“The teaching profession is critical to California’s economic success and impacts every vocation and profession in the state,” state Sen. Henry Stern said in a statement. “SB807 addresses the immediate teacher shortage and sends a loud and clear message across the state and nation: California values teachers.”

Senate Bill 807 would exempt teachers from paying state income tax after teaching for five years and would also provide a tax deduction for costs relating to obtaining credentials.

It comes at a time when California is scrambling to hire teachers, as between 20 percent to 40 percent of teachers leave the profession after the first five years, according to recent research, and the amount of teachers is at a 12-year low.

But critics say it’s an impractical solution to combating the problem of poor-performing schools.

“If you take an entire class of people based on their occupation and say that they are somehow ‘more deserving’ than everyone else and should be exempted from paying state income taxes, what other groups might qualify?” conservative commentator Jazz Shaw, writing for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, argued.

The bill comes at a time when proficiency rates among California students still are under 50 percent, as 49 percent in English and just 37 percent in math scored proficient on CAASP tests in 2016, with minority students scoring even lower.

It’s also unclear what effect the bill would have, as opponents have noted it appears to be a measure to provide monies to veteran teachers, where retention is less of an issue, at the expense of the taxpayer.

Furthermore, the starting salaries at even small high schools stands near $44,000, just slightly less than the median household income in the U.S., which stands at around $50,000.

If teachers are exempt from paying income tax, is raises the question of what other occupations may qualify due to their perceived importance in society.

Details on the effect on tax revenues have not been released and the California Teacher Association has so far not taken a position on the proposed legislation.

But today’s Halloween is a wee bit different than the Halloween traditions I enjoyed as a child.

This year, I will not open my front door to the usual hobgoblins, ghosts, witches and pirates; my front porch will be visited instead by adults wearing sports jerseys or no costume, who demand candy… or else.

Old versus new

According to Welsh mythology, Halloween marked the end of the harvest season and beginning of the ‘darker half’ of the year, winter. It was seen as a special time, when the spirits or fairies could more easily come into our world and were particularly active. Offerings of food and drink, or portions of the crops, were left for the fairies. Places were set at the dinner table or by the fire to welcome them. After this the eating, drinking, and games were played.

Halloween entitlement society

The last five years, Halloween in my neighborhood has become a freak show. No longer is it about little children donning scary and cute costumes and Trick-or-Treating for candy and goodies.

Buses and vans now drop off loads of children, teens and adults. Some wear costumes, many don’t. Young girls wear wildly inappropriate costumes, often with their parents in tow.

My first memory of Halloween was in the late 1960’s. I dressed in a tacky Blue Fairy costume with a creepy plastic mask. To my chagrin, this costume is now sold on eBay as “vintage.

No longer is the candy request “trick-or-treat;” I open the door to angry faces, intimidating and defensive stances, thrusting open pillow cases at me, while their vans and rented buses idle nearby.

The standard “costume” is greasepaint under the eyes and a NFL jersey… or a plain white T-shirt.

Until last year I used to say, “no costume, no candy.” But that only got my sprinkler heads kicked off, crushed pumpkins, and broken potted plants.

Before calls of racism and elitism are leveled at me, here is an example of the attitude:

“Every Halloween some (mostly) suburban olds start firing off letters to the Editor of the local paper frothing about the *wrong kids* Trick-or-Treating on their lawns. They have a big problem with parents from the *wrong side of town* driving their kids to the neighborhood to get in on the better candy. They hate it for the same reason that Republican voters hate *welfare* and *redistribution*: they’re big racists.”

The blog post is titled “Send us your racist Halloween stories!” and is pure race-baiting.

Speed trick-or-treating

I was raised in a very no-frills, working-class neighborhood in Sacramento. Our parents never drove us to another neighborhood to trick-or-treat.

Granted, the neighborhood was relatively safe. I understand parents want their kids to experience Halloween in a safe neighborhood.

But the thug entitlement mentality is making me turn off the porch lights this year. The demands for mountains of candy by adults and teens is strange. The concept of trick-or-treat has turned into homeowners providing a years’ worth of expensive candy for people they do not know. It’s about volume, and how much candy people can collect from perfect strangers. The celebration is gone.

Absurd Halloween bans

It’s the adults who have ruined the holiday.

The other issue swirling around Halloween now are the recent school bans. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that schools are banning Halloween activities.

School boards all across the country seem to eventually find ways to ban everything near and dear to many Americans. Starting with a ban on common sense, they’ve also banned traditional American holidays, sports, certain books, art, music, theology and religion. Parents have even been banned from schools.

School administrators have sent home notes this year telling parents superheroes, witches, princesses and goblins are not welcome at school on Halloween this year.

Why are schools banning Halloween activities? Equality – because of cultural, financial and social differences, it’s not fair to celebrate Halloween, according to many school administrators and teachers.

Inglewood Elementary School, located in the Philadelphia suburb of Towamencin, announced its cancellation of of All Hallows Eve festivities, citing concerns that the cultural holiday was “filled with religious overtones,” according to PennLive.com in Pennsylvania.

It is not fair to celebrate anything American, according to this logic. Schools seem to work overtime now preventing kids from experiencing anything new or different… as long as it’s an American tradition.

On Halloween, while it is still light out, I will hand out candy to a few of the littlest ghouls, goblins, witches and pirates who come to my door with their parents. And then I will turn off the porch light, bring all of my pumpkins into the house, and go out to dinner — if I can navigate through the gridlock on my neighborhood streets.

A school district in New York has banned footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls or any dangerous instrument that might hurt someone on school grounds.

“Port Washington schools Superintendent Kathleen Maloney said the change in policy is warranted due to a rash of playground injuries,” CBS New York reported. “Some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious, so we want to make sure our children have fun, but are also protected,” Maloney said.

So the school officials deferred to the lawyers, who apparently advocate keeping children safely indoors all day where they can’t get hurt. Blunt-nose scissors and jars of edible paste are not going to hurt anyone.

During recess at Port Washington schools, “[F]ootball is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.”

In Sacramento where I live, the Sacramento City Unified School District's motto is: “Putting children first.” On the district website, not one elementary school had pictures of playground equipment or mention of athletic activities.

One school mentioned its “fitness program,” which  included doing “short stretches every morning and one activity per day,”  the school website reported. How very civilized.

The school taught jazzercise, had a healthy snack preparation demonstration, “a visit by Sacramento United Soccer League representatives to teach students about fitness and agility, and a visit by local firefighters who talked to students about the importance of physical and mental fitness.”

Presentations, talks, demonstrations … and jazzercise. How fun. But that's putting teachers first.

Rough and tumble playground

I was a total rough and tumble kid. Soccer wasn’t exciting enough, so my friends and I played tackle soccer. We climbed trees and shot beebee guns at each other. We strapped firecrackers to Barbie dolls, and well, you know.  Today, I’d be arrested and so would my parents.

On the playground at school, we played dodge ball, where you actually were supposed to hit someone with a ball to tag them “out.” Dodge ball is gone. We played crack-the-whip, where kids form a human chain and whip the kid on the end around until she goes careening off and falls. And we did cartwheels. I still have the scars on my always-scabbed knees to remind me what fun recess time was.

We ran races, where someone won and someone lost. Losing is no longer acceptable at government schools. Yet learning how to lose is as important as learning how to win.

And I got in fights but wasn't suspended.

The playground is a place where children establish social order.

The school playground back in the  1950s, 1960s and 1970s was chaos, where kids were allowed to run and play like wild animals. But it was controlled chaos, managed by the social order, and loosely overseen by the adults, who stepped in only when it got too rough.

Football is deadly

There has been a movement for two decades to ban school recess, along with school sports.

Journalist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has compared professional football to dog fighting. “In what way is dog fighting any different from football on a certain level, right?” Gladwell said in a Forbes magazine story. “I mean you take a young, vulnerable dog who was made vulnerable because of his allegiance to the owner and you ask him to engage in serious sustained physical combat with another dog under the control of another owner, right?”

“'Well, what's football?” Gladwell asked. “We take young boys, essentially, and we have them repeatedly, over the course of the season, smash each other in the head, with known neurological consequences. And why do they do that? Out of an allegiance to their owners and their coaches and a feeling they’re participating in some grand American spectacle.”

And now four professional football players are suing the NFL over concussion injuries — as if they didn’t know football was a contact sport, and were paid millions of dollars to do it.

“What does this mean for football in America?” asked Brian E. Moore, MD, on kevinMD.com. “Nothing. Fans are willing to spend a lot of money to see men slam into each other’s heads on the field. But, as a parent, you can do something. You can forbid your son from playing football.”

Humans are animals too

To use another dog analogy, the playground is like watching dogs play. Dogs run like a pack, bumping, jumping over each other, play-biting and dominating, or allowing other dogs to dominate. Kids do this too, when allowed. The playground was the place we once learned how to deal with confrontation, hurt, success, physical and emotional challenges, and to face our fears.

With today's emphasis on standardized testing and academic performance, recess and sports have been sacrificed in many schools. In 1998, Benjamin O. Canada, the superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, famously told the New York Times, “We are intent on improving academic performance. You don’t do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars.”

A doctor disagrees with this dangerous trend. Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant professor and pediatrician, conducted the “School Recess and Group Classroom Behavior” study in 2009, when the trend to cut recess and sports was growing. “We need to understand that kids need a break,’’ Barros said. “Our brains can concentrate and pay attention for 45 to 60 minutes, and in kids it’s even less. For them to be able to acquire all the academic skills we want them to learn, they need a break to go out and release the energy and play and be social.’’

The playground at school today is calm and organized, where everyone is a winner. And many of the kids are taking Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses. But teachers are happy. And school district lawyers can rest easy.

Let the kids play virtual sports.

Romero, a Democrat who served as Senate majority leader, knows what she’s talking about. Her focus is on education, where the teachers’ unions have blocked meaningful reforms for years by protecting bad teachers from being terminated, promoting based on seniority instead of merit, taking over local school boards with hand-picked, union-financed candidates, attacking charter schools, prioritizing teacher compensation and job security over student achievement, and pushing a social agenda in front of academic fundamentals. Romero considers it a civil rights issue, since the negative impact of the union takeover has disproportionately harmed public education in low-income and minority communities.

What Romero discusses publicly — criticizing not only teachers’ unions for undermining public education, but also public safety unions for pricing their services beyond the ability of cities and counties to afford them — is privately echoed by Democratic lawmakers throughout California. And it should come as no surprise that Romero, along with virtually all Democratic lawmakers, places equal if not greater blame on the corrupting influence of corporate special interests in Sacramento.

Connection

But there’s another crucial connection: Public sector unions have an identity of interests with those elements of capitalism they decry the loudest, the crony capitalists and the casino bankers. If this is understood by Democratic legislators, or even Republicans, it is rarely articulated. And to the extent it is understood, awareness has yet to translate into proposals, much less into action.

The alliance between public sector unions and entrenched private-sector elites is not an adjunct point to be recognized, acknowledged and forgotten. It is the primary underlying cause of some of America’s most challenging threats, including economic stagnation, increased stratification of wealth, financial insolvency, mediocre education outcomes, and eroding civil liberties.  As I explain in “Why Public Sector Unions are Special Special Interests”:

“This reality, that public sector unions operate at the heart of the corporate and financial elite, that they are the brokers and enablers of corporate and financial power, is the tragic irony that is lost on California’s electorate. Public sector unions are the foot soldiers of corporatism, because without their blessing and support, crony capitalists would not successfully lobby for anti-competitive laws, pension bankers would not have a taxpayer-guaranteed virtually unlimited source of funds to invest, and bond underwriters would not be collecting commissions on hundreds of billions in bond issues necessitated by spending deficits. Public sector unions are also the facilitators of authoritarianism, because every new law and every new intrusion on civil liberties is accompanied by a need for more unionized government workers.”

Evidence

Evidence of the connection between public-sector unions and crony capitalists is everywhere:

* Overbuilt schools and prisons, constructed by politically connected construction firms and costing taxpayers far more than what right-sized, competitively bid institutions should have cost.

* “Affordable housing” and big box retailing being constructed using public funds and eminent domain laws, where the primary criteria for participation are political connections — i.e., public sector union connections — not market savvy and access to risk capital.

* “Carbon emissions auctions” set to extract more than $2 billion from ratepayer supported utilities in November 2013, eventually increasing to over 10 times that much annually, so financial traders can make a killing in commissions, crony capitalists can access funds for “green” projects that ought to be able to withstand the scrutiny of genuine venture investors, and public entities can collect financial windfalls for enacting “smart growth” ordinances and by redefining jobs to include “global warming mitigation.”

* California’s $370 billion in state and local government bond debt, rolling over every five to 30 years, earning billions in commissions to financial interests, and enabling deficit spending by governments that can’t afford to pay their unionized workforces.

* At least $600 billion in assets currently invested by California’s 80 different public employee pension funds, earning financial interests billions in management fees and commissions every year, and guaranteeing public employees retirement packages that ordinary citizens can only dream of.

* Anywhere between $200 and $600 billion (or more) in unfunded public employee pension and retirement health care obligations, that financial interests will make additional billions in fees to invest, once their attorneys, working in tandem with public sector union attorneys, compel taxpayers to fork over the money.

Context

This is the context in which one of California’s teachers’ unions produced a video cartoon a few months ago, showing the caricature of a rich tycoon urinating onto a crowd of poor people. The irony is only matched by the hypocrisy.

Romero distinguished herself last year by supporting Proposition 32, which would have merely required anyone collecting political contributions via payroll deductions to ask for permission once a year. Because passage of Prop. 32 would have threatened the money pouring into public sector unions, Romero’s support was an act of extraordinary courage.

At this point, we should emphasize this startling fact: By undermining the power of public sector unions, you are undermining the entire apparatus of corruption. You are weakening the entire nexus of government power and financial greed.

Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Public Policy Center, and the editor of UnionWatch.org.

By Chris Reed

Lance Izumi does a great job in the Orange County Register of documenting how President Obama’s push for universal preschool is a retread of actor-director Rob Reiner’s failed, scandal-scarred push in California — right down to citing the same shaky study to justify changing the lives of vast numbers of families.

“Both Reiner and Obama pointed to supposed research showing that for every tax dollar invested in government-run preschool several times that amount would be saved by higher graduation rates, lower teen pregnancy and reduced violent crime. The trouble is that there is no such long-term evidence for children of all income backgrounds.

“Reiner and his campaign made much of a RAND Corp. study that purported to show what universal government-run preschool would have cost and student-outcome benefits. However, even RAND admitted that there was only one study done on the long-term impact of preschool on non-poor children. According to RAND, this study found that non-poor children attending preschool ‘were no better off in terms of high school or college completion, earnings, or criminal justice system involvement than those not going to any preschool.’ In other words, President Obama’s argument for universal government-run preschool is totally baseless.”

Surveys say: No long-lasting benefit despite hype

And guess what? Much broader and more scientific studies sharply undermine the case for Obama’s and Reiner’s crusade, as Izumi lays out:

“Further, even evidence of the impact of preschool on low-income children is mixed. True, after longitudinal study, a few preschool programs have shown positive results, but there are critical caveats.

“First, the reasons for the positive results are tied to very specific elements, such as long-term parental involvement, and there is no guarantee that such elements will be included in Obama’s program. Further, some of these ‘positive’ studies are based on tiny sample sizes and have never been replicated.

“Finally, there’s a lot of data to show that whatever beneficial impact preschool has on poor children fades away after a few years.”

But what’s striking to me is that even though RAND acknowledges the weakness of the study that’s being touted by the president and his Hollywood pal, the Santa Monica-headquartered think tank is back on the pulpit pushing for universal preschool. A search on its website turns out lots of hits that suggests universal preschool is part of RAND’s agenda.

Silly me. I thought think tanks were supposed to be both ideological and empirical.

A whiff of ugly paternalism

And do I detect a slightly ugly whiff to our liberal elites’ eagerness to help poor families — often minorities — in raising their kids? This is coming from the same educrat wing of the Democratic Party that increasingly implies that teachers can never help broad swaths of students. I’m always struck when I read the comments sections of education blogs by how ready teachers are to argue that some kids just can’t be helped.

I am not a Pollyanna. I know students have varied skill sets. But it’s worth remembering that a central rationale for “No Child Left Behind” was a cliche — “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — that has some real truth to it. If teachers assume individual students — or categories of students — aren’t reachable, they don’t reach.

Is their paternalism now broadening out to suggest that there may be categories of parents who are so incompetent that they need government-supplied role models to save their 3- and 4-year-olds?

Could be. There is a grim history to liberals’ condescension and contempt for the downtrodden they allegedly care most about.

By Chris Reed

The state Senate committee report last week showing districts stealing federal funds meant for school lunch programs came as no surprise to students of California’s education establishment. There’s a strange mentality afflicting school governance in this state, an odd combination of an anything-goes ethos and a righteous sense of entitlement.

That’s why in recent years we’ve seen school districts in California caught lying about dropout rates. And about attendance rates, which determine state funding. And also about local property tax receipts, which can reduce state school funding depending on their amount.

We’ve also seen school districts’ legal but appalling abuse of school bonds, which used to be “construction bonds” but are now about finding ways to free up money for the general fund. One version of bond abuse is borrowing at ridiculous long-term rates to avoid short-term headaches through CABs — capital appreciation bonds. The more common version, though, is use of 30-year conventional bonds to pay for routine maintenance and educational equipment such as laptops and iPads.

CalWatchdog has written about these amoral assaults on taxpayers on several occasions. Anyone who pays attention quickly figures out what the Sacramento press corps never makes clear to Californians: Goal number one in the Legislature and in nearly all local school districts is accommodating veteran teachers, which means a constant push to free up enough funds in district operating budgets so that teachers can get the automatic “step” raises that they typically receive just for showing up for 15 of their first 20 years on the job.

All the other stuff we hear about education in budget fights? It’s all show. Democratic legislators beholden to the CTA and CFT know what they must do each budget season: Keep the auto raises coming to veteran teachers and stymie any reform that might discomfit them.

The latest example of K-12 chicanery

Understand this history, and it’s no surprise that federally funded school lunch programs are being looted as well to free up funds for teacher auto raises:

“At least eight California school districts have misappropriated millions of dollars in funding intended to pay for meals for low-income students — the biggest culprit being the Los Angeles Unified School District, according to a state Senate watchdog group.

“The California Department of Education has ordered districts to pay back nearly $170 million in misused funds to their student meal programs, the California Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes said Wednesday. L.A. Unified has been forced to pay back more than $158 million in misappropriations and unallowable charges that the district made over six years ending in 2011.

“State officials suspect the alleged misuse of funds could be more widespread across California school districts but the system is overburdened and has only a small team of investigators.”

I would bet anything that this “alleged misuse of funds” is far more widespread. The never-ending pressure to free up money in the general fund to pay for teachers’ auto raises is a constant up and down the Golden State. Whether that means deceiving the federal government, ripping off Sacramento, or lying to parents and students, so be it. It’s the California way.

A governor who wants to enable the abusers

The key subplot here, of course, is that Gov. Jerry Brown in recent days has again made clear he wants more local control of schools.

Yo, Jerry! Yo, gov! I have some questions!

Do you get out much?

Do you think that leopards change their spots?

Do you think local school boards are full of smart, tough advocates of students?

Yo, Jerry! Yo, gov! I have more questions!

Have you been awake for any sustained period over the last 30 years?

Do you understand how California schools operate, and to the benefit of whom?

Have you even heard of Mark Berndt?

Sheesh. If this is the smartest guy in California government, we are doomed.

By Chris Reed

Is Jerry Brown knowingly picking a fight with the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers? Based on his remarks Thursday, that’s what it seems like.

The governor wants to change the basic education funding formulas to give more money to underperforming schools, with the prime metric being how their students do in writing and reading English. This could lead to a change in the California education status quo that we have seen for decades in which everything about K-12 schools is built around the interests of veteran teachers.

What do they want? To retain the current status quo — the one that allows veteran teachers to teach in schools in affluent neighborhoods where students have fewer academic, crime and behavioral problems. No, they do not want to be noble public servants who try to help society by teaching the students who need the best teachers.

Critics of this attitude should get off their high horse. Of course people should pursue career paths that suit them. But elected Democrats in California for at least two decades have ignored the fact that the CTA and the CFT don’t give a damn about the “social justice” that arguably would result if the best teachers were given the most challenging students.

Hey, Assembly Speaker John Perez! Are you going to back the governor? Or are you just another union puppet?

Gloria Romero is right to frame the fight over California public education as being about civil rights — the interests of mostly white teachers vs. majority-Latino students. Gov. Brown’s budget, if not his rhetoric, implicitly agrees with her take on California.

Will the media notice? We shall see.

My newspaper, at least, did.

“When Romero said the inequities facing Latino students were California’s biggest civil-rights issue, she got little support from fellow Democratic lawmakers – and the CTA pronounced her ‘dangerous’ and used its clout to kill her 2010 bid to be state superintendent of public instruction.

“The governor didn’t frame the issue as dramatically as Romero. But it’s quite telling that the first time he had enough budget flexibility to pursue a big idea, he focused on the inequities facing Latino students. It may not be long before the CTA calls Jerry Brown ‘dangerous.'”

As I wrote Thursday, it is highly likely that Brown is rebuffed, and that Sacramento’s status quo of always doing what’s best for veteran teachers is preserved. But it’s interesting to see the governor take on this status quo, given how widely he’s considered the sharpest guy in town.

Katy Grimes: With all of the recent talk about nanny states and politicians interjecting themselves into the personal lives of citizens, another such bill was passed in the Assembly Thursday. But this bill will allow the state of California to dictate the grounds for school suspensions and expulsions, but is focused primarily on black students, children of color, and LGBT students.

Apparently the “disparity in suspensions and expulsions for Black students, especially males, and students with disabilities,” is the reason for the bill.

AB 2242 by Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, “prohibits out-of-school suspensions and expulsions due to disruption of school activities and willfully defying the  authority of school officials.”

These usually are perfectly legitimate reasons for discipline by school officials.

According to Dickinson, “this bill addresses the overuse of out-of-school suspensions under the category of “disrupting school activities or otherwise willfully defying the authority of supervisors, teachers, administrators, school officials or other school personnel.”

What’s behind this inane abuse of state authority?

The bill’s analysis explains: “A University of California, Los Angeles’ Civil Rights Project October 2011 brief titled “Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and Racial Justice,” report that data gathered by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights shows disparity in suspensions and expulsions for Black students, especially males, and students with disabilities.”

In floor debate Thursday over AB 2242, Dickinson told of two extreme situations in which teachers expelled kids for merely speaking up or asking questions in class.

Instead of opting to change the impossible teacher discipline process to deal with bad public school teachers who may be improperly disciplining some students, Dickinson’s answer is to ease up on the punishment teachers are allowed to administer… but only on children of color and LGBT students.

Assemblyman Ricardo Lara, D-Bell gardens, chimed in that LGBT youth are disproportionately disciplined in public schools. Lara is one of seven members of the legislative LBGT Caucus.

“Are you kidding me?” Assemblyman Brian Jones, R-Santee asked. “This is ridiculous. Let’s just take out the teachers and administrators and let the kids run the schools.”

Democratic Assemblyman Sandre Swanson of Oakland said “kids are penalized just for raising their hand in class.” Then when they are expelled, Swanson said they move into the juvenile justice system.

“What in the world are we doing?” asked Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia. “Because you happen to be of color or a certain orientation, we are creating a whole new society. We are creating segregation within schools. No wonder the rest of the world is laughing at us.”

The conflicting UCLA report

“Disruptions tend to increase or decrease with the skill of the teacher in providing engaging instruction and in managing the classroom—areas many teachers say they would like help improving,” the UCLA report found.

“Yet despite these apparent connections to classroom management and quality of instruction, policymakers often treat student misbehavior as a problem originating solely with students and their parents. This ignores the potentially key roles played by teachers, teacher training, school leadership, or the school system.”

These findings would suggest that more attention should be paid to teacher training, preparedness and skill levels. Instead, Dickinson’s bill not only does not hold teachers more accountable for their own behaviors, it lets ill-behaving students off the hook.

“Our public schools are essential to preparing our children to participate fully in our economic and democratic future,” the UCLA civil rights report states. “With these interests at stake, U.S. policymakers must find more effective ways to educate all of the nation’s children, including those who may be challenging to engage.”

With this conclusion, how can Dickinson, with a straight face, suggest that disruptive students are being mistreated, and should receive more leniency from teachers?

Take a look at the list of supporters and the bill’s sponsors:

Public Counsel (co-sponsor) 
Youth Law Center (co-sponsor) 
American Civil Liberties Union 
Californians for Justice Education Fund 
Children Now 
Children’s Defense Fund 
Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth 
Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund 
Disability Rights Legal Center 
Fight Crime: Invest in Kids California 
Labor/Community Strategy Center 
Legal Advocates for Children & Youth 
Legal Services for Children 
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund 
New America Foundation 
PICO California 
Restorative Schools Vision Project 
Youth and Education Law Project, Mills Legal Clinic 
Several individuals 

I’ve never even heard of some of these special interest groups.

Assemblyman Donnelly is right–this is why the rest of the world is laughing at California.