Anybody Up There Care About The Schools?
By Peter SchragThe milestones keep rushing by in California’s race to the educational bottom.
Last Monday, a group of students and parents, joined by a coalition of civil rights organizations filed the second major lawsuit in recent weeks charging the state with failing to meet its constitutional and moral obligations to provide quality education to its six million K-12 students.
Two days later, perhaps not coincidentally, the California Budget Project published a report headed “California’s Support for Schools Lags the Nation.” It was full of depressingly familiar numbers: California is near the bottom among the states in school spending per pupil; dead last in school spending as a percentage of personal income; last in teachers per students; ditto for counselors, librarians and administrators.
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For Parents, Shortened School Year Proves Costly
By Vivian PoNew America Media
For some low-income parents, the decision by many school districts to shorten the school year has raised anxieties about the extra costs it could impose on them.
Unlike more affluent parents, most are not in a position to pay for extra classes or tutoring to make up for time lost. So they are also trying to find innovative ways to make sure their child does not fall behind academically, according to interviews in Los Angeles and San Francisco by New America Media.
Gabriel Medel, whose son will be a freshman at Hamilton High in Los Angeles in the fall, is the volunteer director of Parents for Unity, an education advocacy group formed by Latino parents in Los Angeles. He believes students who are less fluent in English – typically designated as English Language Learners – will be among the first to feel the impact of a shorter school year.
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2010 Sees Return of Conservative Exploitation of LGBT, Minority Groups
By Dan AielloCalifornia Progress Report
In Hawaii, the state where Mormon and Catholic leaders first organized to fight "Homosexual Lesbian Marriage" after polling found the public had little innate opposition to same-sex marriage, Republican Governor Linda Lingle last week vetoed a bill approved by the state legislature in April that would have legalized civil unions in the Aloha state.
“After carefully reviewing each of these bills and weighing the considerable amount of input that we received from the public, I made the decision to not allow these measures to become law,” read the Lingle veto statement.
“Although the legislature passed bills they believe are important, I have the final responsibility to ensure that any new law is constitutional, fiscally responsible and in the best interest of the state,” Lingle stated.
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