SB 51: the California politics thread

the mayor of LA hardly does anything. the city council has all the power. hes a glorified cheerleader. all he accomplished was bagging the olympics that nobody really wants and is gonna fuck up the city.

he was in training for the job at 18 and presumably before that but hey I for one like him

I look forward to voting for him when he runs for governor

insanely close race (0.1% lead) but the public school guy just pulled ahead of the charter school guy in SPI

#.SPI Update pic.twitter.com/7brkOKjOyF

— CATargetBot (@CATargetBot) November 13, 2018

Oh hell yes! Go Tony!!

Feel like both of those guys have their merits but are both pretty flawed too...

That's kinda like saying Obama and Hitler are both pretty flawed

lol, you sound rational.

Charter schools are basically a scheme to allow speculators to harvest wealth from state and local taxes with education of children as an incidental side effect.

Universal free primary+secondary education is one of America's two good ideas and charter schools are a perversion

They're basically on the same page, hardline Dems who come from the non-profit education sector :

* Both Thurmond & Tuck are anti-FOR-PROFIT charter schools.
* Both want to shut down charter schools that are failing & mishandling public funds.
* Both are self-proclaimed neutral on whether they are pro- or anti- Charter Schools.
* Both had ugly, untrue campaigns of deception trying to slander the other candidate.

Their only significant difference is on local districts' ability to appeal charter schools approval (Thurmond anti-, Tuck pro-*)... *only in rural areas of California.

My main beef with Thurmond is he lacked the spine to vote on AB1220**, something that would help define his stance in the race but instead showed him to be prone to petty political power moves.

**http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB1220

I need to dig into this so thank you, but “non profit” education seems like very careful branding.

Charter schools are basically a scheme to allow speculators to harvest wealth from state and local taxes with education of children as an incidental side effect.

― I have measured out my life in coffee shop loyalty cards (silby), Tuesday, November 13, 2018 9:52 AM (three hours ago

yes, and, to do so while fostering increasing inequity/inequality of opportunity for the children being educated. It's a real, serious problem in urban areas with a lot of poverty and income inequality

I need to dig into this so thank you, but “non profit” education seems like very careful branding.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, November 13, 2018 11:07 AM (two hours ago)

yeah, it pretty much is saying, I am fine with charter schools except for the ones that are too incompetent and stupid to fill out the right forms and check the right boxes so that they actually get denied tax-exempt status.

yo bryce, if you are reading this thread, post about this, because it's something you actually deal with irl, and we're just being typical ilxors who are having opinions about things

the problem we have with charters in oakland is that they don't enroll kids with special needs at the rate the district schools do, which leaves the district with higher costs even while they drain its coffers (up to $57M/year lost in oakland). there is little evidence that charters outperform public schools in general, and many locally have serious corruption problems. it's absurd that, per state law, the financial costs of charters can't be considered when deliberating their approval. i understand that thurmond at least backed a temporary halt to charter approvals so the state could properly assess their costs, while tuck did not.

i send my daughter to a public school here, but dealing with ousd administration is an exercise in futility. administrators regularly lie to parents with impunity, and our board member is disengaged with the community. i totally understand why parents would seek other options. that said, the teachers and principals we've dealt with have been fantastic. i agree with silby upthread. we need to properly restore funding to our public schools at all levels.

the nearest charter school to us shut two weeks into the school year.

Uh, so the Democrat who's probably about to win a usually-Republican seat on the California Board of Equalization is a disbarred lawyer and perennial candidate who was previously ordered to stay at least 100 feet away from comedian Brad Garrett. https://t.co/MkrlixLfqF https://t.co/RBGhb1sZ8A

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) November 13, 2018

Meanwhile

In the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction, @TonyThurmond opens up a 67,161 vote lead over @MarshallTuck. The two candidates were two hundredths of a percent apart at the last update. https://t.co/qlv13fzE56

— Rob Pyers (@rpyers) November 14, 2018

BREAKING: Democrat Josh Harder wins U.S. House seat in California farm belt, defeats 4-term Republican Rep. Jeff Denham. https://t.co/YfFnH2YEJH

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 14, 2018

sweet! I donated. time to open the ILX influence-peddling thread.

shakey your thoughts please http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-pge-paradise-fire-destruction-20181114-story.html

PG&E's fire liabilities are going to continue to go through the roof because this kind of thing is likely to keep happening every year. Why? Because maintaining their extensive network of capital assets (the only thing keeping the company afloat, at this point) is way less profitable, more expensive, more time consuming and more dangerous then building new capital assets. Combine that with perpetually dangerous conditions and its likely PG&E will cause more fires as time goes on.

They were just bailed out by the legislature in the previous session over exactly the same issue - if they were held liable for the Carr fire (or was it the Tubbs fire? I forget) they would have been bankrupted and then who knows what would happen. The state would take over, I guess? Frankly as much as I hate PG&E I don't see the state taking any better care of gas lines and electrical lines than PG&E does. Although at least the state wouldn't have a profit motive to *not* take care of their shit.

So - either the legislature bails them out again and holds them non-liable for this kind of thing, or PG&E's finances are going to look increasingly grim until they finally death-spiral out. They have a lot of other pressures on them at the moment - declining customer base/competition from distributed energy resources, competition from CCAs taking their customers (I just signed over to SF's Cleanopower SF), a state mandate to basically not sell gas anymore by 2050, etc.

I have no idea what's going to happen. Maybe they'll go bankrupt and get broken up and taken over by CCAs or POUs (perhaps the ideal situation tbh)

obviously the more people that die the worse it's going to get for the company, all of their money will be tied up in lawsuits and insurance claims and liabilities and their profits will tank

interesting, thanking you

idk if my point was clear about their capital assets, what I was trying to get at is it costs them a lot of money to ensure that all of their existing assets are working safely and properly. Their network is *gigantic* and old and there are all kinds of property/jurisdiction issues involved, it's hard to get qualified crews out to remote areas, etc. None of that stuff turns them a profit.

But if they put in a new substation, or build a bunch of electrical infrastructure to service electric vehicle charging stations, for example - *those* assets go on their books as profitable (because they contribute to increase in generating capacity/serving more customers, which = revenue).

So they have a financial incentive to build stuff, but a financial disincentive to maintain it to ensure that it doesn't blow up houses/burn down entire towns/kill people.

Cool financial model they have there, thx capitalism etc.

obviously the more people that die the worse it's going to get for the company, all of their money will be tied up in lawsuits and insurance claims and liabilities and their profits will tank

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, November 14, 2018 2:20 PM (one hour ago)

Their collapse may precede any financial reporting... 50% loss in 5 days. Massive sell-offs.

https://i.imgur.com/U1U8abt.png

also, w/r/t tuck vs. thurmond upthread, it sounds like all of us (candidates included) are on the same page w/r/t underperforming charter schools in urban areas.

well personally the page i'm on right now (as an immigrant trying to figure the situation out over the next few years, and admittedly not in full possession of the facts) is that the only schools that receive public money should be public schools, and there shouldn't be any charter schools. but yeah, start with the underperforming ones.

9120 votes have been added in CA 39 in OC/SB, republican Young Kim now only ahead over Gil Cisneros by 122 votes, down from 590 votes. still many votes to be counted as far as I can tell

sigh

charter and public are not mutually exclusive categories

some of california’s public charters are among the most progressive schools in the nation

i have worked at three of them. one of which you could fairly call an underperforming urban charter

and one of which is the top performing urban school on the state so

in, not on

i’m going to preemptively excuse myself from this conversation though, i can already feel myself getting irked by the presence of strong opinions absent strong background knowledge of the topic

(voted for tony k thurmond btw because my teachers union said so)

i’m sorry to be snippy, obviously i take broad criticism of “charter schools” much too personally

but i’m just curious like what’s the alternative model to charters that you would follow in order to offer a performing arts school or a project based school or a college prep academy or a hybrid homeschool etc etc and how would you avoid the flaws in that model?

like that’s a question that i’ve spent literally months if not years of my life workshopping and believe me there are a lot of dimensions to that question

i guess you could say like thurmond and tuck i’ve come out neutral on the issue, or, better yet, agnostic on it

i don’t want to be uh pedantic about it though

Plenty of public high schools that are not charter schools in America offering alternative programs

tell me about them. where are they? how are they administered? equitably, i hope

tell me about one

My elementary and middle schools offered Spanish partial immersion. My high school was a science and technology magnet. I had friends who attended an alternative progressive-education-based middle and high school program in my county. All were public, non-charter schools

Spanish immersion I believe was open enrollment. My high school was competitive. The alternative program was by lottery.

where did the money come from? how big was the district?

http://echoices.lausd.net/Magnet/Information

that's is the program for specialized public schooling in LAUSD. it's extremely popular. it's equitable in the sense that it's district-wide (i.e. doesn't consider location, which is a de facto race-based admission in large parts of LA), and provides free transportation.

IMO "public" and "charter" are not mutually exclusive only if you redefine what "public school" means. charter schools that receive public money and are not run for a profit are still not public schools in the usual sense of the word.

From the school district, presumably allocated per student based on the funding model. My high school’s labs were set up with corporate sponsorships for some specialized equipment when they were established but to the best of my knowledge the operating budget was all district funding. Probably a richer PTA than average but they dont pay for teachers. This was Northern Virginia fwiw if that tells you anything.

well shucks that’s only the second largest district in the entire country, no idea why their model wouldn’t be portable to smaller districts, no idea at all

also your complaint sounds more ideological than practical to me, but whatever, i guess i’m just a parasite on the public teat

Public money should pay for public schools operated by public school districts is how I break it down to an extent.

competitive high school admission is a barbaric practice outlawed in the golden state

I mean yeah it’s ideological. I’m not a student teacher or parent I’m just an Internet poster.

well there you go!

in my case two of my chartering bodies were a) the university of calfornia and b) the public library

what do you make of that, hmm? it’s like public teat inception