Money for California's schools

When teachers argue that school funding should not be cut, we are told by the  Republicans in the legislature that there is not choice, there just is no money.

Well, that is not really true.  Here is where reasonable people would get the revenue.

1.     Repeal the September 2008 and February 2009 tax cuts.  As a part of the Sept. 2008 and Feb. 2009 budget deals, the legislature created huge new corporate tax breaks.  That right.  To respond to a budget crisis, they gave new tax reductions to corporations.  These take effect in 2011 and will make the budget crisis worse.  What is to be done ? Repeal of tax credit sharing to  raise 2009-10 revenues by $80 million, over time, the permanent tax cuts will cost the state $2.0 billion to $2.5 billion.

2.      Reinstate 10 percent and 11 percent tax rates to 1991 levels, adjusted for inflation. The February tax increases disproportionately affect low- and middle-income taxpayers. Reinstatement of the top brackets would restore balance to the state’s tax system and raise $4 billion to $6 billion in additional revenues.

3.     Impose on oil severance tax. California is the only oil producing jurisdiction in the world without a severance tax. A tax of 9.9 percent, such as that proposed by the Governor, would raise upwards of $1 billion dollars.

We, the people, own this oil.  It is under California soil.  Oil companies only take it out.  They should pay to take our oil out of the ground and to sell it to us.  Even arch conservative Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska have oil severance taxes.

The Economic Crisis and School budgets

    The nation  including California is suffering a severe recession.  Twenty Six million  are unemployed and under employed. This crisis was created by finance capital and banking, mostly on Wall Street ,ie. Chase Banks, Bank of America, AIG, and others.   Finance capital produced a $ trillion bailout of the financial industry, the doubling of America’s unemployment rate and the loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in 2008.  Fifteen million people are out of work.  You and I, and college students did not create this crisis.  Finance capital stole the future of many young people.   It is important in developing  responses  to distinguish between the financial bail out (TARP) and the stimulus plan (ARRA, 2009).  Fox News and the Republican Right like to merge these two as one.

            If we don’t find a way to stop Wall Street from controlling  our government, the standard of living of working people will continue to decline and we will continue to have economic crises.  As a minimum, we need to extend unemployment benefits for long term unemployed.

Race to the Top: consultant employment project ?

On Wed. Dec.2,2009, the California Assembly held  a hearing on Race to the Top, chaired by Julia Brownley, Chair of the Assembly Education Committee.

In her testimony,  Jennifer Kuhn of the Legislative Analyst Office testified that

Because California has a severe budget crisis in k-12 education, we recommend that th RTTP funds  be used to

develop plans and strategies for RTTT.  We should not commit funds for  direct service efforts that the state can not sustain.

(Not quite a quote.  I encourage readers to look for the video on line on the California Channel. It was as I could catch it.)

In other words, the LAO  encourages   funding advisors and consultants to talk about what should be done. She argued that money  should not be allocated to program that serve children. Rather, it will be used to plan and build strategies.

This seems like a make work projects for consultants, advisors and charlatans.   One of the consistent problems of schools in the U.S. and California is that too much money is taken from the school budgets to fund other things, such as consultants , program designers and hucksters.  

 The new regulations in RTT Top require that the local unions are required to sign off on their participation.  I argue that unions should not sign off unless the majority of the money go into the classroom not to consultants and planners.

Based upon the requirements of RTTT, it  is not about teaching, it is about building infrastructure and implementing policies that in theory will help teaching and learning.  We have been here before. This is “drive by school reform.”

See the excellent responses to Race to The Top by Monty Neill of Fair Test.

He says it well here.

FairTest website at http://www.fairtest.org/FairTestComments-RTThearing.


Of particular value in the hearing  was the testimony of Roberta Feurger representing PICO in favor of how to increase parent participation.

Duane Campbell, Sacramento

The Right to a great public education; California

We've got to stop cutting public education. To ease the budget crisis, one state after another is taking an ax to higher education. This is cruel and shortsighted.
Cruel because it denies students the right to a decent education. Shortsighted because how will this generation of students get prepared to compete globally or even to clean up the financial mess brought about by Wall Street?
I'm a product of the worst and best public education California has to offer. I grew up in an East Los Angeles housing project in the 1970s and 1980s. I attended overcrowded public schools in the inner city. Like many racial minorities from America's barrios and ghettos, I received an inadequate education.
While I excelled in mathematics, I was never taught to read or write at a competent level throughout my K-12 schooling. To complicate matters, the longest paper assigned to me in high school was two pages long.
I taught myself how to properly read and write while going through college to compensate for my poorly funded K-12 education. But what will happen to those without this same self-drive that I learned from my Mexican immigrant mother? Fortunately, I also benefited from affirmative action and from numerous educational outreach programs and policies like Occident College's Upward Bound - a preparatory program for students from disadvantaged communities.
If not for such programs, I wouldn't have made it to UCLA as an undergraduate. I wouldn't have earned a master's degree in urban planning there. And I wouldn't be pursuing my doctorate at Berkeley.
So I worry about those who grow up in poor neighborhoods without the same educational safety nets that allowed for me to attend some of the best universities in this country. I can't help but be concerned about the plight of my wife's elementary school students in East Los Angeles today.
Those who fight affirmative action and against government-sponsored early educational outreach programs conveniently wash their hands of any responsibility toward those who lack the financial resources and access to human capital to go to college.
And fewer and fewer have those resources, with one state after another raising tuition and other fees. These fee hikes couldn't come at a worse time.
If we care about equality of opportunity, if we are concerned about our ability to compete in the global economy, it's time to give everyone, including those from America's barrios and ghettos, a shot at a great public education.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Alvaro Huerta is a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting scholar at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Readers may write to the author at: Progressive Media Project, 409 East Main Street, Madison, Wis. 53703; e-mail: pmproj@progressive.org; Web site: www.progressive.org. For information on PMP's funding, please visit http://www.progressive.org/pmpabout.html#anchorsupport.
This article was prepared for The Progressive Media Project and is available to MCT subscribers.

Sacramento Multicultural Education Conference : Free

Social justice educator Brian D. Schultz is the keynote speaker for the 16th annual Multicultural Education Conference, 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 14, in Sacramento State’s University Union.
Titled, “Social Justice Through Civic Engagement and Action,” the free conference is sponsored by Sacramento State’s Bilingual/Multicultural Education Department (BMED) and co-sponsored by the Serna Center and Project Citizen. The conference provides an opportunity for university faculty and local educators to promote multicultural education in K-12 public schools in the Sacramento region
Schultz is the author of Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way: Lessons from an Urban Classroom. A panel discussion by candidates for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction will follow Shultz’ talk. The rest of the day will be filled with 30 break-out sessions on a range of topics including Peace and Conflict Resolution, Technology Integration and Anti-Bias Media Analysis, and Impact of Educational Reform Polices on English Learners.
For more information or to register for the conference, visit www.edweb.csus.edu/bmed, e-mail Maggie Beddow at beddow@csus.edu, or call the BMED Office at (916) 278-5942. For media assistance, call Sacramento State’s Public Affairs office at (916) 278-6156.

Some Californians promote a constitutional convention

That California government is in a financial crisis is not news – but it is in crisis. And, that only 13% of Californians think that the legislature – both Republican and Democrats are doing a good job, indicates a that an opportunity exists to throw the baby out with the bath water. Or, as Rahm Emanuel says, “don’t allow a good crisis to go to waste.”
At an interesting conference, “Getting to Reform: Avenues to Constitutional Change in California,” on October 14, at the Sacramento Convention Center, Prof. Kimberly Nalder, an associate professor of Government at Sacramento State said California voters are like a person who contracts with a personal trainer to lose weight, then says, “but I don’t want to do any exercise and I don’t want to go on a diet.” and then blames the trainer for not producing results. The conference was sponsored by the Center for California Studies at CSU-Sacramento and others.

New Field Poll figures released Wednesday Oct.14, at the conference show that voters think the state needs fundamental reform. And, majorities would favor a constitutional convention to propose revisions.
However, they tend to oppose commonly discussed changes such as reducing the two-thirds voting threshold to pass a state budget or raise taxes, modifying or eliminating term limits and altering the state tax system.
"The rub is, what are we going to reform?" Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said. "With these results, it's going to be a tall order to put a package before voters that they will support."
There are two major groups promoting fundamental change, Repair California a mostly business interests group that plans to place a measure on the ballot for November 2010 calling a convention ( http://www.repaircalifornia.org/), and California Forward ( http://www.caforward.org/), a mostly business interest group –along with the State Building and Construction Trades Unions and other bipartisan advocates- who prefer to change the constitution with a series of concrete proposals rather than a convention. For example, a proposition could be placed on the ballot calling for a majority rule in the legislature rather than the current 2/3 requirement to pass a budget or to raise taxes. The Repair California convention approach assumes that delegates to a convention would be selected rather than elected and the 2/3 vote requirement would be off the agenda of the convention.
A constitutional convention could, for example, change the laws on labor rights or educational rights.
Scholars and advocates at the conference noted that California voters want more services and to pay less taxes, and some hope that a Constitutional Convention will achieve this improbably end. R. William Hauk, of the California Roundtable ( a business lobbying power house), the pre eminent Capitol insider argued that “the sky really is falling,” and that excessive partisanship prevented the legislature from fixing the very real financial problems of the state. This is a position- it should be noted- frequently taken when your side is not winning.
Prof. Amy Bridges of U.C. San Diego gave a historical analysis of the last time a constitutional convention revised the California Constitution in 1879 and Glen Gendzel, of History at San Jose State U. reported on the reform efforts of 1911 which brought us the initiative, the referendum, and the recall processes.
The history was informative, however it failed to note that the 1879 constitution replaced the 1849 constitution, and in so doing it eliminated the protections of bilingualism, of Mexican American political and property rights, and established a regime of White Supremacy. They did note the infamous efforts to ban Chinese immigration. These issues continue to resonate as recently as California Prop. 187 and 227. Proposition 187 itself was somewhat inaccurately described at the conference as having no practical effect because of the federal court injunction. That is partly correct. However, as those of us who were active in the campaign for No on Prop. 187 know, most of the provisions of California Prop. 187 went on to be included in the Immigration Reform and Control act of 1996 and thus apply throughout the nation.
So, for ethnic minorities, the constitutional convention route may be fraught with peril. Noticeably, the conference was almost 90% Anglo with an roughly equal distribution of men and women participants. California’s registered voters are 65% White, 21% Latino, 5.8 % African American, and 8.2 % Asian and other.
There was a significant presence of English speaking media participating on panels so I anticipate that readers will soon see essays based upon the polls and the presentations at the conference. For details on the many aspects of the reform efforts see http://www.ReformCalifornia.org.

The precedings of the conference will be on line at http://igs.berkeley.edu/events/reform2010.html. And will be broadcast on the California Channel.

California Assembly Committee on Race to the Top

Hearing today at the Capitol . The 5th. Extraordinary Session. Assembly Committee on Education considering the Race to the Top Funds of the Obama Administration.
Note; These funds are a part of the American Recovery and Re-investment Act, also known as the stimulus package.
There will be about $5 Billion available. At best California could hope for $1 b. Note, the California Legislature and the Governor cut $6.1 B from the state school budgets this year. Of this. $2.1 was “backfilled” by the federal government stimulus package. Deputy Supt. Of Public Instruction Miller stressed that Race to the top was totally voluntary, unlike NCLB. However, in local districts that have lost up to $35 million dollars, an opportunity to get $5 million back is definitely not voluntary.
It is noteworthy that the same people who made these slashing brutal cuts to education ( the Schwarzenegger admin.) are in charge of deciding how to pursue Race to the Top. Does that make you confident?
The representative from the California Federation of Teachers and Rucker of CTA again made the detailed and appropriate points that the assessment systems being proposed are totally invalid and unreliable. The professional literature on this is overwhelming, but not of interest to Arne Duncan, and apparently Supt. O’ Connell and Governor Schwarzenegger .
Student Data
The California Federation of Teachers believes that student achievement and student growth data may be worthwhile tools in helping to improve school instruction when the data instruments contain information that is useful to the teacher. We do not believe that current standardized tests being administered as part of the No Child Left Behind Act meet those criteria.
School reform will come when we can engage teachers, students and families. We need to engage the teachers in the classroom. It will not come from consultant class. My 35 + years of experience in working with schools convinces me that the political consultants and the bureaucrats may receive the funds, but the solutions will come from dialogues with the teachers, families, and community activists.
The most basic decisions on class size in schools are made by the Governor, the legislature, and the voters. In last year’s budget deal, the legislature and the Governor cut some $6 billion from the k-12 schools forcing lay offs of teachers and increasing class sizes. This cut was forced on California because the Governor and the Republicans would not raise taxes. Many art, music, and career technical teachers will be layed off. Class sizes in high schools will rise to over 40 and the drop out crisis will grow. Did you know that California already ranks 49 out of the 50 states in counselors per student? That is why there are so few counselors in schools. California now has the largest class sizes in the nation. Our Senators and our Assemblypersons voted for this. They argue that they had no choice.
The legislature, enjoys a 16% approval rating from voters. The federal competition for Race to the Top is a distraction from the more basic issues. Until the schools are adequately funded and class sizes reduced to at least the national average- no amount of pubic relations efforts will improve test scores.
At best, the Race to the Top funds would provide $100 per student to work toward reform. The California legislature reduced the per pupil expenditure this year by about $1,400 per student. So, their argument is that reform will come from a competition for $100 per students, but please don’t notice that we have cut $1,400 per student. I guess they think that the public can be distracted from basic realities.


Duane Campbell