The study — prepared by researchers from Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and the Los Angeles Unified School District — found that in seven small- and medium-sized districts it evaluated, two-thirds of English learners receiving special education are classified as having a “specific learning disability.” That’s more than double the rate for other students receiving special education.

This suggests that districts are failing to make a distinction between not being fluent in English and not having the full learning capacity of a normal child. The study says changes are needed “in both the current classification system for students learning English and in the provision of services for these students. Specifically, they indicate that EL classification is too blunt an instrument to capture accurately the diverse learning needs of students learning English, and that reclassification is elusive for many students, sometimes for problematic reasons. Our research also points to weaknesses in the provision of services for English learners, especially in terms of full access to core content and teachers’ level of preparedness to work with students acquiring English.”

For years, Gov. Jerry Brown has called the education of the 1.4 million English-learner students in state public schools the most important issue in California, given the need for these students to end up as productive members of a healthy economy. But the urgency with which Brown framed the issue hasn’t translated into actual efforts by the California Department of Education, the State Board of Education or most school districts to do a better job of evaluating these students and trying to maximize their education outcomes, the new research suggests.

Fixes to system not necessarily costly

Ed Source’s coverage of the study noted one of its most interesting points: Improving evaluations wouldn’t necessarily be all that costly:

The report also said that the initial English learner classification is overly broad and does not reflect home conditions, family education and wealth, which are predictive of how quickly an English learner will likely become proficient. The classification rates vary significantly among districts, the report said. It also noted “troubling achievement gaps among English learners of different linguistic and national origins,” with 90 percent English learners of Chinese origin in one district reclassified by middle school, compared to 65 percent of Hispanic English learners.

 

Citing the need to expand access to core academic instruction, bilingual instruction and better prepared teachers, the report concluded, “Changes along these lines would not necessarily require large new investments, but they could yield substantial benefits for large numbers of California students.”

But it’s unsure if these recommendations will prompt action by the governor, the Legislature or state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson. All have faced criticism over the implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula, a 2013 state law that was supposed to direct additional resources to educate English language learners. The Legislative Analyst’s Office reported in January that it did not find adequate safeguards for the use of the resources in any of the 50 state school districts it surveyed.

The new study’s formal title is “Improving the Opportunities and Outcomes of California’s Students Learning English.” A 16-page policy brief on its findings can be found here.

The rankings were based on 10 factors relating to how many graduates started successful companies and to how much help they got from their schools and alumni networks.

Stanford being tops in the world comes as no surprise, given how much it is linked to the emergence of Silicon Valley as the world’s technology center. From the students who launched Google to the hundreds of other science, finance and business whizzes who attended the Palo Alto school, the university, its Graduate School of Business and its Center for Entrepreneurial Studies have served as an enormous economic engine.

USD’s and USC’s presence on the list might seem surprising to those unfamiliar with their histories.

The University of San Diego, like Stanford, also benefits from geography. The La Jolla/Torrey Pines area seven miles from its campus is one of the world’s leading centers of the interconnected fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology and life sciences, along with San Francisco and Boston. The university’s business school has won raves from Business Week and U.S. News and World Report for its “custom” MBA program that provides students who know what fields they want to enter or who are already with a company with coursework that precisely aligns with their needs.

The University of Southern California, located in Inglewood, doesn’t have such a geographic nexus with a tech center, and the prominence of the university’s football team has long cast a shadow over USC’s very ambitious academics programs. But USC’s Marshall School of Business has won vast praise for its Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, which puts a heavy emphasis on having aspiring entrepreneurs develop extensive relationships with successful entrepreneurs, both those from USC and other academic backgrounds. It’s won kudos from Princeton Review, Entrepreneur Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, and Business Week.

Three other U.S. MBA programs — all from Massachusetts — made Financial Times’ Top 10. MIT was second, Harvard was fifth and little-known Babson College — which offers only business degrees at its Wellesley campus and has successfully focused on entrepreneurship since its 1919 founding — finished eighth.

Kennedy was born in Sacramento, California, on July 23, 1936. He married Mary Davis and has three children. He received his B.A. from Stanford University and the London School of Economics, and his LL.B. from Harvard Law School.

 

He was in private practice in San Francisco, California from 1961-1963, as well as in Sacramento, California from 1963-1975. From 1965 to 1988, he was a Professor of Constitutional Law at the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific. He [was] a member of the California Army National Guard in 1961 …

 

He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1975. President Reagan nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat February 18, 1988.

Father was a well-known Sacramento lawyer

Kennedy was the last U.S. Supreme Court nominee without any Senate opposition.

Kennedy’s father was a Sacramento lawyer who had frequent dealings with the California Legislature; he was friendly with Gov. Earl Warren, who would go on to be chief justice. This is from a Washington Post profile of Anthony Kennedy in December 1987 after his high court nomination:

Kennedy [was] the second child of parents by then deeply imbedded in the civic life of the modestly proportioned city that serves as California’s state capital.

Kennedy’s father, Anthony J. (Bud) Kennedy, was a lawyer and lobbyist locally famous for his charm and caginess amidst old-line California politics; the senior Kennedy was reputed to have helped finance his law school years as a poker player, a tale he apparently made no effort to discourage, and that image stayed with him throughout much of his working life. …

“Kind of a shrewd, cardplayer’s view of life,” said Dozier, who remembers vividly the big white house with the train set and the ping-pong table and the closet perpetually stocked with sports equipment. …

“A lot of business was done over the breakfast room table or the back patio,” said Dana Smith, a petroleum and chemical executive who was married to the younger Anthony Kennedy’s late sister Nancy. “You might find anybody in there, from the Portuguese immigrant Delta farmer … . You could find the grocer stopping off and having a drink after he’d closed his store. You could find the priest in there.”

His heart just wasn’t in lobbying state lawmakers

Kennedy returned to his home state after thriving at Harvard, the Post account notes:

Kennedy graduated cum laude from law school, was taken into a prestigious San Francisco firm, and within a year was back in Sacramento to cope with his father’s estate. The senior Kennedy had died of a heart attack while on a business trip in Los Angeles, and despite his relative inexperience, Tony Kennedy took over his father’s Sacramento law practice, lobbying clients and all.

The men who watched Kennedy work, lobbyists and legislators alike, saw a businesslike young man who evidently had little interest in courting legislators with the cocktail party and enthusiastic handshake. His clients included the Schenley distillery company and an opticians’ organization, and men then in the California legislature describe him as having been invariably well-prepared, brisk, and low-key as he argued his client’s position on a pending bill.

“He was a bashful lobbyist, as compared to the public image of a backslapping, cigar-smoking, let’s-go-have-a-drink good old boy,” said San Francisco attorney Bill Bagley, who served in the California state assembly for 14 years. “He didn’t want to accost people, and say, ‘Hey, man, give me a vote.’ It’s not his style.” …

“He acted like it was something he really wasn’t enjoying,” said former state senator Paul Lunardi, who left politics in 1966 and became a lobbyist for the Wine Institute. “I think he wanted to be a lawyer more than a lobbyist.”

Justice Breyer also a California native

Justice Stephen Breyer is the other high court member from California. He was born in San Francisco in 1938; he debated Jerry Brown in high school competitions. Breyer’s father was for years the lead counsel for the San Francisco school board. His brother, Charles, is a sitting judge on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

All nine Supreme Court justices were born in four states — four in New York (Roberts, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan) , two in New Jersey (Scalia and Alito), two in California and one in Georgia (Thomas).

By Wayne Lusvardi

When hosting TV game show “Family Feud,” the late host Richard Dawson made famous his line: “Survey says!”

There’s a new study out on how millionaires react to tax increases. What does the survey say?

“Millionaire Migration in California: The Impact of Top Tax Rates” is by Charles Varner and Cristobal Young, both of the Stanford University Center on Poverty and Inequality.

The study says:

* The flight of millionaires from California due to higher income tax rates from pending Proposition 30 is likely to be minuscule.  Only a maximum of 120 millionaires a year could leave or 1,200 over ten years. (Proposition 30 would raise the state income tax on those making $250,000 or more a year, with the top rate rising 3 percentage points, to 13.3 percent.)

* The highest income Californians were less likely to leave the state when the Mental Health Services Tax was passed in 2005.

* The number of non-resident millionaires who pay some taxes in California did not rise when the Mental Health tax was imposed.

* The 1996 state tax cuts did not have a consistent and substantial effect on retaining residents in California or attracting in-migrants from other states.

* The strongest out-migration factor was marital divorce.  Tax policies are “modest when compared to the life impact of marital dissolution.”

* Most millionaires fall into the highest tax bracket because of a peak year of earnings, such as real estate brokers, during the Mortgage Bubble.  So millionaires are not as likely to move if Prop. 30 passes, and their top income tax rate toes from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent on a peak year of earnings.

Left out

Briefly, here is what the study didn’t say, or didn’t interpret properly:

* The largest out-migrations of Californians of all income levels have occurred during real estate booms such as the Mortgage Bubble, not during economic recessions. The largest net out-migration of California millionaires was in 2004, during the Mortgage Bubble, with 63 leaving (Stanford study, Page 22, Table 3.1).

* In-migration of millionaires from other states offsets the number of California millionaire out-migrations in most years. The larger problem is that the number of millionaires in California has declined by 61,410 since 2002. If this trend continues to 2019, when Prop. 30 expires, any tax increase on millionaires would be on 71,645 fewer millionaires than in 2012

* The percentage of those with incomes from $500,000 to $1 million that migrated out of California during the Mortgage Bubble from 2005 to 2007 rose 74 percent on average compared to the recessionary years of 2001 to 2004.

Divorce

* There were 150,180 divorces in California in 2003-04.  In that same year, only 857 millionaires and 63 net millionaires moved out of California. The gross number of millionaire out-migrants (0.5 percent) and the net number of out-migrants (0.4 percent) are too small to be of statistical significance to generalize that divorce is the main cause of millionaire tax flight.  Most statisticians warn that such small numbers can lead to hasty generalization.

* Divorce rates for the middle class tend to fall during recessions and rise during booms, albeit the data are mixed.  Divorce rates dropped during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Divorce does not appear to be the main driver of relocation out of state unless it is related to home foreclosure, mainly for those in lower income brackets.  The Stanford study confuses a symptom for a cause and tends to reduce the reasons for out-migration to psychological marital incompatibility. Divorce is not the main driver for people to move to California, nor to move out.

* The imposition of the state Mental Health Tax during the Mortgage Bubble is not a valid indicator for tax flight during a prolonged managed depression.

* To conduct a valid scientific study about millionaire tax flight, a comparison needs to be made between millionaires who left the state and those that did not. Instead, the Stanford study made a comparison of a so-called “Control Group” of those in the $500,000 to $1,000,000 income bracket with a “Treatment Group” in the $1,000,001 to $1 billion income bracket.  This is obviously not a valid apples-to-apples comparison (see Table 3.3).

* Low tax rates and business regulations appear to have a significant bearing on choice of state to relocate to.  All the “sender states” with the largest number of in-migrants to California have unfavorable tax and business climates; and all the “destination states” have better tax and business rankings by a factor of two (2 X).  Even if size of state is considered, there is a much greater tendency for out-migrants to flee to low tax-low regulation states.

* If divorce were a large factor in out-migration, then we would expect out-migrants to tend to move back to old family and community ties in their states of origin rather than to low tax states.  But that is not the case.  Moreover, the researchers ignored what is called “strategic divorce,” or “postnuptial agreements” where wealthy couples divorce to protect assets when there is financial stress.

Out-migration

* A Mercatus Center 2011 study found that higher state income-tax rates cause a net out-migration of both higher income residents and all residents.

* Of course, all this controversy dodges the question: Will future millionaires avoid residing in California?

In conclusion regarding wealth redistribution by taxing the wealthy, as Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman wrote:

 “There is all the difference in the world, however, between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: First, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in order to help the bottom 10 percent, and second, 80 percent voting to impose taxes on the top 10 percent to help the bottom 10 percent.

“The first may be wise or unwise, an effective or ineffective way to help the disadvantaged — but it is consistent with belief in both equality of opportunity and liberty. The second seeks equality of outcome and is entirely antithetical to liberty.”

Commentary

July 24, 2012

By John Seiler

Anyone who observes California politics knows that the government-worker unions dominate the state from top to bottom. They forced union pension spiking on the state a decade ago, leading to the spate of bankruptcies by cities here; and to the effective insolvency of the state government itself. The state simply cannot pay the $500 billion unfunded liability for state pension funds, according to a Stanford study.

Union dominance means that union bosses effectively sit on both sides of the negotiating table: as workers, and as employer — because union clout at the polls means the elections make union hacks like Gov. Jerry Brown the employer.

Proposition 32, on the ballot in November, would curb union power. According to the official ballot summary, it “Restricts union political fundraising by prohibiting use of payroll-deducted funds for political purposes.” Union members still could contribute to political causes. But they wouldn’t have their paychecks directly pilfered for union campaigns.

Not surprisingly, the major leftist organizations in the state oppose it, beginning with Common Cause and the supposedly unbiased League of Women Voters.

“It’s not at all what it seems,” said Trudy Schafer, of the state League of Women Voters, as reported in the Mercury News. “It promises political reform but it’s really designed by its special interest backers to help themselves and harm their opponents.” The backers are anti-union activists in Orange County.

But without this reform, the state really will go bankrupt — if it hasn’t already — because of union looting.

Common Cause

“I’m all for campaign finance reform,” said Derek Cressman, western regional director for Common Cause. “I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life working for campaign finance reform. I know campaign finance reform, and, friends, Prop. 32 is not campaign finance reform.”

Actually, Common Cause has worked to suppress free speech. Back in the 1970s, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, at the national level the group was instrumental in the so-called Watergate reforms that severely restricted campaign contributions. Doing so made elections so complicated that only professionals and rich people could run for office — not just for national office, but in many cases even for local offices.

It was a typical liberal “reform” that had the opposite effect of what was intended. Instead of reducing the power of the rich, it increased it. Before, a candidate for the U.S. Congress, for example, could tap a few rich people for campaign contributions. After the “reforms,” the candidate has to be rich himself to fund much of his campaign; or he has to spend most of his time fundraising small amounts. The result was that a good local candidate with ideas and character finds it almost impossible to run for office.

Political vacuum

Another result was that unions filled the political vacuum once they were given collective bargaining rights, which they were in California in 1977 with the Dills Act. It’s the same old story: The Left empowers itself and calls it “reform.”

Reported the Mercury News, “Still, labor groups view the ballot measure as a deadly threat and have far outpaced supporters in the money chase. Since the most recent finance reports on April 30, they’ve added $3.4 million to the $3.9 million cash they had on hand for a total of $7.3 million. The Yes side has $1.9 million.”

So it’s going to be tough the get this reform passed. A similar reform, Proposition 75, was on the ballot in 2005 as one of four initiatives on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reform platform in that year’s November Special Election. The whole reform plank was badly conceived. And Schwarzenegger gave it his usual half-hearted attempt. He only ever campaigned hard for himself. After his reform plank was defeated, Schwarzenegger turned sharply to the left, passing massive new regulations, such as AB 32 and tax increases, that left the state in ruins similar to those on that island at the end of his movie “Commando.”

But the joke is on the unions, unCommon Cause, the League of Liberal Women Voters and their leftist cohorts. There’s no more money. Business and jobs are fleeing the state. California is going to have to cut union pay, perks and pensions — no matter what.

When you strangle the goose it no longer lays Golden State eggs.

Putting its investment projections slightly more in line with reality, yesterday CalSTRS downgraded its fund forecast. According to its own announcement, “The governing board of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) today adopted a new set of actuarial assumptions, including lowering the investment return assumption from 7.75 percent to 7.5 percent. The change is part of a four-year experience analysis that sets the parameters for determining the financial health of the system.

“The assumptions update the actuarial experience analysis covering 2006 through 2010 and are used to evaluate the impact of both demographic and economic factors on the long-range financial health of CalSTRS. These assumptions, in turn, have a significant impact on the valuation of the plan, a snapshot of its financial health, scheduled to come before the Teachers’ Retirement Board in April.

“The most recent past valuation, presented in April 2011, showed a $56 billion funding shortfall, meaning that available assets fell $56 billion short of the system’s long-term obligations.”

That means California taxpayers are on the hook for making up that $56 billion.

But at least some reality has crept into the CalSTRS projections.

By contrast, sister fund CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, has refused to change its assumptions. Reported Bloomberg, “Last March, the CalPERS board voted to maintain its 7.75 percent assumed rate, rejecting its actuaries’ recommendation to lower it to 7.5 percent.

“Of the 11 U.S. pension funds with assets of more than $50 billion, CalSTRS and systems in Wisconsin and New York reduced their assumptions since 2007-08, according to the staff report to the CalSTRS board.

“New York City owes its pensions more than previously anticipated because officials have been too optimistic in assuming an 8 percent return on the $115.2 billion that the five funds hold in assets, Chief Actuary Robert North has said.

“A more realistic expectation would be 7 percent, which would increase the city’s liability by about $2 billion if paid in one year, North said in a telephone interview.”

Actually, a Stanford study found that even CalSTRS’ 7.5 percent assumption is too optimistic — that 6 percent or lower is more realistic.

These state pension funds still don’t acknowledge that the 2007-09 Great Recession, and the tepid recovery since, scrambled all their calculations of fund gains. Taxpayers increasingly will be dinged to pay for the shortfalls.

Reform is more needed than ever.

Feb. 3, 2012