California's Children

Only 6% of 744 hi-risk CA school building projects audited

Randall Jensen, writing today in Bond Buyer, reports on an audit released in June "that received little media attention" -- an audit conducted by the State Dept. of Finance between April 2010 and January 2011 that focussed on [emphasis ours]

$7 billion of [Proposition 1D] bond money handed out through the state [Office of Public School Construction]...[The audit] found that billions of dollars of bond proceeds spent on projects considered to have a high risk of misuse of funds went unchecked...

....The facilities program provides funds for building and upgrading K-12 schools. The State Allocation Board hands out the bond money through the the school construction program.

“Although OPSC has established accountability processes and controls for Proposition 1D bond funds, a number of these controls are either not implemented or not working as intended,” the audit report said. “These issues, if left unresolved, will continue to adversely affect bond accountability.”

...According to the report, the Office of Public School Construction only audited 6% of 744 construction projects that had a high risk of misuse over roughly a one-year period, leaving $4 billion of costs unaudited, according to the audit report that was released in June but has received little media attention.

Save Our Schools marchers reject Obama invitation to meet today

After meeting with three representative of the US Department of Education on Wednesday (a meeting that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan attended for 10 minutes), leaders of the four-day Washington convergence of teachers (Save Our Schools march and Call to Action) -- a grass-roots movement that received late and small support from the major teachers unions -- have rejected a further invitation to meet with Administration officials before tomorrow's march.

At left is Tracey Douglas, an teacher at Granite Hills Elementary School in Riverside County, and a march attendee. Press-Enterprise photo.

Reporting in the Washington Post's blog, "The Answer Sheet," Valerie Strauss writes:

Organizers of Saturday’s Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C., have declined an invitation to meet today at the White House with education advisers to President Obama, saying they would instead be available after the march.

The march, to protest the Obama administration’s corporate-driven education-reform policies, has been in the planning stages for about a year. Some of its organizers have tried for months to get the attention of the White House through letters and blogposts. Suddenly, a few days before the march itself, an invitation was issued for a meeting today.

Phone home ... but not too often: kids, cancer & cell phones

Confused by whom to believe? The World Heath Organization? The Wall Street Journal? Business Insider? The Huffington Post? We've chosen to go with the Environment Health Trust (putting us on the side of The Atlantic), which reported on the news Wednesday that an article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute refutes prior claims that cell phone use by kids may cause brain tumors.

Results of student in the JNCI:

  Regular users of mobile phones were not statistically significantly more likely to have been diagnosed with brain tumors compared with nonusers (OR = 1.36; 95% CI = 0.92 to 2.02). Children who started to use mobile phones at least 5 years ago were not at increased risk compared with those who had never regularly used mobile phones (OR = 1.26, 95% CI = 0.70 to 2.28). In a subset of study participants for whom operator recorded data were available, brain tumor risk was related to the time elapsed since the mobile phone subscription was started but not to amount of use. No increased risk of brain tumors was observed for brain areas receiving the highest amount of exposure.

Conclusion The absence of an exposure–response relationship either in terms of the amount of mobile phone use or by localization of the brain tumor argues against a causal association.

As The Atlantic reports:

Case closed, right? Maybe not. Both the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Environmental Health Trust (EHT) have taken up arms against the study's results, arguing that poor data and methodological flaws render the findings problematic. Among the organizations' complaints:

Save Our Schools: Marching for Rigoberto Ruelas

UPDATE, July 27, 2011: All week, as teachers prepare for the Save Our Schools  march on Washington this weekend, Education Week has run posts from teachers on "Why I'm Marching."  Yesterday, blogger and educator, Nancy Flanagan, at left, posting in "Teacher in a Strange Land," wrote:

People are marching for the new teachers they work with, for their education-focused families and for their grandkids. They're marching for better curriculum and instruction, for equity and fairness. A whole lot of people have made it plain that they're sick to death of ineffective and omnipresent testing. Others are angry that control over decisions that should be made in schools and classrooms are now handed over to "experts."

Simply looking at the child poverty statistics recently released should make it very clear that the past decade of federal power-grabbing in education policy has not addressed real causes, and has actually made the symptoms worse.

Plenty to get exercised about, plenty of advocacy work ahead.

But I'm marching, on Saturday, for a man I never met, and whose story burned in the public consciousness for a few days, then faded: Rigoberto Ruelas.

Ruelas was the 5th grade teacher in Los Angeles whose life goals and achievements were reduced to this--a public humiliation in the Los Angeles Times. When he took his own life, depressed, he became a footnote in the history of education "reform." ....

It's a hard thing, talking about Mr. Ruelas. His family and his school colleagues deserve privacy, and a chance to mourn. Making the case that Rigoberto was a victim of the corporate war on teachers feels like using cheap emotion to make a political point, the kind of low-rent sensationalism the Rupert Murdoch mastered years ago. ...

On Saturday, I will carry Mr. Ruelas' picture in my pocket...a gentle dissent from the surveyed lines, in a world that values standardization over humanity.

Previously reported on this topic:

 

The DQ: "An incoherent collection of clans" Dan Walters on the new segregation

Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters writes this morning of the "semi-final" results of the state's new, mandated resdistricting boundaries, and finds ... segregation. Requested segregation. Called "communities of interest" (COIs), the melting pot that once was touted as being California is boiling down to an inedible stew ... or, as Walters more eloquently phrases it, "an incoherent collection of clans."

From the column:

The state's new redistricting commission fully embraced the "community of interest" concept and during countless hours of line-drawing, which reached a semifinal stage over the weekend, bent over backward to accommodate demands from what its members called "COIs."

To some extent, they had no choice. The federal Voting Rights Act, as interpreted by their legal adviser, required them to create a certain number of "majority minority" districts to maximize Latino political clout and to protect, as best they could, the interests of other ethnic groups. And COIs are mentioned in state law.

But the commission also labored hard to meet demands from other self-identified COIs, such as gays, lesbians, environmentalists and Jews, and assumed that its duty was to separate the poor from the rich. Everyone else – those not seeking special treatment – was merely filler to equalize district populations.

The ultimate expression of that syndrome occurred late Sunday, when commissioners became enmeshed in a sharp and sometimes teary debate over how many African American-occupied congressional seats would exist in Los Angeles County. Commissioners acted to preserve two black-held seats.

The commission was created to stop politicians from drawing districts to benefit themselves and/or their parties, but in doing so, it gerrymandered another way.

A clear and interesting explanation of COIs can be read on the website of the County of Santa Cruz, from which this info is drawn:

California law requires that when possible, district lines should maintain communities of interest (“COI”). The primary goal of redistricting is to adjust the supervisors boundaries to ensure equal population in each of the five supervisorial districts. Keeping communities of interest intact is the fourth criterion outlined in state law (Elections Code §21500) the Santa Cruz County Task Force uses to draw lines. This means that it is the fourth most important criterion to follow, behind topography, geography, and contiguity.