD’s insistence on excluding capital costs, Izumi asked, “Would these kids learn the same if they were sitting in the park some place? To not include those costs is only to give half the story about what’s being spent in those schools. If the district had a disagreement with what the Cato Institute put out, then they should engage in argument about it. If the district isn’t willing to engage, then you have to wonder how strong a case they have.

“They didn’t say they disagreed with it. They just said they didn’t include the figures the Cato Institute used. That gives credence to Cato’s methodology. Public schools often aren’t willing to engage in debate.”

For its $29,780 spent per student, LAUSD’s graduation rate is 40.6 percent, second worst in the country.

John Seiler, an editorial writer with The Orange County Register for 20 years, is a reporter and analyst for CalWatchDog.com. His email: writejohnseiler@gmail.com.

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Appendix: Los Angeles Unified School District Budget Data, Fiscal 2007-08: