22 Days without a budget … but who's counting?

GET YOUR FLOOR REPORT HERE

by Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert Staff: After approving the budget in a late night session until Friday AM, the state Assembly's Democratic caucus has posted a copy of the floor report for the 2007-2008 Budget Act online.

The Assembly Democratic floor report can be found here....

an after the last minute update:

NO STATE BUDGET, BUT SENATORS TO TRY AGAIN THIS WEEK

GOP members maintain their opposition but agree to offer a plan of their own at midweek, when the upper house convenes again.

by Evan Halper. LA Times Staff Writer

Sunday, July 22, 2007 - SACRAMENTO — State senators went home Saturday morning after an all-night lockdown failed to force a budget agreement, with the exasperated Senate leader ordering GOP members to return midweek with their own spending plan.

The senators read books and magazines, listened to music and mostly just sat around through the previous night. Some of the Republicans posted notes ridiculing the lockdown to a conservative blog that has become a rallying point. By midmorning everyone was dismissed with no deal in place, pushing the budget impasse into a fourth week.

"We've reached the end of our rope," said Senate Leader Don Perata (D-Oakland). "I do not understand what they are after…. If those 15 Republicans want to stop state government, they are on their way to doing it."

The Senate Republicans continue to ignore Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's call to sign off on the $145-billion bipartisan budget approved Friday by the Assembly. The GOP lawmakers say that budget plan spends too much. But they have been unclear about where they would make about $700 million in additional spending reductions they demand.

Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman of Irvine said his caucus will meet Perata's challenge to put it all in a GOP budget plan this week. The upper house will reconvene Wednesday.

"We are going to try to fashion a budget," he said. "We will have a proposal."

Ackerman said his caucus will not sign off on a budget package resembling the one passed with support of Republicans in the Assembly. The lower house has since adjourned for a month, with its leaders vowing not to cut recess short to consider changes to the spending bill. Ackerman called on the Assembly to return.

As drowsy senators left the Capitol on Saturday, pressure on Republicans mounted. The governor warned that cutting as deeply into spending as the Republicans are demanding would mean scaling back funding to schools, something Schwarzenegger said he will not support.

"I remain firm in my commitment that we not cut education funding," he said.

The governor had earlier promised to use his line-item veto authority once the budget is passed to make some additional cuts that would appease the GOP. But the Republican senators say they are unconvinced that such a move would reduce spending enough.

Administration officials said that they were trying to help negotiate a deal but that Republicans had been unclear about what additional cuts they wanted to make, leaving discussions in limbo.

Individual Republicans, meanwhile, rebuffed invitations to meet with the governor late Friday night. In years past governors have occasionally managed to extract GOP votes for a budget from an otherwise obstinate caucus. Passage of a spending plan in the Senate requires at least two GOP votes. This year, the Senate GOP caucus has made a pact that none of its members will vote for a budget until the caucus as a whole agrees it would be appropriate.

One member appears to be wavering, however. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria), a moderate, has been abstaining from casting a budget vote, rather than joining his colleagues in voting against the Assembly plan.

As the rest of the Republicans dig in, school groups have begun calling individual lawmakers, urging them to compromise. The Democrats have already agreed to hundreds of millions of dollars in reductions to public transportation, welfare, drug treatment and other programs. Education spending accounts for nearly half of the budget, and educators warn that any further cuts will hit schools.

Education groups also warn that unless a budget is in place soon, schools won't receive state money they need for the fall semester.

The effort to block the budget "creates confusion and concern for our school districts, which will be starting fall term in just a few weeks," said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell.

Conservative activists, meanwhile, told the lawmakers to hold their ground.

"You 15 are officially martyrs for all California taxpayers," Jon Fleischman, a member of the state party's board, wrote to the caucus on his blog Flash Report, http://www.flashreport.org. GOP senators have been using the blog to sound off on Perata, the governor and Assembly Republican Leader Michael Villines of Clovis. They also offered updates on the lockdown.

Just before 7 a.m. Saturday, Sen. Jim Battin (R-La Quinta) sent in a posting. "We've been locked in, and there are sergeants at every exit making sure we can't leave," he wrote. "I slept in a chair for about an hour (and btw — Dennis Hollingsworth [(R-Murrieta)] snores :/). Ah-Democracy at work…. It's all rather quite embarrassing."

Also posted on the blog was an attack on the governor by Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks): "He sided with liberal Democrats in refusing to balance the state budget."

Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster) blogged that if Assembly Republicans "had chosen to learn more from their colleagues in the Senate who have gone through more than one or two budgets, we might have a true 'fiscally responsible' budget to vote on."

He also took a swipe at their decision to leave town: "Now is the time to put our vacation plans aside, get back to Sacramento and craft a better budget."

ASSEMBLY RECESS CONSTITUTIONAL?

By Judy Lin – Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert
Published 10:06 am PDT Saturday, July 21, 2007

After a long night with no progress to speak of on the budget, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate agree: The Assembly negotiated a flawed tax credit package when they struck their deal. Now Republican senators are demanding changes in the overall plan, which would require the Assembly to reconvene.

The Speaker's Office has already said members won't come back, no way, no how.

But can the Assembly stay away for then entire four weeks of summer recess? Maybe not.

Under Article IV, Section 7, Part D of the state Constitution, "Neither house without the consent of the other may recess for more than 10 days to any other place."

The joint rules - house procedures adopted by both houses - backs up the law of the land. "This recess shall not commence until the Budget Bill is passed."

Assembly spokesman Steve Maviglio says the rule is unenforceable.

"The constitution also says we are required to have a budget by June 15th -- that's the one that the holdout Senate Republicans need to focus on instead of making excuses for their failure to do what Assembly Democrats and Republicans have done by passing a balanced budget that has the support of the governor and Senate Democrats.

The legislative counsel has opined in the past that this provision is (inapplicable) and unenforceable," Maviglio said in an e-mail.

SENATE ADJOURNS BUDGET TALKS UNTIL WEDNESDAY: Republicans want the deficit cut further; Assembly closes shop.

By Judy Lin and Jim Sanders – Sacramento Bee Capitol Bureau

Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, July 21, 2007

Senate Democrats on Saturday morning ended a night-long lock down over the already-overdue state budget and adjourned until Wednesday.

Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, said he had hoped to persuade at least two Republicans to vote for the $103 billion Assembly-approved plan by locking members in the chambers Friday for a marathon session.

But Republicans refused to budge, and a frustrated Perata threw in the towel just after 10 a.m. He challenged the GOP to come up with a list of budget cuts to debate by a scheduled Wednesday morning floor session.

"Until they are ready, willing and able to specifically say 'we want cuts here, we want changes there' and write trailer bills that satisfy the budget requirement, I don't see how we're going to make any progress," Perata said Saturday shortly after letting senators go home.

Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman of Irvine called Perata's request a "drill" but said he will have his staff compile a new budget as best it can.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested the Republicans may not be able to reduce a projected operating deficit in the 2007-08 fiscal year without cutting education.

"I have been open to ideas put forth over the last three weeks," the governor said in a statement. "I know how difficult it is to eliminate the operating deficit all in one year. But I remain firm in my commitment that we not cut education funding."

The development leaves the state without a budget 22 days into the fiscal year with little prospect of immediate resolution. While union contracts and court decisions require the state to make some payments, including paychecks to most state employees, payments to vendors for services and goods incurred after July 1 cannot be made until a budget is approved.

Perata said Republicans are negotiating in "bad faith" and "overreaching" by continuing to press for deeper savings. He said the GOP keeps moving its goal farther on the operating deficit, even though the version now pending made more progress on the deficit than the plan the Republican governor put forth in mid-May.

The senator said Democrats have already made as many concessions as they are willing in order to protect the state's most vulnerable people, including seniors and children.

"The governor is perplexed, I'm perplexed," Perata said.

Ackerman denied that he's been moving the goal line, saying he has called for a balanced budget all along. He declined to say specifically where the state might find savings, but suggested it could be done without lowering education funding.

"We were negotiating all last night and even some this morning. We did not get to a conclusion. We did not," Ackerman said. "Democrats did not want to meet us anywhere on some of our proposals so we are now going to present some more of our ideas.

Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, said the budget plan is based on faulty economic assumptions. "The claim that this budget is only a half-billion dollars out of balance is simply a monstrous ... how do I put this politely ... a mathematical malfunction," he said in a late night floor speech.

The budget plan was approved by the Assembly before dawn Friday, freeing members of that house for a four-week summer recess.

Members of the Senate, however, were less fortunate.

Throughout Friday night and early Saturday morning, senators were confined to the chamber and had to have permission to go to their their offices. To distract themselves, they read, listened to iPods, and played Sudoku on their laptops.

A window long thought to be sealed was opened, allowing senators to access the south balcony.

Republicans in the upper house say the budget bill doesn't go far enough to bring state spending into balance with revenues. Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Temecula, noted the state faces a $5.5 billion deficit in the 2008-09 fiscal year. Unless lawmakers reduce automatic growth in programs now, he said, the state will be forced to make "draconian cuts" later.

"The threat is there, the threat is real. It is unavoidable," Hollingsworth said during a floor debate before the bill came up for a vote.

The Senate initially voted 25-14, failing to obtain the necessary 27 votes - or two-thirds - necessary for passage.

Moderate Republican Sen. Abel Maldonado abstained. He plugged his ears with his fingers when Perata called for a recount of votes an hour later.

Democrats characterized Senate Bill 77 as a compassionate and fiscally sound spending plan. While it takes away more than $1 billion in dedicated public transit funding, Democrats argued it would be backfilled by new infrastructure bonds.

"It protects our seniors and our children," said Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego.

Schwarzenegger said the Legislature has done a "magnificent job" in driving the deficit down to $700 million, roughly half of what he proposed. The governor indicated he would cut more using his "blue pencil" authority.

Ackerman, who leads minority Republicans, said the GOP wants language in the budget to prevent the state from suing local governments if they fail to consider climate change in their development plans.

Sen. Bob Dutton, R-Rancho Cucamonga, said Attorney General Jerry Brown recently sued San Bernardino County for failing to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act - the law that ensures planners consider the impact of a project on the local environment.

Republicans, he said, want to create a "safe harbor" by preventing Brown from filing such lawsuits.

Perata refused to negotiate further.

"We've made as many concessions as we will, and I'll stay here as long as is necessary," the Democratic leader said.

Both parties in the Senate agreed that a package of tax breaks for business that helped win Assembly passage of the state spending plan in the wee hours of Friday morning would not get much of a look.

The Assembly tax package was designed to benefit numerous types of business activity, including research and development, the airline industry, the shipping industry, and movie or television production.

Perata called the last-minute compromise "an irresponsible action to take in the dark of night, without any debate or discussion."

He also argued that the bill appeared to have drafting errors that could hurt the businesses it was designed to help, saying it appeared to have been "written by chimpanzees."

In a memo to the Senate sent on Friday, Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines said the centerpiece of the tax-cut plan was poorly drafted and the legislation, Senate Bill 98, "inadvertently" applied a sunset clause to "existing research and development provisions of California law."

Perata declared the tax deal, which promised about $500 million a year in tax breaks in an effort to secure Republican votes for the bill, "DOA" and a "non-starter," adding that he would derail the measure without a Senate floor vote.

The tax bill is not directly linked to the budget bill.

Senate Republicans, meanwhile, were criticizing the budget bill even before Perata turned thumbs-down on the tax breaks embraced by many of their Assembly colleagues.

For hours Friday, Senate Democrats and Republicans held separate caucuses to discuss concerns and decide what action to take.

Perata said his Democratic caucus supports the budget bill itself, but not the Assembly's companion tax compromise.

Providing tax breaks would lower the state's revenue base, thus jeopardizing future funding for schools, public health and public safety, Perata said.

The Senate conceivably could break the logjam by negotiating separate concessions with Senate Republicans, but that would require the Assembly to return from recess.

"We're not coming back under any circumstances," said Steven Maviglio, a spokesman for Núñez.

A FINE MESS ENTANGLES LATE BUDGET

by Dan Walters – Sacramento Bee Capitol Bureau
Published 7:50 pm PDT Friday, July 20, 2007

The convoluted, multifaceted and almost impenetrable political thicket surrounding the state budget recalls a line in movies made by 1930s comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

When the two loonies would find themselves in some seemingly intractable dilemma, Hardy would turn to Laurel and scowl, "Well, Stan, this is another fine mess you got us into." And Laurel, tears welling in his eyes, would whimper, "Sorry, Ollie."

Plug in Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, and you get the idea.

Núñez created the fine mess when he more or less caved into Republican demands to reduce the state's chronic budget deficit and enact a multibillion-dollar package of tax breaks for various business groups. The Assembly passed the budget bills and the tax bill about 4 a.m. Friday and then adjourned for a month, with members scattering across the globe.

Hours earlier, Perata had denounced the tax breaks for giving away millions to business while tax credits for teachers were being eliminated and benefits to the aged, blind and disabled were being scaled back to narrow the budget gap. "How could you throw them over for Hollywood movie moguls and multinational corporations?" Perata asked Núñez in a sharply worded letter.

After the Assembly passed the tax breaks anyway, Perata declared them to be dead-on-arrival in the Senate. "It's an irresponsible action to take in the dark of night, without any debate or discussion," Perata said, later adding that it appeared to have been "written by chimpanzees." Republican senators refused to back it, as well, because it inadvertently wiped out a longstanding research tax credit and, eventually, Núñez admitted it was drafted incorrectly.

Republican senators were a little scornful of their Assembly counterparts. "It appears to be that the Assembly was too quick to go on vacation," Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster, observed, saying of GOP Assembly members: "I just think they were snookered."

The dustup over taxes, however, was just one aspect of the mess. More fundamentally, Republican senators demanded tighter restrictions on spending to narrow the operating deficit even more and ease projections of big deficits in future years.

"We've been spending much, much more than we've been taking in," Senate GOP leader Dick Ackerman said as he and other Republicans refused to vote for the package of budget bills late Friday afternoon.

Republicans also had a laundry list of non-financial demands, including curbs on Attorney General Jerry Brown's lawsuits against local governments over growth plans that failed to account for greenhouse gas emissions. Brown described the demand, backed by developers, as "an outrage."

Perata reacted by locking up senators indefinitely, requiring them to remain "on the red carpet" - inside the Senate chambers - and suggesting that they begin thinking about ordering breakfast. When a few GOP senators tried to leave for their offices, Senate sergeants-at-arms locked the chamber's doors and turned them away.

Given the lengthy list of Republican senators' demands, it is very uncertain when - or if - the impasse would be resolved; Perata said he was "done negotiating." But even if there were to be some deal in the Senate, the Assembly's recess would make it very difficult to reconvene that house to complete budget action.

Even before the Senate met, a Núñez spokesman declared that "we're not coming back under any circumstances" and if the impasse continued, "the Senate will have to live with that."

Núñez, however, also would have to live with a prolonged impasse that would alienate voters further and dim prospects for passing a Núñez-backed ballot measure to ease legislative term limits.

OOPS! ASSEMBLY MEMO SAYS TAX-CUT BILL ACTUALLY SUNSETS EXISTING INCENTIVES

By Shane Goldmacher – Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert

Published 5:00 pm PDT Friday, July 20, 2007

In a memo to the Senate sent on Friday, Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez and Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines reveal that the centerpiece of the tax-cut plan passed in the wee hours of the morning was miswritten and the legislation, Senate Bill 98, "inadvertently" applied a sunset clause to "existing research and development provisions of California law."

The tax cut proposal had already received a cold shoulder in the Senate on Friday, where Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata said the bill looked as if it had been "written by chimpanzees."

In a letter sent to Núñez late Thursday night, Perata urged the speaker not to include tax cuts for businesses in the budget.

"We have surrendered $185 (million) in teacher tax credits to balance the budget!!!" Perata wrote. "How could you now throw them over for Hollywood movie moguls and multi-national corporations???"

Specifically, the tax incentives, according to Villines' office, will promote research and development, keep more of the film industry in Hollywood, and create tax exemptions for the purchase of jet fuel. The total value was estimated to be as high as $500 million by Perata.

But the section covering research and development tax credits in SB 98 was subject to a "drafting error," according to the memo obtained by Capitol Alert.

"One particular area of emphasis in Senate Bill 98 is the area of research and development tax credits, and in particular conforming California's tax law to the federal Alternative Incremental Credit (AIC). SB 98 provides a full five-year conformity to this enhanced federal credit," Nunez and Villines wrote. "However, in the final draft of Senate Bill 98, a technical drafting error inadvertently applied this five-year sunset to the existing research and development provisions of California law, and not the specific change to the AIC."

"All parties to the debate, discussion and drafting of SB 98 agree that this was not the intended result," the memo continues.

Núñez and Villines, however, hold firm that the Assembly has adjourned for summer recess and will not return until mid-August.

"As Speaker and Assembly Republican Leader, respectively, we are pleased to have been able to come to agreement on a significant tax incentive and economic stimulus package. Upon our return from the Summer Recess, we will take the necessary steps to correct any concerns or inadvertent consequences due to this drafting error," the memo concludes.

Meanwhile, the Senate, in an initial vote, has rejected the budget passed by the Assembly in a party-line vote, with Republicans opposed.

Below is the full memo:

TO: Interested Parties

FROM: Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez

Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines

DATE: July 20, 2007

RE: Drafting Error in Senate Bill 98 Related to Research and Development Credit

We write both to bring to your attention an inadvertent drafting error by Legislative Counsel in Senate Bill 98, which passed off the Assembly Floor last night with strong bipartisan support, and to express our mutual understanding to address this drafting error in August.

As you know, SB 98 contains numerous provisions, all of which provide enhanced taxpayer incentives to bring new jobs and capital investment to California. One particular area of emphasis in Senate Bill 98 is the area of research and development tax credits, and in particular conforming California's tax law to the federal Alternative Incremental Credit (AIC). SB 98 provides a full five-year conformity to this enhanced federal credit.

However, in the final draft of Senate Bill 98, a technical drafting error inadvertently applied this five-year sunset to the existing research and development provisions of California law, and not the specific change to the AIC. All parties to the debate, discussion and drafting of SB 98 agree that this was not the intended result.

As Speaker and Assembly Republican Leader, respectively, we are pleased to have been able to come to agreement on a significant tax incentive and economic stimulus package. Upon our return from the Summer Recess, we will take the necessary steps to correct any concerns or inadvertent consequences due to this drafting error.

BEWARE THE "SLASHERS"

By Dan Weintraub – Sacramento Bee Captiol Alert

July 18, 2007

The LA Times reports this morning that Republicans have proposed to "slash" aid to the schools by $400 million and the Democrats say that will happen, essentially, over their dead bodies. The school lobby is deeply disappointed in the Republicans for considering such a thing.

Nothing against my friends at the LAT, since the Republicans deserve to be slapped when they whisper this stuff in private rather than explaining it to all in the light of day, but a little more context might help here. It sounds as if the Republicans might be talking about adjusting the Prop. 98 estimate for the coming year. That estimate is tied in part to the state's revenues. In May, Schwarzenegger increased the Prop. 98 number for 07-08 to reflect higher projections for tax revenues in the coming year. Then before the ink was dry on those numbers, the actual tax collections started coming up short, to the tune of $800 million already in just May and June.

The Democrats' budget "slashed" about $400 million from the schools to reflect those lower revenues in the current year, but kept with Schwarzenegger's assumption for the minimum in the coming year. If you assume that the lower than expected revenues in May and June will be continue in soft collections in the rest of 2007 and 2008, you would also expect the Prop. 98 minimum to be a bit lower. I'm guessing that is what the Republicans have suggested.

Now let's look again at the "slash."

When the budget was approved last summer, the schools stood to get $55.1 billion from state and local taxes, a ten percent increase over the amount originally budgeted the year before -- despite essentially zero growth in enrollment.

The governor's May revision increased the current year amount by $371 million to reflect the higher revenues, and proposed $57.6 billion for the coming year.

The Democrats' plan approved by the conference committee backed out that extra $371 million for this year.

If, indeed, the Republicans are now proposing $400 million less for next year, that would mean the schools budget would grow from $55.1 billion to $57.2 billion, an increase of $2.1 billion, or just under 4 percent.

K-12 attendance, by the way, is expected to decline by about 28,000 from this year to next.

BUDGET LATE AGAIN - WHAT'S NEW?

By Dan Walters – Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert

Published 4:47 pm PDT Thursday, July 5, 2007

Capitol legend has it that the state's politicians can't enact a new state budget until the temperature in Sacramento hits 100 degrees.

Triple-digit temperatures arrived this week, so that impediment, if it exists, has vanished. But there are no indications, as yet, that the three-way budget wrangle involving Democratic and Republican legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's caught in the middle, will be resolved quickly.

It's an old story in the Capitol. Although the governor and lawmakers produced an on-time budget last year, thanks to a surge of revenues, that was the first time the state had a budget on place for the July 1 beginning of the fiscal year since 2000 and only the fourth time in the last two decades, according to a chart prepared by the Department of Finance.

The latest a budget was enacted, at least since 1977, was Sept. 2, 1992. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson and legislators were deadlocked over how to handle a humongous budget deficit created by the worst recession in a half-century. A year later, in 1993, however, Wilson and lawmakers produced one of the state's rare on-time budgets.

Schwarzenegger's revised budget is available here.

If you want a summary of what the Democrats want in the budget, contrasting with Schwarzenegger's major proposals, it's available here.

POST-PARTISAN DEPRESSION

By Dan Walters – Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert

Published 10:00 pm PDT Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger crows loudly and often about how "post-partisanship" is the Capitol's new operating credo and that he and the Legislature's Democrats are working together on the state's knottiest issues.

A new poll, however, indicates that Californians, both voters and nonvoters, are increasingly skeptical about the ability of Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers to perform as promised - even though they continue to give the Republican governor very high approval ratings.

The poll is the latest in a frequent series of attitudinal surveys by the foundation-supported Public Policy Institute of California, and among its other findings is the increasing preoccupation of Californians with illegal immigration.

"Immigration tops just about everyone's list of the most important issues facing California today," PPIC says in a summary of its poll. "This holds true across regions, political parties, racial and ethnic groups and gender."

PPIC president Mark Baldassare finds that fixation puzzling, since the state has almost no power to affect immigration, legal or illegal. "State leaders cannot make immigration policy but they will continue to feel the fallout of voter discontent over its effects."

The poll found strong support for immigration reform, especially for the general thrust of the measure being pushed by President Bush to give illegal immigrants a pathway to legalization - although Bush's own popularity in California has sunk to what PPIC describes as "nearing rock bottom," just 28 percent.

Of more immediate concern to the Capitol's politicians is the poll's finding that Californians are becoming somewhat disenchanted with their performance - which may stem, the poll indicates, from the upbeat promises that Schwarzenegger and legislators made earlier in the year about their intention to attack health care and other pithy issues.

That could be bad news for Democratic legislative leaders who want voters to pass a measure to loosen up on legislative term limits. The Legislature's popularity is scarcely half of Schwarzenegger's, and he's been threatening to oppose the term limits measure if Democrats refuse to overhaul the process of drawing new legislative and congressional districts after the decennial census.

The survey found that Californians generally endorse Schwarzenegger's health care proposal, including mandatory coverage and "shared responsibility" among consumers, government, employers and health care providers for the cost.

Other findings include strong support for abortion rights, a nearly even division on same-sex marriage and continuing support for Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani for their parties' presidential nominations.

The survey can be accessed here

JohnDewey4Today

Chicago refines the role of the research university
in urban schools.

By Timothy Knowles, Stephen Raudenbush & Henry S. Webber

from EdWeek Vol. 26, Issue 43, Pages 32,34 | 18 July 2007

Art by Bryan Toy

Many of us in higher education have long grappled with the stunning dichotomy of American education: Our colleges and universities are acknowledged as the most advanced in the world, and yet our public elementary and secondary schools continue to lag behind those of other industrialized nations. Nowhere is this contrast more stark than from our academic vantage point: a world-renowned university in a section of Chicago whose public schools struggle to serve the children and families who depend on them. Because the country relies on public schools to educate its citizenry—not only to maintain America’s place in the global economy, but also to preserve its democratic systems—continued failure in this realm poses one of the most significant national domestic problems of our time. It is time for higher education to take a far greater, and significantly different, responsibility for pre-K-12 schooling.

Our institution, the University of Chicago, has made a strategic decision to focus its intellectual resources on the improvement of urban public schools. Recognizing that a complex problem needs innovative and nuanced solutions, we have launched an urban education initiative that comprises four interrelated strands: pursuing basic research that will help better the lives of children, developing outstanding practitioners for urban schools, undertaking applied research that refines our work in Chicago and informs other school systems across the nation, and developing a model of what high-quality public schooling for urban children looks like.

Notably, we are pursuing this work without a school or department of education. We believe this offers us an exceptional opportunity to conceptualize a new role for the research university seeking to influence pre-K-12 schooling. Our initiative will be led jointly by faculty members and school practitioners, and is supported by a national board co-chaired by the university’s president and provost. We do not suggest that Chicago’s Urban Education Initiative is a blueprint for other institutions to follow. But we are committed to investing in this work, and to studying and sharing new approaches as we do so.

At the heart of our initiative are the pre-K-12 charter schools opened and operated by the university’s Center for Urban School Improvement. These are located in communities near our South Side campus and serve predominantly low-income African-American students, who will number approximately 1,600 when the schools reach capacity in a few years. Admission is through a lottery process. The university is taking full responsibility for the schools’ academic performance and fiscal administration. These public charter schools are designed to provide an outstanding education for children and families, serve as a training ground for the next generation of practitioners, and operate as the locus for cutting-edge research to develop new tools and methods for urban education.

Seeking solutions to the social and economic ills facing our country must be one of the tasks of higher education.

Because there are those who will argue that schools operated by a university cannot be replicable, we have initiated a connected effort to incubate and support 15 additional new schools across Chicago. Together, the University of Chicago schools and this broader portfolio of schools will serve 10,000 children annually.

The singular contribution a university can make to such an effort is to ground it in formative evaluation and systematic empirical research. Thus, intersecting at our charter schools will be the work of Chicago’s newly established, multidisciplinary Committee on Education , which conducts basic research spanning pedagogical, economic, and cultural issues that affect urban schooling. Because researchers must learn from the problems practitioners encounter and the solutions they devise,the committee brings together nationally recognized practitioners with members of our faculty from fields such as psychology, mathematics, sociology, economics, and public policy. Also essential to the program is work under way at the university’s school of social service administration, where we explore new ways to address nonacademic barriers to learning, chart the links between schools and communities, and train social workers and community school leaders.

Another key aspect of our initiative is a return to the enterprise John Dewey began at the university more than a hundred years ago: changing the way teachers are prepared for the classroom. Chicago’s recently launched Urban Teacher Education Program is our response to national concerns about the adequacy of traditional teacher-preparation programs and the disconnection between the academy and the realities of teaching in challenging urban contexts. This highly selective master’s degree program to prepare elementary teachers (and later, high school teachers as well) is designed and taught by distinguished professors and top pre-K-12 teachers, and emphasizes the high intellectual standards, professionalism, and leadership qualities required to teach well in cities like Chicago.

The central experience of teacher-candidates’ preparation occurs during a full-year internship in classrooms at our own and other local schools. The Chicago public school system is our partner in this work, and provides support for interns as well as their cooperating teachers, the program’s clinical instructors. To ensure the success of graduates, we provide them with two years of professional development and ongoing mentoring as they begin their careers teaching in the Chicago public schools.

Operating schools poses financial and organizational challenges and puts the university’s reputation on the line. To complicate matters, success might not always be within the university's control.

Because the initiative aims to inform urban school policy nationally as well as locally, the Consortium on Chicago School Research will play a key role. For more than 15 years, the CCSR’s applied research has defined areas for improvement in the Chicago schools, and consequently has guided the district’s reform efforts. Its findings also have helped shape the design of the university’s own schools, through studies analyzing what ambitious intellectual work for students requires, what effective professional training for teachers includes, and what constitutes the “essential supports” urban schools need to improve student learning.

The consortium’s national reputation and its activist role in disseminating findings to the public have inspired other cities to form similar research groups. For example, a consortium of four East Coast institutions—New York University, Columbia University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York—will be replicating the CCSR model as it studies reforms in the New York City public schools.

In short, the Urban Education Initiative is now a central part of the University of Chicago’s mission to increase knowledge and prepare future scholars and professionals. It is creating an extraordinary partnership between university researchers, expert practitioners, and our broader community—a partnership that sustains interaction between basic and applied research and between research and practice.

Of course, there are risks for a university embarking on such an endeavor. Operating multiple schools poses financial and organizational challenges and puts the university’s reputation on the line. Complicating matters, public education is a highly politicized arena, and success might not always be within the complete control of a university. And questions inevitably will arise about whether such initiatives can achieve scale—how will our work at Chicago, for example, be made relevant in Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Boston – Emphasis added by smf/4LAKids

Our response is that universities should weigh these risks carefully, but balance them against the responsibilities and opportunities inherent in crafting a new relationship between higher and precollegiate education.

First and foremost, it must be the task of higher education to seek solutions to the social and economic ills facing our country. Not only is this in universities’ long-term interest, but it is also the right thing to do. Second, such work advances our academic agenda. A broad-based engagement with urban public education is a means of recruiting top-notch scholars and excellent practitioners, people who will build academic programs that attract high-quality college and graduate students. Third, for urban universities in particular, operating schools is a vital way to establish meaningful ties with community leaders and residents. Our schools’ governance structure includes the active involvement of parents and members of the community, which in turn offers compelling opportunities for the university to collaborate with and learn from its neighbors, and to leverage other university-based initiatives to build robust mixed-income communities.

What will be the measure of our success? Primarily, the aim of the initiative is to transform the outcomes for children enrolled in urban public schools and clarify the supports, structures, and practices needed to organize schools to make consistently high achievement possible. The problem, we believe, is not simply one of resources or will, but of creating both the knowledge to inform practice and the new institutions to pursue such work. Certainly, the bottom line is whether we make a difference for the schoolchildren we serve and, as a result, influence the quality of schooling for children across Chicago and in other cities.

In the long run, what holds the greatest promise for universities are the twin opportunities of developing new ideas and models for urban schooling—ones that will enable more high school graduates to enter four-year colleges with every expectation for success—and crafting new conceptions of the role institutions of higher learning can play in improving the quality of American schooling.

Timothy Knowles is the director of the Center for Urban School Improvement at the University of Chicago. Stephen Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring professor of sociology and the chairman of the university’s Committee on Education. Henry S. Webber is the university’s vice president for community and government affairs.

7/15: the news that didn't fit!

LAUSD HAS A LOT RIDING ON LOCKE'S CHARTER CHOICE

by Joel Rubin, LA Times Staff Writer

July 10, 2007 - At a better school, in a less desperate part of the city, Zeus Cubias might have shrugged off the disruption.

But after a decade teaching at Locke High School — one of the worst in the Los Angeles public school system — he was annoyed when a recent geometry class ended with one more small reminder of how much things need to change.

Cubias had wolfed down his lunch and hustled back to his room for the start of class. He launched enthusiastically into a special two-day lesson he had devised.

"All right, your job is to paint the school," he said, his voice raspy from a morning of classes. "How can we use geometry to figure it out?"

The hour passed quickly as talk turned to angles, protractors and calculating area. A minute before the bell was to sound, Cubias warned his students that they would need a quick start the next day in order to finish the assignment.

"Sorry, Cubias," one student called out, "I won't be here. Field trip to the beach."

"Me too," a chorus of others chimed in.

Standing at the front of the room, the teacher bowed his head and rubbed his eyes wearily — the frustration welling up. Half his students would be absent the next day, and no administrator or other teacher had bothered to tell him. The lesson he had designed would have to be postponed.

"I'm just tired, man," he said later. "Tired that whenever you want to do something positive for the kids, it's a struggle. It shouldn't be this hard."

Cubias is symbolically at the center of a power struggle taking shape in the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest. With a prominent charter school organization challenging the district for control of Locke, the school's teachers ultimately must decide which of the two is better able to deliver badly needed reforms.

The direction that Cubias and the rest of the faculty choose could have far-reaching implications for L.A. Unified, as teachers at other schools consider similar options.

The charter group, Green Dot Public Schools, shocked district officials in May when it announced that a majority of Locke's tenured teachers had signed petitions in support of a Green Dot takeover, clearing the major legal barrier to converting the campus into several independent schools.

District officials countered with promises to teachers of increased authority and reforms if Locke remained within the district. After several teachers rescinded their signatures, saying they were confused about the takeover proposal, district officials threw out the formal takeover plan submitted by Green Dot.

Recent days, however, have brought a shift in direction at the district headquarters as a new school board majority allied with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has taken control. Today, new board member Richard Vladovic, who represents the Locke area, will present a motion to reconsider the Green Dot petition.

The charter group's leaders have vowed to press ahead, one way or another, with plans to convert Locke by 2008. Green Dot already is planning to open two small charter schools near Locke this fall. To propel this effort, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Monday that it had given Green Dot an $8-million grant to develop charter schools in the Locke-Watts area.

The battle over charter schools has roiled Locke. Some teachers angrily oppose a takeover, while others are eagerly supportive. Many remain undecided.

For Karen Brown, who has taught at Locke for 16 years and heads the school's widely respected fashion design program, Green Dot is nothing more than an unproven, uninvited group attempting a hostile takeover.

She and other longtime Locke teachers are suspicious of Green Dot's labor contract with its union, which does not include the detailed work rules, job protections or lifetime benefits granted district teachers. Moreover, those teachers reject the idea that Locke is broken.

"We are confident that we can continue to give our students what they need. We don't need anybody from the outside coming in telling us how to do our job," Brown said. Green Dot "cannot prove to me that they can do a better job. Not here."

For Cubias, 32, a Locke graduate who grew up in the poor, violent neighborhoods surrounding the South L.A. campus, the field trip debacle reflected larger problems at a school he sees as struggling in an ineffective district. Much of the charter school's model appeals to him.

Green Dot's plan for Locke calls for the large campus to be divided into several small, autonomous schools with separate faculties and principals.

With a small central office and administrative staff for their schools, Green Dot officials say, they funnel more state funds into classrooms than the district does and give teachers and principals considerable control over budgets and instruction.

Cubias said he worries that the relatively small Green Dot operation could be overwhelmed by the numerous needs and demands of the school's 2,800 students. And he wonders whether the benefit of starting over from scratch and leaving the school district would outweigh the huge disruption to students and teachers that such a drastic move would entail.

Although much of the debate about Locke's future has played out in heated faculty and community meetings after hours, at times it has spilled into the school's wide cinder-block corridors.

"Why are you even here? Why don't you just leave?" gym teacher Simone Chait hollered at an English instructor, Bruce Smith, who has vocally supported Green Dot, one morning as dozens of students looked on.

"Because I want something better for these kids. I don't want half of them to disappear," he shot back, referring to the school's 50% dropout rate.

The decision whether to leave the district would be much easier for Cubias if he hadn't seen some progress in recent years.

Take the third-floor math lab that opened this year. A windowless room with missing ceiling panels and exposed pipes, it has new computer terminals running a specialized software program that provides instruction for struggling students at high risk of dropping out.

Teaching leaves him exhausted, but Cubias clearly enjoys the four remedial algebra classes he teaches each day in the lab. Students work on their own, each struggling in different areas and often calling out, "Cubias, some help!" or "Cubias, over here!" He moves from one to the next, leaning over their shoulders, helping them work through equations and graphs.

He understands them — how they feel like they could drop out and no one at the school would notice or care — because he used to be one of them. Once a failing student who frequently ditched classes in order to hang out at the school's handball courts, Cubias credits a demanding English teacher with keeping him in school.

"People tell me my problem is that I take this too personally," he said. "I have a really hard time explaining to them that I do take this personally because this is personal for me."

Cubias also sees promise in the cadre of young, talented teachers who have been hired in recent years and now make up about half of Locke's math faculty.

And then there are the signs, however fleeting, that the school can offer a student a way out. Walking down the hall, he points to a gangly, shaggy-haired kid loping down the hallway, the first anyone can remember being admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Cubias notes that the number of students going on to two- and four-year colleges has been climbing in recent years.

But he knows too well that progress is still the exception, instead of the rule, at Locke. And such signs of hope, he added, have come mostly despite L.A. Unified, not because of it.

"We can see some light," Cubias said. "But between us and that light is a system that makes everything so difficult."

Locke's crew of young math teachers did not land at the school through the district's recruiting and placement office, Cubias said, but because of an informal pipeline he forged with UCLA's education program.

He and other teachers have taken it upon themselves to keep close tabs on new recruits — stopping by their classrooms between periods or offering advice over a meal after work.

And, when it came to funding the computer lab, the faculty didn't even bother to ask district administrators but secured money themselves directly from the state.

Moreover, in the decade since he earned his teaching credential and returned to Locke, Cubias recalls five principals arriving to run the school. More than a dozen assistant principals have come and gone as well, he said, typically using Locke as a stopover on the way to better positions elsewhere in the sprawling 708,000-student district.

"We get people coming here more to put in their time than to serve the kids," he said. "They are not the type who want to rock the boat when they're here."

The revolving door for administrators, Cubias and several other teachers on both sides of the Green Dot divide said, has left teachers with the sense that the school is adrift, missing the consistent leadership that is often a key element of more successful schools. Without it, small frustrations like the field trip mishap are frequent, and larger reform efforts, including a sweeping plan to divide the campus into several semiautonomous learning communities, have faltered.

And it's the kids, Cubias said, who have paid the price. For every student who graduates from Locke, there is still one who drops out. For years, the school has languished at the bottom of the state's ranking system, and it fares only slightly better when compared to schools with similar challenges. Last year, 72% of Locke's juniors tested either "below basic" or "far below basic" on California's standardized English test, and 89% of students who enrolled in algebra classes scored at those levels.

Whichever side prevails in the battle for Locke, teachers will continue to face the host of challenges that students bring to school.

This year more than 70 Locke students were either on probation or had been issued bench warrants for their arrest. The year before, nearly 175 students were suspended for violent incidents. Dozens of the teenagers live in foster care.

At the end of a recent class, a withdrawn pregnant teenager approached Cubias at his desk to timidly show him photos from her first sonogram. Minutes later, he broke up a gaggle of students gathered in the hallway around a classmate — a single mother selling candy from a duffel bag.

"I tell teachers, if you're going to come here, you've got to expect stuff like this," he said, "It's part of life here."

______________________________

SOME NONNEGOTIABLE RULES AT GREEN DOT CAMPUSES

By Joel Rubin, LA Times Staff Writer

July 14, 2007 - Green Dot Public Schools operates 10 charter high schools in and around Los Angeles, serving about 3,000 students. The faculty and principals at each school are given broad discretion over budgets and instruction, but all Green Dot schools must adhere to a set of basic tenets. Charter schools are independently run and publicly financed. Some nonnegotiable rules at Green Dot campuses:

No school can enroll more than 525 students.

All students must complete the rigorous curriculum required for admission to the University of California.

Parents or guardians must commit to at least 35 hours of service at their child's school each year.

Schools must remain open to students until at least 5 p.m. each school day.

_____________________

REPORT: TEEN BIRTH RATE HITS RECORD LOW

by Jennifer C. Kerr - Associated Press Writer

From the Sacramento Bee

Friday, July 13, 2007 — Fewer high school students are having sex these days, and more are using condoms. The teen birth rate has hit a record low.

More young people are finishing high school, too, and more little kids are being read to, according to the latest government snapshot on the well-being of the nation's children. It's good news on a number of key wellness indicators, experts said of the report being released Friday.

"The implications for the population are quite positive in terms of their health and their well-being," said Edward Sondik, director of the National Center for Health Statistics. "The lower figure on teens having sex means the risk of sexually transmitted diseases is lower."

In 2005, 47 percent of high school students - 6.7 million - reported having had sexual intercourse, down from 54 percent in 1991. The rate of those who reported having had sex has remained the same since 2003.

Of those who had sex during a three-month period in 2005, 63 percent - about 9 million - used condoms. That's up from 46 percent in 1991.

The teen birth rate, the report said, was 21 per 1,000 young women ages 15-17 in 2005 - an all-time low. It was down from 39 births per 1,000 teens in 1991.

"This is very good news," said Sondik. "Young teen mothers and their babies are at a greater risk of both immediate and long-term difficulties."

The birth rate in the 15-19 age group was 40 per 1,000 in 2005, also down sharply from the previous decade.

Education campaigns that started years ago are having a significant effect, said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington-based nonprofit group that focuses on prevention of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

"I think the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the efforts in the '80s and '90s had a lot to do with that," Wagoner said of the improved numbers on teen sex, condoms and adolescent births.

"We need to encourage young teens to delay sexual initiation and we need to make sure they get all the information they need about condoms and birth control," he said.

The report was compiled from statistics and studies at 22 federal agencies, and covered 38 key indicators, including infant mortality, academic achievement rates and the number of children living in poverty.

Other highlights:

-The percentage of children covered by health insurance decreased slightly. In 2005, 89 percent of children had health insurance coverage at some point during the year, down from 90 percent the previous year.

-The percentage of low birthweight infants (born weighing less than 5 pounds, 8 ounces) increased. It was 8.2 percent in 2005, up from 8.1 percent in 2004.

-More youngsters are getting reading time. Sixty percent of children ages 3-5 (and not in kindergarten) were read to daily by a family member in 2005, up from 53 percent in 1993.

-The percentage of children who had at least one parent working year round and full-time increased to 78.3 percent in 2005, up from 77.6 percent the previous year.

-More young people are completing high school. In 2005, 88 percent of young adults had finished high school - up from 84 percent in 1980.

The report was released by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics - a consortium of federal agencies that includes the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Census Bureau and the Administration for Children and Families.

smf opines: This report is one where the good news practically runneth over!

Fewer teenagers are having sex, those that are are having safer sex. Childhood poverty is decreasing. Young kids are being read to more. HIV/AIDS is on the dcrease. Yes obesity is on the rise. Birth weights are low. Single parent households are up. Insurance coverage is down. But maybe the end of the world isn't @ hand

...if we don't give up, if we don't relent

...if we just keep on keeping on!

Good job! - smf

America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2007 is one in a series of annual reports to the Nation on the condition of children in America. In this restructured report, three background measures describe the changing population of children and provide demographic context and 38 indicators depict the well-being of children in the areas of family and social environment, economic circumstances, health care, physical environment and safety, behavior, education, and health. Highlights from each section of the report follow.

Demographic Background

• In 2006, there were 73.7 million children ages 0–17 in the United States, or 25 percent of the population, down from a peak of 36 percent at the end of the "baby boom" (1964). Children are projected to compose 24 percent of the population in 2020.
• Racial and ethnic diversity continues to increase over time. In 2006, 58 percent of U.S. children were White, non-Hispanic; 20 percent were Hispanic; 15 percent were Black; 4 percent were Asian; and 4 percent were all other races. The percentage of children who are Hispanic has increased faster than that of any other racial or ethnic group, growing from 9 percent of the child population in 1980 to 20 percent in 2006.

Family and Social Environment

• In 2006, 67 percent of children ages 0–17 lived with two married parents, down from 77 percent in 1980.
• The nonmarital birth rate in 2005 increased to 48 per 1,000 unmarried women ages 15–44 years, up from 46 in 2004. The recent increases in nonmarital birth rates have been especially notable among women age 25 and older. Births to unmarried women constituted 37 percent of all U.S. births, the highest level ever reported.
• In 2005, 20 percent of school-age children spoke a language other than English at home and 5 percent of school-age children had difficulty speaking English.
• The adolescent birth rate for females ages 15–17 continued to decline in 2005. The rate fell by more than two-fifths since 1991, reaching 21 births per 1,000 females ages 15–17 in 2005. The 2004–2005 decline was particularly steep among Black, non-Hispanic and Asian or Pacific Islander adolescents. The birth rate for Black, non-Hispanic adolescents dropped three-fifths during 1991–2005.
• In 2005, there were 12 substantiated reports of child maltreatment per 1,000 children.

Economic Circumstances

• In 2005, 18 percent of all children ages 0–17 lived in poverty; among children living in families, the poverty rate was 17 percent.
• The percentage of children in families living below the federal poverty threshold has fluctuated since the early 1980s: it reached a high of 22 percent in 1993 and decreased to a low of 16 percent in 2000.
• The percentage of children who had at least one parent working year round, full time rose from 77.6 percent in 2004 to 78.3 percent in 2005.

Health Care

• In 2005, 89 percent of children had health insurance coverage at some point during the year, down from 90 percent in 2004.
• In 2005, 48 percent of children ages 2–4 had a dental visit in the past year, compared with 84 percent of children ages 5–11 and 82 percent of children ages 12–17. In 2003–2004, 23 percent of children ages 2–5 and 14 percent of children ages 6–17 had untreated dental caries (cavities) upon dental examination.

Physical Environment and Safety

• In 2005, 60 percent of children lived in counties in which concentrations of one or more air pollutants rose above allowable levels.
• The percentage of children served by community drinking water systems that did not meet all applicable health based standards declined from 20 percent in 1993 to about 8 percent in 1998. From 1998 to 2005 the percentage has fluctuated between 5 and 10 percent.
• In 2001–2004, about 1 percent of children ages 1–5 had elevated blood lead levels [greater than or equal to 10 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL)]. The median blood lead concentration for children ages 1–5 dropped from 14 µg/dL in 1976–1980 to about 2 µg/dL in 2003–2004.
• In 2005, 40 percent of households with children had one or more housing problems, up from 37 percent in 2003. The most common type of housing problem is cost burden, followed by physically inadequate housing and crowded housing.
• In 2004, the injury death rate for children ages 1–4 was 13 deaths per 100,000 children.
• The leading causes of injury-related emergency department visits among adolescents ages 15–19 in 2003–2004 were being struck by or against an object (33 visits per 1,000 children), motor vehicle traffic crashes (25 visits per 1,000 children), and falls (20 visits per 1,000 children). Together, these causes of injury accounted for half of all injury-related emergency department visits for this age group.

Behavior

• The percentages of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students reporting illicit drug use in the past 30 days remained stable from 2005 to 2006. However, past month use among all three grades significantly declined since 1997.
• In 2005, 47 percent of high school students reported ever having had sexual intercourse. This was statistically the same rate as in 2003 and a decline from 54 percent in 1991.

Education

• The percentage of children ages 3–5 not yet in kindergarten who were read to daily by a family member was higher in 2005 than in 1993 (60 versus 53 percent). A greater percentage of White, non-Hispanic and Asian children were read to daily in 2005 than were Black, non-Hispanic, or Hispanic children (68 and 66 percent, compared with 50 and 45 percent, respectively).
• Between 1982 and 2004, the percentage of high school graduates who had completed an advanced mathematics course almost doubled, increasing from 26 to 50 percent. Likewise, the percentage of graduates who had completed a physics, chemistry, or advanced biology course almost doubled, increasing from 35 to 68 percent.
• In 2005, 69 percent of high school completers enrolled immediately in a 2- or 4-year college. This rate was not statistically different than the historic high of 67 percent reached in 2004.

Health

• The percentage of infants with low birthweight was 8.2 percent in 2005, up from 7.9 percent in 2003 and 8.1 percent in 2004 and has increased slowly but steadily since 1984 (6.7 percent).
• In 2005, 5 percent of children ages 4–17 were reported by a parent to have serious (definite or severe) emotional or behavioral difficulties. Among the parents of these children, 81 percent reported contacting a health care provider or school staff about their child's difficulties, 40 percent reported their child was prescribed medication for their difficulties, and 47 percent reported their child had received treatment other than medication.
• The proportion of children ages 6–17 who were overweight increased from 6 percent in 1976–1980 to 11 percent in 1988–1994 and continued to rise to 18 percent in 2003–2004.
• In 2005, about 9 percent of children ages 0–17 were reported to currently have asthma, and about 5 percent of children had one or more asthma attacks in the previous year. The prevalence of asthma in children is particularly high among Black, non-Hispanic and Puerto Rican children (13 and 20 percent, respectively).

Pro-Con: SHOULD NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND BE REAUTHORIZED?

This Pro-Con feature from the Kansas City Star / Mon. July 9, 2007




▲ SHOULD NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND BE REAUTHORIZED? YES!


A Washington Post editorial





No one in his right mind would demolish his home because it had a leaky basement or it needed new carpeting. But that’s the approach being advocated by those who find fault with the No Child Left Behind Act. The federal law is not perfect, but its architecture of educational accountability, transparency and equality is sound. With the law up for reauthorization this year, Congress should be debating how — not whether — to continue this landmark education initiative.





Consider the landscape before No Child Left Behind. No one was really focused on results, failure had no consequences, few people were talking about the achievement gap and parents had little choice if their child’s schooling wasn’t doing the job. A recent report by outside experts showed students nationwide doing better on math and reading tests, as well as a narrowing of the achievement gap. To let states opt out of doing the hard, necessary work of raising standards is to turn back the clock on education reform.






▼ SHOULD NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND BE REAUTHORIZED? NO!


by Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute





Test scores are the last refuge of the No Child Left Behind Act. They have to be, because so little else about the act is attractive.





The act takes a giant step toward nationalizing elementary and secondary education, a disaster for federalism. It pushes classrooms toward relentless drilling, not something that inspires able people to become teachers or makes children eager to learn. It holds good students hostage to the performance of the least talented, at a time when the economic future of the country depends more than ever on the performance of the most talented.





The federal government is doling out rewards and penalties to school systems across the country based on changes in pass percentages. It is an uninformative measure for many reasons, but when it comes to measuring one of the central outcomes sought by No Child Left Behind, the closure of the achievement gap that separates poor students from rich, Latino from white, and black from white, the measure is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive.

COURT RULING ON DIVERSITY RAISES ED-TECH STAKES

With new limits on using racial diversity as a tool to level the educational playing field, equitable access to technology takes on even greater importance for schools

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

June 29, 2007 - The Supreme Court's sharply divided ruling yesterday that rejected integration plans based on race in two major public school districts has raised the stakes for education technology leaders to ensure that all students have equitable access to technology--and the opportunities it affords.

"The court's ruling ... sends K-12 policy makers back to the diversity drawing board," said Maureen Dwyer, a partner in Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman's education practice and managing partner of the law firm's Washington, D.C., office.

"The Supreme Court has upheld public education agencies' pro-diversity motives, while striking down anything resembling quotas, and now, with [its June 28] ruling, elaborate admissions formulas incorporating race are off the table as well," Dwyer said. "This places administrators in a challenging position; the courts are on their side in seeking diverse classrooms, but the means to get there are continually scrutinized and subject to interpretation."

Reaction to High Court’s diversity ruling

Some reaction to the Supreme Court's June 28 decision rejecting school integration plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle because they improperly considered students' race in assigning them to schools:

"I believed so much in what we are doing, I just felt we had to win. The goal here is to make sure all kids have access to great schools."--Kathleen Brose, president of Parents Involved in Community Schools, who sued the Seattle school district after her daughter failed to get into a highly regarded high school

"I'm confident the Jefferson County Public Schools leadership team will develop new guidelines for student assignment that will continue this community's commitment to diversity and educational excellence."--Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson

"It was unconstitutional in 1954 for the Topeka, Kansas, school board to refuse to allow seven-year-old Linda Brown to attend her neighborhood school because she was the wrong color; and it is just as unconstitutional in 2007 for Jefferson County, Kentucky, to refuse to allow four-year-old Josh Meredith to attend his neighborhood school because he is the wrong color."--Edward Blum, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

"The court made the right decision today. That public institutions cannot be allowed to sort children based on race is consistent with the Constitution, was clearly established in Brown v. Board, and simply makes sense as a matter of justice. And it is good to see the court doing what it should in education, especially after so many years in which it and other federal courts required exactly the kind of racial engineering it prohibited today."--Neal McCluskey, education policy analyst at the Cato Institute

"This is a very lame excuse to tell a school system that they don't have to use race as an arbiter to help kids achieve and get a fair deal. In a world that still has the vestiges of racism, that's a ridiculous rationale."--Warlene Gary, CEO of the National Parent Teacher Association

"These decisions take away the right of local communities to ensure that all students benefit from racially diverse classrooms. Recent evidence shows that integrated schools promote minority academic achievement and can help close the achievement gap."--Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

In placing limits on race as a means of creating diverse learning populations in their schools, justices have put school district leaders in a difficult position, many education groups said in the wake of the court's 5-4 decision.

Other groups, such as the conservative Cato Institute, praised the ruling, saying the focus should not be on the racial makeup of schools, but whether they are providing students with access to a high-quality education.

Regardless of where educators might stand on the issue, it's clear that many school districts are likely to rethink how they assign students to their schools in the aftermath of the court's ruling.

For years, many districts have used race as a factor in placing students to help close achievement gaps and create more diverse, racially balanced learning environments. If district leaders cannot seek to achieve this kind of balance within their schools by using key demographics to assign students, the challenge then becomes: How do they ensure equitable access to educational resources--including computers, high-speed internet connections, software, training, and support--in schools with higher poverty rates and percentages of minority students?

Equitable access to digital resources was the subject of a new report from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), called "A National Consideration of Digital Equity." Released earlier this week at the organization's National Educational Computing Conference in Atlanta, the report says the digital divide continues to exist, particularly along demographic and socioeconomic lines. It asks, in effect, "whether current educational experiences are meeting the needs of culturally diverse students," and it calls that idea one of seven "essential components for creating an environment that supports digital equity."

For some ed-tech advocates, the court's ruling provides an opportunity as well as a challenge. When used correctly, they say, technology has the potential to help level the educational playing field for all students. And with new limits imposed by the court's ruling on using racial diversity to achieve this same goal, technology could be called upon to play a more significant role in schools.

"Many families cannot [afford to] move and might not have access to the best education available in their geographical areas," said Susan Patrick, executive director of the North American Council for Online Learning. But "by allowing students to transcend time and place," she said, online courses open doors for students from diverse backgrounds to come together to learn "in a color-blind environment--giving students choices to pursue a high-quality education from any location, instead of having a very limited choice ... decided by others."

The Supreme Court's June 28 ruling in cases affecting schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle could imperil similar race-based plans in hundreds of districts nationwide, legal analysts said, and it further restricts how public school systems may attain racial diversity.

The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment. The court's four liberal justices dissented.

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Roberts said.

Yet Justice Anthony Kennedy would not go as far as the other four conservative justices, saying in a concurring opinion that race may be a component of school plans designed to achieve diversity.

To the extent that Roberts' opinion could be interpreted to foreclose the use of race in any circumstance, Kennedy said, "I disagree with that reasoning."

"A district may consider it a compelling interest to achieve a diverse student population," Kennedy said. "Race may be one component of that diversity." He agreed with Roberts, however, that the plans in Louisville and Seattle violated constitutional guarantees of equal protection.

Some advocates of greater school diversity took heart from Kennedy's words, but others saw the court's dominant view as essentially hostile to racial integration plans in education.

One analyst, John Banzhaf, professor of public-interest law at George Washington University, said the ruling still would permit schools to take positive steps to increase diversity, but they would not be permitted to use race as the sole basis for their policies. He predicted that school officials were likely to be told, "Consider other factors along with race--wink, wink--and we can get away with it."

Justice Stephen Breyer, in a dissent joined by the other liberals on the court, said Roberts' opinion undermined the promise of integrated schools that the court laid out 53 years ago in its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

"To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown," Breyer said.

While Roberts said the court was being faithful to the Brown decision, Justice John Paul Stevens, in a separate dissent, called the chief justice's reliance on Brown to rule against integration "a cruel irony."

Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only black member, wrote a separate opinion endorsing the ruling and taking issue with the dissenters' view of the Brown case.

"What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today," Thomas said. "The plans before us base school assignment decisions on students' race. Because ‘our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,' such race-based decision making is unconstitutional."

The two school systems in the court's decisions have used slightly different methods of taking students' race into account when determining which school they will attend.

Federal appeals courts had upheld both plans after some parents sued. The Bush administration took the parents' side, arguing that racial diversity is a noble goal but can be sought only through race-neutral means.

The Louisville case grew out of complaints from several parents whose children were not allowed to attend the schools of their choice. Crystal Meredith, a white, single mother, sued after the school system turned down a request to transfer her 5-year-old son, Joshua Ryan McDonald, to a school closer to home.

Louisville's schools spent 25 years under a court order to eliminate the effects of state-sponsored segregation. After a federal judge freed the Jefferson County, Ky., school board, which encompasses Louisville, from his supervision, the board decided to keep much of the court-ordered plan in place to prevent schools from re-segregating.

Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson said he was disappointed with the ruling, because Louisville's system had provided "a quality education for all students and broken down racial barriers" for 30 years. He said he was confident that school leaders would implement effective new guidelines.

The Seattle school district said it used race as one among many factors, relying on it only in some instances--and then only at the end of a lengthy process in allocating students among the city's high schools. Seattle suspended its program after parents sued.

The opinion was the first on the divisive issue since 2003, when a 5-4 ruling upheld the limited consideration of race in college admissions to attain a diverse student body. Since then, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who approved of the limited use of race, retired. Her replacement, Justice Samuel Alito, was in the majority that struck down the school system plans in Kentucky and Washington.

The cases are Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 05-908, and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 05-915.

Links:

Supreme Court decision

www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-908.pdf

North American Council for Online Learning

http://www.nacol.org

International Society for Technology in Education:

National Consideration of Digital Equity (.pdf)