The San Diego Unified District Board of Education will be voting Tuesday (5 pm) evening to place a temporary parcel tax up for voter approval on the November ballot.  While this move on the surface is a response to the “funding cliff” that public education systems state-wide are facing as Federal stimulus dollars expire next year, the reality is that much larger stakes are in play here.

The school district is facing the prospect of $127 million in projected cuts for the school year beginning in September 2011 after cutting more than $370 million from its budget over the last four years. They have tentatively proposed a long list of budget reductions, from eliminating librarians and counselors to halving the school day for kindergartners. More than 1,400 employees – ten per cent of school district employees – will be facing layoffs if those cuts become reality.

Beyond the job cuts, which would entail eliminating school athletics, arts & music programs, vice-principals, libraries, school nurses, gifted programs and magnet schools, is a struggle for the very soul of public education.  Hidden behind the “no-tax” and “blame the unions” rhetoric of the measure’s opponents is an agenda that would shrink public education to a bare bones institution that would functions as holding tank for the children of the lowers and middle classes whose parents cannot afford private education.

As with private schools in the higher education business, this agenda won’t actually reduce education costs; these monies will simply be re-directed to profit-making institutions with no public oversight or real interest in student achievement. (For more on the cruel, cold world of private college education, I suggest that you read this investigative report: http://www.propublica.org/arti…

The reality of proposed parcel tax is that it will cost individual home-owners a whopping $8 a month, apartment owners are looking at paying $6 per month per unit.  Low-income seniors would be exempt from the parcel tax. In other words, for the cost of a martini or a couple of lattes, the local school district will be able to deal with a looming fiscal crisis. That money goes directly to the school district and not Sacramento. In San Diego Unified, the money would be used to hire more teachers, which would help to lower class sizes.

The tax expires at the end of five years, and the monies raised are strictly targeted: Under the proposal, none of the money would be spent on administrators or the central office. Expenses would be monitored by an oversight committee.  Each school would get $150 per student to pay for academic programs. The money could be used to hire teachers, pay for supplies, vocational education or technology. After per-pupil funding is distributed, half of the remaining funds – about $20 million annually – would be spent to keep class sizes low in kindergarten through third-grade.

The counter-attack on the proposed parcel tax has already begun.  Sunday’s Union-Tribune editorialized on flaws they perceived in the District’s web site explaining the details of the parcel tax.  You can be assured that a follow-up attack will happen over the next couple of weeks over the choice of consultant Larry Remer to run the campaign in favor of the proposal, despite the fact that he has a good track record on such issues. (Full disclosure: Remer and I were, four decades ago, co-editors of an alternative newspaper that used much of its editorial footprint towards denigrating the local dailies.)

Since it now appears that the two initiatives that appeared likely to gain the most interest amongst reactionaries will not be on the ballot in November-Carl Demaio’s “Clean Up Government Act” and the proposal to raise the local sales tax by ½ percent*-the proposed parcel tax will become the lightning rod for pro-privatization forces.

(*Insiders have told me that the decision has been made not to expend political capital in the face of proposals to build a new city hall and other new shiny toys.)  

Advance polling by education advocates shows that the battle is likely to be hard fought.  Poll respondents demonstrated a significant depth of support for the tax.  The problem is that State law mandates that such measures must be approved by 2/3 of the electorate.   Over the past year more than 20 California districts have attempted to pass parcel taxes, with 16 passing in mostly small and affluent districts.

The voting districts with the most swing, depending on the questions posed by pollsters, were district six (inland north city, i.e., Claremont & Kearny Mesa)  and district two (which includes Ocean Beach and Point Loma).  This means voter turn out in OB could be a real determining factor.

As one business leader reportedly told School Board President Richard Barrera, he’s opposed to this initiative and will work for its defeat so he can make the schools “come to us on their knees” to beg for survival. That pretty much sums it up.  The survival of schools is now on the line. Here’s where we stand now:  

California has more students per school staff than the rest of the US.

California’s schools:

• Ranked 50th in the nation with respect to the number of students per teacher.

California averaged 21.3 students for each teacher in 2009-10, more than 50

percent larger than the rest of the US, which averaged 13.8 students per teacher.2

• Ranked 46th in the nation with respect to the number of students per

administrator.3 California’s schools averaged 358 students for each administrator

in 2007-08, compared to 216 students for each administrator in the rest of the US.

• Ranked 49th in the nation with respect to the number of students per guidance

counselor. California’s schools averaged 809 students for each guidance counselor

More than $17 billion has been cut from California public schools and colleges in the last two years, equaling a cut of nearly $3,000 per student. This is the single largest cut to public education since the Great Depression. Because of this, more than 26,000 pink slips were issued to California educators this year.

Do we really want to make things worse? The school board hearing on the parcel tax is scheduled for 5 pm Tuesday, July 13th at the Board of Education Building in University Heights.  The anti-education people will be out in full force to try & discredit this idea.

Please attend if you can.

The fairly spectacular flameout of LAUSD superintendent Adm. David Brewer, hailed as a savior for the district just two years ago and now on the verge of being fired by the school board, could perhaps provide a valuable lesson to progressives about education policy.  Too often the focus is solely on finances – protecting education funding, fighting fee hikes at colleges and universities, spending X amount per classroom.  These are noble and important goals, but Brewer’s tenure shows the pitfalls of this focus at the expense of proper management and development, which is simply a disaster in Los Angeles, the state’s largest school district and one of the largest in the nation.  A lot of it has to do with internal politics.  Antonio Villaraigosa spent millions to put his acolytes on the school board, and Brewer was seen as a legacy of the past.  There was a Solomonic gesture to make everyone happy, and it made things worse.

Eventually, Brewer’s accumulated missteps — and his dismaying lack of prowess — led to an arrangement in which he ceded much of his authority while preserving the illusion of his leadership, a revision of his job description that avoided roiling the city’s ever-tenuous racial politics. Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines was hired in April to oversee academic matters for the district, while Brewer continued to preside over administrative matters such as payroll and construction; Brewer also acts as a public figurehead and attends the protracted board meetings. This is classic Los Angeles politics: Administrative and racial comity is achieved by paying two superintendent-level salaries for one complete superintendent-level package. It also typifies all that is wrong with L.A. Unified. The district protects administrators who fail rather than students whose futures depend on a solid education.

For his part, Brewer was overconfident about his ability to navigate the political shoals that lay ahead. Shortly after starting his job, he was confronted with an enormous payroll snafu, as a new computer system put in place by his predecessor repeatedly spat out inaccurate checks — for months, some teachers were overpaid, some paid not at all. Though Brewer tackled the problem competently, he also compounded it, first by trying to blame district employees for the mess and then by hiring expensive and ineffectual public relations consultants to spin a new image for the district.

On Which Way, LA last night, one guest reported that the Administrative newsletter had to be scaled back to a 10th-grade reading level because it was causing difficulties for the TEACHERS.  And there were a lot of horror stories about the composition of the district political architecture itself.  These are not all questions of finance, and many positive steps could be achieved for students without an appreciable amount of funding, or cutting back on needless public relations spending.  This CAP report about teacher tenure and high-poverty schools might be a good place to start.

I think we need to have a broader conversation about education policy than “protect our school money,” is all I’m saying.

The LA Times gets downright progressive about voting reform, in the wake of the horrible turnout for Tuesday’s school board runoff, where $9 million dollars in voting infrastructure and campaign expenditures yielded a 6% turnout.

A much better solution is to use instant runoff voting, an electoral method that elects a majority winner in a single election.

Here’s how it works: Voters rank the candidates in their order of preference instead of just picking one candidate. If a candidate wins a majority of first rankings, the election is over, just like now. But if no candidate wins a majority of first rankings, voters’ other rankings are used to determine the winner instantly. The candidate with the fewest first rankings is eliminated, and voters who ranked that candidate first can now have their second choice counted. All ballots are recounted in the “instant runoff,” and the process of dropping the last-place candidate continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes […]

Because this method of voting would save millions of tax dollars, part of that money could be used for an expansion of Los Angeles’ public financing system, which might produce more candidates and more competition – which could induce higher voter turnout.

Los Angeles also could change to an all vote-by-mail system. Oregon votes this way, as does Burbank, and it has led to higher turnout in non-November elections. It also saves tax dollars by avoiding the high costs of setting up polling stations and hiring election workers.

Color me shocked.  over…

Maybe it takes a disaster like the school board election to make people see the light.  Of course, IRV and vote by mail and public financing have been around for decades.  They were seen as flaky Birkenstock ideas at one point; only some hippie commune like San Francisco could use Instant Runoff Voting, right?  But if the staid LA Times can figure out that IRV is efficient, smart and leads to better campaigning. 

I am very hopeful that this work will get done in Los Angeles to make voting more in line with the 21st century.  Now there’s one more hurdle to clear.  We just need the Governor to sign the National Popular Vote bill that would reform the electoral college by eliminating the outdated and anti-democratic idea.  The Governor has taken no position on the bill this year.  He ought to be urged to sign it.

LA Times:

A state appeals court today soundly renounced a law designed to give Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa substantial authority over the Los Angeles Unified School District. The ruling is the second — and perhaps final — blow to what was once the centerpiece of Villaraigosa’s education-reform plan.

Today’s unanimous decision, by a three-judge panel of the 2nd District Court of Appeal, found the law, Assembly Bill 1381, unconstitutional — and it was not a close call, in the view of the justices. In its one-paragraph conclusion, the justices gave particular importance to the revised Los Angeles City Charter that was approved during the term of then-Mayor Richard Riordan. That charter revision reaffirmed the election of school-board members with authority to govern the school district, in the view of the court.

There’s almost no way that the State Supreme Court would choose to take a case when the appeals court voiced this strong a takedown.  The next step for Antonio is to have his candidates win the two outstanding school board runoffs next month.  After that, if he can’t hammer out a deal there, he may have to go to the ballot if he wants to get this done.  This is really a crushing defeat for the mayor, who staked a lot of political capital on this issue.

The decision on the flip…

“The citizens of Los Angeles have the constitutional right to decide whether their school board is to be appointed or elected,” the justices wrote. “If the citizens of Los Angeles choose to amend their charter to allow the mayor to appoint the members of the board, such amendment would indisputably be proper. What is not permissible is for the Legislature to ignore that constitutional right and to bypass the will of the citizens of Los Angeles and effectively transfer many of powers of the board to the mayor, based on its belief, hope, or assumption that he could do a better job.”

(Our own gjones is quoted in the article. Go give it a read. – promoted by juls)

There’s
an article in the Orange County edition of the Los Angeles Times today about how some newly-elected trustees of the Capistrano Unified School District (CUSD) are showing an interest in changing the name of our winter break to “Christmas break.”

I’m quoted in the story, but that’s not why I bring it up. My concern is that this is a trial balloon and that they will probably soon move on to issues of more substantive concern to the religious extremists. Discrimination against sexual minorities is possible next step, as is the teaching of creationism.

(I didn’t attend the meeting in which the discussion took place and am loathe to give too much second hand information, but I’m told the new trustees also challenged one or more books that were being proposed for use in the curriculum.)

I’m not a Christian myself but I am a person of faith, and as such it bothers me greatly when members of one religion show intolerance toward those of a different faith. I’d like to believe our society is more “advanced” than those where people of different faiths make war on each other, but over and over I see evidence we’re really not.

We’re just a bit more subtle about it.