EDUCATION POLITICS--Last month a seven-member panel met in the state Capitol to discuss the calamitous funding situation of the California State University system, as well as the prospects for creating free public higher education in the state. The latter idea of nationally establishing cost- and debt-free learning at the college and university levels had been popularized by Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign last year. Yet in California, the legacy of the revenue-slashing Proposition 13, which California voters approved in 1978 to cut property taxes, remains a formidable stumbling block. (Photo above: Cal State University professor Melina Abdullah.)

At the heart of the February colloquium in Sacramento was a new report released by the California Faculty Association called Equity, Interrupted: How California is Cheating Its Future. (Disclosure: CFA is a financial supporter of Capital and Main.) Among the report’s findings is that the CSU student body rose 64 percent from 1985 to 2015, yet state funding for the system as a percent of the total general fund fell from 4.4 percent to 2.4 percent.

Panelist and Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) stressed the practical politics of raising taxes and spending them on public higher education. Ting, who chairs the Assembly Budget Committee, pointed to November’s approval by San Francisco voters of Proposition W, which will establish free City College of San Francisco tuition for students who are city residents. It will be funded by a real estate tax on properties that sell for over $5 million.

A similar proposal is on the radar in New York state, where Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed in January that residents with annual household incomes of $125,000 or less attend state colleges without paying tuition. New York’s 2011-2015 median household income—the point at which one-half is below and the other half is above— was $59,269, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Such large-scale public investment in free education is not new. In 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill of Rights. That federal policy allowed mainly white ex-soldiers to attend colleges and universities, free of fees and tuition. (Jim Crow segregation kept nonwhite veterans from attending many public higher education institutions.)

The economic impact of the GI Bill investment, which also funded apprenticeships and job-training, in California and across the U.S., was huge. Upward mobility accelerated, according to panelist and Assemblymember Jose Medina, (D-Riverside), a retired classroom teacher who today chairs the Assembly Committee on Higher Education. “The support and the lower cost was there,” he said.

Government intervention on behalf of higher education through targeted taxation and spending worked then and later, with the California Master Plan. The CMP provided free higher education to state residents at public universities, along with state and community colleges, beginning in 1960, although a decade later Governor Ronald Reagan would cut higher education spending and set the stage for tuition-based funding.

“I think we have to revisit that vision of raising taxes to spend them on public higher education for the CSU,” Medina said, while Ting added that California voters are “aspirational,” and care enough about their kids’ futures to vote for taxes to hike investment in higher education.

Ting believes that a battle to win the hearts and minds of voters must be waged to convince them that the local and state taxes they approve for higher education will actually get to students and teachers. He pointed to such voter-approved initiatives as Proposition 30, which increased personal-income and sales taxes to fund public education and thereby avoid deep spending cuts. (The law was extended in November with the passage of Proposition 55.)

Another panelist, Robert Shireman, who is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, spoke of another fraction of voters to sway in the battle over public opinion, albeit a tiny one: elite opinion makers on editorial boards of news media. Paradoxically, he said, many of these same elites attended well-resourced institutions of higher education, e.g., Ivy League universities, where ample private funding stands in sharp contrast to CSU’s continual disinvestment.

Improving access and success in higher education does require more money, according to Shireman. For instance, he emphasized the importance of CSU libraries receiving adequate funding to keep their doors open and shelves stocked. These libraries, Shireman said, provide alternatives to cash-strapped students coping with the high cost of textbooks.

Economics have intersected with demographics in startling ways for the state university system. From 1985 to 2015, the enrollment of CSU’s white students declined from 63.2 percent to 25.7 percent. At the same time, nonwhite CSU enrollment, which was 26.8 percent in 1985, rose to 62 percent 30 years later. The population of Latino/a CSU students spiked from 13.1 percent in 1985 to 37.6 in 2015, nearly tripling. Meanwhile, the African-American CSU student body has plunged significantly.

“We have seen a plummeting of Black student enrollment in the CSU, with the Black student population cut in half,” said panelist Professor Melina Abdullah, chair of Pan-African Studies at CSU Los Angeles wrote in an email. Abdullah is a founding member of Black Lives Matter in L.A. “That is almost identical to the percentage cut in state funding to the CSU over the last 30 years.”

One recurring theme during the CFA panel discussion was that state spending reflects policymakers’ priorities – which are revealing.

California’s budget for 2016–2017 provides $14.5 billion of general fund revenue to the University of California, CSU and community college systems versus $10.6 billion to operate the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, according to the Public Policy Institute.

Alma Hernández (photo above), executive director of the 700,000-strong Service Employees International Union California, said her members have deep concerns about being able to fund their kids’ higher education — no small stressor in the households of working families. (Disclosure: Some California SEIU locals are financial supporters of this website.)

“I had a conversation with an eligibility worker,” Hernández said, “and in order to fund half of her kids’ education under the ScholarShare program, she needed to be putting away $552 a month. She said to me, ‘That’s what my paycheck is.’ So you can image the fear and the concern. Our members are also fighting for their children to have a pathway to the middle class.”

Margarita Ines Berta-Ávila, a professor in the College of Education at CSU, Sacramento, laid out the impacts of nonwhite CSU students receiving less state resources than what white CSU students got 30 years ago. For example, she shed light on why first-generation CSU Chicana/o and Latina/o students, whose family members’ lack higher education experience, seek out her and other nonwhite faculty for help to navigate the system. Too often, however, CSU minority faculty are absent on campuses because CSU disinvestment has increased class sizes, with fewer professors teaching more students, she said.

In a question-and-answer period that ended the CFA panel briefing, Berta-Ávila stressed the importance of engaging with first-generation minority students’ parents to harvest progressive policies for the CSU.

“When parents realize that their child is working so hard to go through those four or five or six years to graduate, or they see how much their son or daughter struggles, they will make those phone calls and write those letters and make sure that they advocate for their child,” she said. “So we cannot forgo the power of our communities in making these changes.”

(Seth Sandronsky is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. He can be contacted at [email protected].) 

-cw

TENANTS RIGHTS--Los Angeles, Homeless Capital of the Nation, is a city in which 64% of its residents are renters and a majority of those renters are paying unaffordable rents. That’s why I support the passage of Assembly Member Richard Bloom's AB 1506 repealing the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act: it will address the problem of Vacancy Decontrol on rent-controlled housing in California. 

LA is the most unaffordable city in the nation for renters with tenants paying the highest percentage of their income to rent in the nation. We have the highest poverty rate in the country at 26%, meaning one out of every four households lives in poverty. 

We have the most over-crowded conditions; seven out of the top ten zip codes with the most over-crowded housing conditions are here in LA. 

We are the homeless capital of the nation. How can this be if we have rent control? Two answers: the Costa-Hawkins Housing Act and the Ellis Act, which provide landlords the ability to leave the rental market and evict tenants. 

The Costa-Hawkins Act ties the hands of local governments to adequately address their housing needs. It is the reason LA cannot pass an inclusionary housing ordinance to obtain more affordable housing units the City so desperately needs. 

The Costa-Hawkings Act puts a bullseye on the back of every long term, low rent tenant in every rent-control jurisdiction in the state. That's because landlords know if they can get those tenants to move, either by legal or illegal means, they can jack up rents without limits due to mandated vacancy decontrol. 

This is the reason why 64% of Angeleno renters are paying unaffordable rents. If we are ever going to adequately address our affordable housing crisis we must let local municipalities have the flexibility to develop policies to address the particular needs of their communities. 

This is why we fully support the repeal of the Costa Hawkins Housing Act and why AB 1506 should be passed by the State Legislature.

(Larry Gross is Executive Director of the Coalition for Economic Survival (CES) and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

IN HIS OWN WORDS (VIDEO)—LA’s just reelected Mayor Eric Garcetti answers these questions and more in this special 7 ½ minute interview with one of SoCal’s most important journalists … PBS reporter David Lazar. What’s ahead for LA’s rising crime stats, transportation, community plans, density, his political future? Get the answers straight from the Mayor to you. A CityWatch guest report. 

(David Nazar is a longtime Los Angeles journalist and PBS reporter.)

-cw

GUEST COMMENTARY-In the aftermath of Measure S, it seems everyone is offering their post mortem observations about this giant struggle over land-use and development in Los Angeles. I'd like to add my "two cents.” 

First, the voters made the right choice in sinking Measure S. We can breathe a sigh of relief that a blanket moratorium did not go into effect that would have vaporized thousands of construction jobs and wreaked havoc on our economy. Now we can continue to address the serious shortfall in housing in our region. 

Second, although the voters rejected Measure S, it was not a vote of support for the status quo. Far from it. Both residents and businesses made it clear that the current system is broken and needs to be fixed. 

Third, the Mayor and City Council need to follow through on the reforms that were promised, among which were to update community plans in a timely fashion and to have the Planning Department select the consultants performing environmental impact reports. 

Fourth, once community plans are updated, "spot zoning" (changing land-use rules to accommodate specific projects) should become the exception rather than the rule in approving projects. It would be helpful if criteria could be drawn up that explains when it is appropriate to grant an exception. 

Fifth, greater transparency should occur throughout the entire process, so that trust can be established with the public. One particular area that needs improvement is with community benefits packages. The Planning Department and councilmembers now negotiate these packages, sometimes extracting millions of dollars from developers for projects that will benefit LA. This process needs to be revised so that the public has more of an opportunity to provide suggestions on things that would benefit the impacted neighborhoods. 

And once a package is finalized and the developer hands over to the City mitigation funds, there needs to be accountability so that the public knows to which department the funds went and that they were spent according to the plan. 

An example may help. When the Hollywood & Highland complex was built back in 1988, the City negotiated a contribution from the developer for more than $9 million to be spent on traffic improvements, etc. Years afterward, when I tried to find out if the money had been spent, I could get no answer. Yet, more than 10 years after the project was completed, I saw a motion before the City Council approving the expenditure of some of the mitigation money from that project. I am not implying that anything was done incorrectly. What I am saying is that the system was not set up for transparency with the public. 

With today's technology, there is no reason that a tracking system cannot be set up on a City website that easily allows the public to see what the community benefits packages are for each project and to track the expenditures of those funds as they occur. This is an issue of trust. If the public can see that these funds are truly going to benefit them and are actually being spent on the purposes intended, it will help to instill trust in the system. 

Finally, in my conversations with neighborhood councils, one of their largest concerns is with evictions that are taking place to make way for some new projects. Most of these evictions are occurring with rent-controlled buildings and by-right projects. With the affordable housing crisis, some tenants are losing their homes with no place to go. The city needs to review its current policy to strike a balance between property rights and fairness for those being evicted. It is a complicated issue with no easy answers because of conflicting state and local laws, but the conversation needs to occur. 

The voters have indicated by large margins in the last two elections that they understand the need to "densify" our City rather than to continue expanding outward. That is the proper course of action, but it is not easy to achieve. The Hollywood Community Plan update will be coming back later this year for reconsideration. Stakeholders will have ample opportunity for public input into the process. With all of the development and changes occurring in Hollywood, we really need to have an updated plan rather than operate under one that dates back to 1988. Let's have the discussion necessary to adopt a plan that will move this community forward and which will help to reestablish trust in our land-use process. 

(Leron Gubler has been serving as the President and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for the past 24 years. His tenure since 1992 continues to oversee the great comeback story of Hollywood.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

FILM WATCH--The most pernicious aspect of our purposefully failing, corporate-profit-driven public education system (when it comes to students of color and the poor) is that student victims of this system end up thinking something is wrong with them. The truth is, the public education system has let them down from the moment they entered kindergarten. 

The real problem lies in public education's unwillingness to educate all students in a timely age-sensitive manner. Instead they are assigned to often arbitrary, inaccurate grade-level designations determined by age rather than their subjective ability level. The longer this public education system is allowed to do this, the more damage will be done to innocent students, whose lives it continues to destroy. 

Predictably, this leads to more violence and costly damage to all of our society. Ultimately, this continued failure to socially and economically integrate such a large segment of our population costs big bucks. Surprisingly, it would be easier and much less expensive to integrate and educate these students so they can become part of this country's future. At some point one must ask if the real purpose of public education as it is presently constituted is to educate the young or to reinforce class and racial stereotypes to maintain the status quo. 

The movie “The Bad Kids”  is a new feel good documentary that will screen on your local PBS station at 10 p.m. on March 20. It purports to show (in a faux “objective” documentary format) the day-to-day life of "bad kids" – a.k.a., underachieving students. What it never addresses is that although these students are being offered a second chance at getting an education and making something of themselves, they are also victims of fraud. Their second chance ignores the measurable academic deficits these "bad kids" have been allowed to acquire after years of being socially promoted with no mastery of the prior grade-level standards. This has impeded their ability to reach their academic potential. 

Placing these “bad kids” in a continuation school to help them finish high school is an act that is doomed from its inception, because it is based on the false assumption that you can make somebody ready for high school by merely waving a magic wand and declaring it so. This is in being done despite them not having mastery of the prerequisite prior grade-level standards that would actually give them a chance to succeed. Not exactly a formula for building self-esteem. 

Simply stated: How can you do Algebra, when you haven't learned your times tables? Or how are you supposed to read a 12th grade English literature or Government book, when you have a 3rd grade reading ability? But these and other issues are never addressed in “The Bad Kids,” whose sole purpose seems to be the creation of positivity and hope without any substance to back it up. 

In addition, the mystical value of a high school diploma is set as the unquestioned goal for all students at Black Rock High School Continuation School students in Yucca Valley, California. No context or questioning of this goal is ever presented and no subsequent academic success or failure of the students is ever presented. 

The Black Rock website lists statistics touting 38% for English and 50% for math as the numbers of students in the school district that are at grade-level; however, the specific statistics of Black Rock Continuation High School students are noticeably omitted. And when it comes to how many Black Rock students are actually "College Ready," the website says "N/A" for not applicable. Why is that? 

At no time during the after screening discussion I attended, lead by KPPC Reporter Adolfo Guzman Lopez, was the premise of “The Bad Kids” ever questioned critically. That is, not until I raised my hand and mentioned what I thought there were relevant questions that needed to be addressed: 

1. Since 70% of students going to California junior colleges with high school diplomas cannot pass the entrance/placement examination and wind up taking remedial classes until most drop out, why is a high school diploma so important, especially since students could get a GED or high school diploma contemporaneously with doing other community college work? Are all high school diplomas created equal if some are given away irrespective of whether or not a student has mastered the material? 

2. Since the total capacity of all colleges and universities in the United States is only 40% of all high school graduates, why are we closing down industrial arts and other direct occupational training programs that could enable students to find gainful employment, making them self-sustaining, tax paying members of our society with professions and/or the ability to pay for further education without going into debt? 

3. What justifiable rage and antisocial behavior is predictably acted out when the vast majority of students in continuation school programs like Black Rock High School ultimately figure out that they have been scammed by being given high school diplomas that aren't worth the paper they are written on? And how much effort would it take the school district or the state to test students to see if they really earned a high school diploma? 

While schools in the past served as the key societal integration mechanism that levelled the playing field by equalizing academic opportunity for all American socio-economic classes, the difference in opportunity between what the affluent receive and what minorities and the poor receive today has never been greater. Is it any wonder there are over 2.3 million people behind bars? If nothing else, it would seem that the cost of timely education would be far less than the $78,000 a year it costs to incarcerate a juvenile...unless you are the for-profit corporation running the prison. 

The free exchange of ideas and knowledge we need as a putative democratic society to continue making decisions that will allow America to be great – “great again” or maybe for the first time -- requires that we the people be given a marketplace of ideas from which to choose -- something more than mere propaganda. Could that be why the core of these rights are in the First Amendment? 

What I found most reprehensible at the screening of “The Bad Kids” was witnessing an example of the cowardice of the news media (both commercial and public) who seem to care more about keeping their jobs than going to where the facts lead them, irrespective of the corporate or foundation interests that either own or subsidize them. The Reporter Adolfo Guzman Lopez, who emceed the evening, is an extremely intelligent person and excellent writer who knows more than I do with regard to what is really going on in public education. But, as a reporter, he’s doing nothing to question the education system; rather, he gives distorted credibility to it by his mere unquestioning presence. 

When I asked him why he never questioned something as irrational as LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King's recent call for 100% graduation rate, while LAUSD has an audited effective truancy rate of 52%, Guzman Lopez said, "She must have meant she would like to have 100% graduation." Other than President Donald Trump's Press Secretary Sean Spicer, is it the function of a reporter to slant and interpret without input? Or rather, should he proactively ask how such an apparent contradiction could exist? Shame on you Adolfo!

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TASER TROUBLE-Last chance for Charlie Beck. Back-to-back Taser-stained police shootings last weekend--one by LAPD officers, the other by LA County Sherrif's Deputies--have brought things to a head, and it’s time for Beck to make a choice: will he pull the plug on his aggressive Taser deployment policy, or let it pull the plug on him?

It may be too late. To save his legacy there's two things he can do: 

First, take the lead in the nation in calling out Taser International for what it is  -- a fraud -- and then dump it wholesale, demanding LA’s money back. 

Second, take the $370 million all-overtime contract he just snatched for providing Metro security and use a big portion of it to subcontract a private security force that can field enough personnel to provide each bus a dedicated guard. 

The jury is in: not only do Tasers fail to reduce police shootings, they cause them. The two police shootings last weekend were just two more data points on a graph that everyone in law enforcement across the country knows to be true. 

1) Tasers fail up to fifty percent of the time and thereby not only provoke the subject into aggressive behavior (leading to shootings by police officers) but also leave the officer exposed at close range and so more in need of using deadly force. Taser International advises officers to avoid shooting at the torso of a subject for fear of causing cardiac complications. At which part of the body is an officer supposed to aim? 

2) There is already an effective means of subduing subjects -- pepper spray -- which, however awful and imperfect, is reliable. It’s also sufficiently messy and inconvenient to discourage unwarranted use. The groan of rank and file cops over having to suffer that inconvenience will be like the groan of teenagers being forced to do something that they know is right. 

Charlie Beck let the Wall Street wolf into the chicken coop. By masquerading as pro-cop, the hedge fund managers who own Taser International are laughing all the way to the bank. 

Monday morning the City of Los Angeles Claims Board will grapple with a multi-million dollar Taser-involved police shooting judgment from 2013. What if the shootings last weekend had taken place at a Metro stop under Beck's all-overtime contract? The liability would be off the charts. 

It takes a village to put so many people -- cops, civilians, taxpayers -- in harm's way, but Eric Garcetti is off this weekend at what the Times is calling a “cattle call” for Presidential hopefuls, and he’ll be long gone when all this comes crashing down in flames. 

Will Charlie Beck's legacy come down with it? 

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer and a candidate for Los Angeles mayor. Joshua is a teacher.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.