The Clean Money Campaign is now in the California Senate. Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D) has introduced a bill to create publicly-funded campaigns in California, similar to Arizona and Maine. It passed the Assembly in February and is now working its way through Senate committees.
Sounds appealing, but would it work?
The week is over and I have returned to Berkeley. I helped gut two houses and met some amazing people in the great city of New Orleans. I wish I had high hopes for its renewal, but I am concerned.
If I were to write a list of I saw missing from the equation for the city of New Orleans, competent leadership would be the first item. The people of New Orleans need someone to step in and provide a vision for the future of the city that respects those who already lived there, and charts a course to a future where all residents benefit, not just the wealthy and well-connected.
Most of the houses in New Orleans have spray-painted crosses on them. It gives the city the eerie feeling of a plague, as if Albert Camus were alive and well in New Orleans. These were used to indicate if the military had gone through the home. A brief description...
Author's Note: Dispatches From Disaster will be Sean West's posts from New Orleans. All comments will be routed to him through Greg Kato.
Today we cleaned out Keith's house along the same avenue as Eddie's. Keith is a mid-thirties white security guard with both ears pierced, who grew up in the house we were tasked to clean out. Unlike Eddie's house, Keith's had not been touched since the hurricane seven months ago--making for more work but also telling a story with each room entered.
Author's Note: Dispatches From Disaster will be Sean West's posts from New Orleans. All comments will be routed to him through Greg Kato.
For those of us who still read newspaper stories about Katrina victims (many begin to block out catastrophes after a measured level of mourning), there a few common themes: Looting, unemployment, insurance hassles, FEMA ineptitude, destroyed lives and feeling of helplessness. It adds texture to have one of these individuals in front of you telling the story.
Enter Eddie: A tall African-American in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a forlorn smile.
Today has been filled with great experiences. We met Eddie, an electrician and homeowner who had water up to two inches below the ceiling on his ground floor. We learned about how he built the back addition to his house and the care he used in building it to withstand the forces of nature. We also got a taste of the frustration and anger people are feeling down here from the perspective of our host.
Hello from the Camp Algiers Internet Café in New Orleans, LA!
Arrived in New Orleans today for a Spring Break helping folks who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. A classmate at GSPP has been working with Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN for the semester. She had kindly hosted us for some home gutting and meeting folks affected by this disaster.
I’m eager to get started.
Marco Antonio Firebaugh, a former California Assemblyman, died on Tuesday March 21 at the age of 39 after a long illness. His obituary can be found here.
Firebaugh was chair of the Latino Caucus and majority leader in the Assembly before being termed out in 2004. He had planned on running for Senate this year.
He was a UC Berkeley graduate in 1990 and spent time as a staffer for Richard Polanco before embarking on his own political careeer.
The College Board recently disclosed that about 4000 students received incorrect scores from the October sitting of the SAT Reasoning Test.
Oops.
Of course, the incident has generated outrage from students and parents. While I agree that it is completely unfair that students get the wrong grade, I'm a bit cynical. Systematic differences (as in across racial or socioeconomic groups) are routinely written off as sour grapes.
A study released by the American Institutes for Research and WestED says that no one approach shows significant gains over others in teaching English learners, whether it be English immersion, or bilingual education courses.
What does show a relationship? Not surprisingly, the report cites poverty is the one indicator that is determinant in test scores more than how quickly students complete an English remediation program.
Five years ago, California voters passed Proposition 227, which proponents said would "mainstream" students for whom English was a second language, and opponents said would hurt children by throwing them into classes in English without proper preparation.
Why can't results be seen? Well, test scores for English learners did go up in the past few years. However, scores across the board rose. The gap in score between English learners and others didn't close significantly.
Think that labor rights aren't completely eroded in the United States? Check out this story from SF Chronicle gossip hounds Matier and Ross for chilling evidence to the contrary.
A local AmTrak conductor was fired recently after getting injured while getting a drunk passenger off the train. On August 15, 2005 Rebecca Gettleman noticed a visibly intoxicated passenger and got him off the train and into the hands of authorities. In the process of stepping off the train, the passenger pitched forward, falling down the stairs. Gettleman grabbed him, and in the process injured herself, requiring a month of physical therapy.
The Class of 2006 will be the first high school class in California that has to pass the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE)… or will they?
Last Wednesday, a lawsuit was filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of 20 high school students and their parents seeking an injunction to delay implementation of the consequences of the exam.
The lawyers in this case picked at least one blockbuster plaintiff. Liliana Valenzuela has a 3.84 GPA and is #12 in her class at Richmond High School in the East Bay. However, she has not passed the English portion of the examination.
Testing advocates at this point must be asking, “What’s going on at Richmond High?” and opponents are probably saying, “Aha, this proves the test is a poor indicator!”
GetEnough.gov still on hiatus...
Yesterday the Office of Management and Budget launched its Expect More website.
It is designed to encourage more accountability from federal programs by giving each a star rating, from three stars signifying “effective” to no stars “ineffective.”
About 800 federal programs are currently on the website, representing 80% of the federal budget. The OMB hopes to have all federal programs on the site by the end of the year.
Each program has a few bullet points about what’s going well, as well as a few areas of improvement where action plans are briefly discussed.
It’s all very glossy and is easily accessible, but what does it really tell us? A series of soundbytes seems awfully shallow considering these are major programs confronting difficult problems.
Are Americans building a house of straw by spending more than they earn?
The US Department of Commerce recently released its monthly report on national savings for December 2005. For the first time since 1932 and 1933, Americans spent more than they brought in for an entire year.
What's going on?
College students increasingly use student loans to finance their education. The average college student will leave school with between $15,000 and $20,000 in student loan debt. Those students who drop out will not reap the benefits of attaining a college degree while being saddled with debt. Low-income students, who already are more likely to drop out due to other risk factors, such as academic preparation and working part-time, are especially at risk.
Two-thirds of students who enroll at a four-year institution with the intention of attaining at least a bachelor’s degree borrowed to finance their education. A similar proportion (68%) of students at private vocational school borrow. Perhaps most troubling is that almost one third (32%) of those borrowers at private institutions dropped out.
If you think that it's getting outrageously expensive to get an education, you wouldn't be wrong. Some quick facts from Strapped, a new book from Demos, a group focused on income inequality.
Did you know?
Every year, 410,000 college-qualified students from households with income less than $50,000 enroll in community college instead of going to a four-year college. Another 168,000 college-qualified students do not enroll in college at all.
The House is scheduled to vote Feb. 1 on a package that includes student aid cuts. If passed, the policy also would raise interest rates for parent loans from 7.9 percent to 8.5 percent and fix student loans at an interest rate of 6.8 percent.
